Monitors first. Equipment second.
Dust work is judged on an air quality record that already exists, by people who already have one. So a programme starts by agreeing what would count as working.
The sequence
Four stages, and the third one is where it gets decided.
- Situation report The surface, its area, what it used to be, your prevailing wind, your exceedance record and who lives downwind. Sent to Alarivean through the contact form. It commits you to nothing and takes about as long as writing an email.
- Desk assessment A written view on whether the surface is a candidate, which of the four surface types it behaves like, what a control area would need to look like, and where our confidence is low. If the honest answer is that your problem is upstream water allocation, that arrives here rather than after a mobilisation.
- Instrumented control area A treated area and a matched untreated area, both monitored, with the protocol and the no-benefit result fixed in writing beforehand. Water applied and energy drawn are metered alongside the emissions data so the cost side is produced at the same time as the performance side.
- Area programme Scaling only against what the control area showed, priced per unit area held for a defined period, with reporting formatted for the regulator who will actually read it rather than for us.
The protocol
What gets measured, and who agrees it.
A dust programme lives or dies on whether the measurement was credible to a third party before the result was known.
Emissions data comes off monitors, positioned by agreement, ideally on the network your air quality authority already operates and already trusts. Where no network exists, one is established as part of the control area and the baseline period runs before treatment rather than around it.
Water applied per unit area is metered, because in arid regions that is the number every method is ultimately compared on. Energy draw is metered for the same reason. Application interval — how long a treated surface stays held before it needs doing again — is recorded rather than assumed, and it is usually the figure that decides the economics.
And the reading of all that is not left to us, which is the subject of the next section. We would rather argue with a third party's data than defend our own.
| Measured | Why it is in the protocol |
|---|---|
| PM10 at agreed monitor positions | It is the fraction the standards are written around and the one your authority is already recording |
| Treated against untreated control | Wind varies far more than treatment does, so an untreated area is the only way to separate the two |
| Water applied per unit area | The binding constraint on every suppression method in an arid region, and the fair basis for comparison |
| Application interval | How long a surface stays held decides annual cost more than any single-pass result does |
| Energy drawn | So the operating cost is produced by the same exercise as the performance, not assembled afterwards |
| Surface condition and crust integrity | Because a surface that looks held and breaks under one vehicle pass is not held |
The standing arrangement
The authority should be reading the monitors while we are.
Dust work has an unusual property: the instruments that judge it usually belong to somebody else already. That makes it the easiest duty in this family to put under continuous independent scrutiny, so there is no excuse for not doing it, and every programme here is designed on that basis.
Which bodies depends on the site. The air quality authority whose exceedance record is at stake. The regional environment agency. An atmospheric or soil science group at a nearby university. The public health office that answers for the population downwind. They are engaged from before the baseline period opens until after the last treated season closes, not summoned for a launch and a closing presentation.
What they hold is the working data, not our account of it: PM10 telemetry, water applied and energy drawn as the meters record them, application intervals, surface condition notes, the lot, at the same latency we see it. Additional monitors of their own are encouraged, and anything those produce belongs to them.
Alarivean requires this rather than permitting it, and the reason is who lives downwind of a playa. Risk controls get run to best practice when a body with a duty to those residents is watching them being run, and health and safety only outrank a mobilisation schedule if somebody outside the contract can see the moment they pull against each other.
The point of the second copy
An emissions file held only by the contractor is a file that can be interpreted after the fact. Held by two parties, one of them the authority, it stops being interpretable and starts being a record.
That matters most in the case nobody plans for. If a treated area performs worse than the untreated one, you want that finding to already exist somewhere we cannot revise it.
Who buys this
Three buyers, three different definitions of value.
Air quality and environment authorities are judged on exceedances. Their question is cost per square kilometre held below a threshold, over a year, in a budget that has to survive a public process. Owens Lake is their reference point and it is not an encouraging one, which works in favour of anything genuinely cheaper.
Site operators — mines, quarries, plants with evaporation ponds — already have a dust obligation, a monitoring network and water carts running on a cycle. Their question is narrower and easier to answer: does this hold the same ground for less water or for longer.
Water authorities with a receding body face the hardest version. They are usually managing the water allocation that caused the exposure in the first place, and dust control competes for the same water. For them, water per unit area held is not a procurement metric. It is the entire argument.
Programmes are contracted by Alarivean, Inc., which operates Credible Ventures systems. Sovereign and national-scale schemes are structured with a local partner and a regional gas supplier, and that conversation is held directly with the operating company.
Inside the fee
- Treatment equipment
- All gases
- Crew and mobilisation
- Monitoring plan
- Water and energy metering
- Regulator-format reporting
Scoped per site
- Exposed lakebed
- Evaporation pond
- Tailings and spoil
- Salinised land
- Additional control area
- Multi-season programme
Where the underlying problem is the water body rather than the ground it left behind, the relevant systems are Fluid Nano for lakes, lagoons and discharge fields and SeaBreather at coastal scale. Being redirected to one of those is a normal outcome of a desk assessment.
From a procurement file
Water, precedent and the exit
Where does the water come from?
Usually from whatever the site already uses for dust control, and that is exactly the point. Water is the binding constraint on every suppression method in an arid region.
Which is why the number a first phase has to produce is water applied per unit area held, rather than a headline reduction percentage. If a programme cannot beat the water carts on that ratio, it should not proceed, and we would rather establish that in one season than in five.
Can this be procured against an existing dust obligation?
That is the usual route. Where a regulator has already approved control measures, a control-area trial runs alongside them instead of replacing them.
The comparison then happens on a monitoring network that already exists and that your authority already accepts, which removes the most common argument before it starts.
What happens if the control area shows no benefit?
The programme stops. The protocol names the result that counts as no benefit before anything is mobilised, so the conversation at the end is short and nobody is interpreting anything after the fact.
You keep the baseline and the monitoring record. On a surface nobody has ever instrumented properly, that has value to you whether or not we are involved afterwards.
The contract, the price and the mobilisation date all belong to Alarivean, Inc. Credible Ventures owns the system and signs nothing.
Immediate, Significant, Scaled
Start with the surface and the wind rose.
Area, history, prevailing wind, exceedance record, downwind population and whatever control measures you already run. Alarivean comes back with a view on whether instrumenting a control area is worth your budget.