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<br />and 76 wells will be developed during the first 5 years of commercial <br />• operations. <br />• The initial processing plant area will occupy approximately 6.5 acres at the <br />Piceance Site, and a 14-acre evaporation pond will be located nearby. <br />• The project pipelines will be routed along an approximately 44-mile-long <br />pipeline corridor. Impacts resulting from construction of the pipeline will be <br />minimized by paralleling an existing pipeline corridor to the extent <br />practicable. Assuming a 75-foot-wide pipeline corridor, construction of the <br />project pipelines would result in incremental disturbance of approximately <br />400 acres of land. <br />• The preferred Parachute Creek Site is an existing industrial site at the former <br />Unocal Shale Oil Upgrade Facility. <br />8.1 GEOLOGY AND SOILS <br />8.1.1 Geology <br />American Soda has developed its solution mining plan for the Yankee Gulch <br />• Project such that the effects on geology would be minimal. The specific impacts to <br />geology that are of concern at the Piceance Site include impacts to the minability of <br />the oil shale-rich Mahogany Zone and oil shale strata that occur within the mining <br />interval and impacts to surface topography. A summary of subsidence impacts is <br />provided in Sections 3.1.3. <br />Solution mining below the Dissolution Surface at the Yankee Gulch Project will <br />result in movement of the overlying strata with a potential to impact the minability <br />of the Mahogany Zone. Both empirical evidence and analytical evidence suggest <br />that the impacts to the Mahogany Zone doe to the planned solution mining will be <br />minimal. The analytical evidence is based on assessment of strains in the <br />Mahogany Zone that would result from solution mining (Agapito 1998) and <br />comparing the estimated strains with a proposed strain protection criterion <br />(Bhattacharya and Singh 1985). The strain protection criterion is the threshold of <br />strain above which the minability of the strata could be adversely impacted. For <br />credible scenarios of solution mining below the Dissolution Surface, Agapito found <br />that the strain protection criterion was not exceeded in the Mahogany Zone (Agapito <br />1998). Empirical evidence is based on case examples from other types of mining <br />where high-extraction mining causes extensive movement in the overlying strata. <br />These case studies show that the Mahogany Zone, located some 500 to 550 feet above <br />the solution mining horizon, is unlikely to be in the caved or severely fractured <br />zone, so the minability of the Mahogany Zone is unlikely to be impacted. <br />• <br />American Soda, L.L.P. 8_2 <br />Commerual Mine Plan <br />August 18, 1998 <br />