BY LAUREN SILVA LAUGHLIN
West Texas drillers have a water problem – they’re swimming in it. At a time when many parts of the southwestern United States are suffering drought conditions, U.S. shale operators are extracting as much as ten times more water than oil from their wells. Disposing the dirty liquid is costly and threatens to curb production growth, but some companies are showing the way forward through recycling. A few may even turn this problem into a second commodity business.
In hydraulic fracturing, drillers inject water mixed with other compounds to shatter shale formations deep underground and release trapped oil and gas. Much of that flows back to the surface with the hydrocarbons. So too does water that had also been locked in the rock.
Once these so-called fracking wells start producing, the water flows can be prodigious. Operators in the Permian region that extends from West Texas into New Mexico are getting four times more water than oil on average, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. By 2025, when the region is expected to be producing some 6 million barrels of crude a day, that would generate enough wastewater to fill more than 1,500 Olympic-size swimming pools a day.
Much of the water is currently pumped back into the ground in disposal wells. But water flows tend to increase as wells age, straining capacity, and shipping water elsewhere by truck or pipeline is expensive. Wood Mackenzie estimates that if companies don’t become more innovative, the rising cost of water management could depress the region’s oil production by as much as 400,000 barrels per day by 2025.
Some operators are getting creative. Encana is building water processing plants close to some of its sites to moderately clean up the water for reuse in fracking. The plants are relatively inexpensive and recycling water can save Encana some 80 cents per barrel on disposal costs. Pioneer Natural Resources is implementing similar systems.
Fracking wastewater in Texas is particularly briny, but as costs increase it may become economic to use desalinization techniques to produce water for irrigation. This is already being done in parts of California, according to a workshop report published by the National Academy of Sciences last year. If water becomes scarcer, drillers may find themselves sitting on a second valuable resource.
First published June 14, 2018
IMAGE: REUTERS/Nick Oxford