In West Texas, oil companies are recycling more fracking wastewater

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Fracked wells in West Texas don’t simply produce petroleum. Much more than anything, they spit up salty, mucky water.

Typically, companies have discarded that fluid, a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of gallons per day, by injecting it again underground, often inflicting small earthquakes. But as water turns into more scarce, they’re starting to rethink.

For now, hydraulic fracturing in arid West Texas makes use of massive quantities of recent aquifer water to crack open subterranean shales, unleashing a mix of oil, gasoline and fossil brine 10 occasions as salty as the ocean.

Increasingly, frackers are beginning to reuse that brine, easing their burden on aquifers.

“We’ve just month by month seen extraordinary growth in the volumes we are managing,” mentioned Matthew Gabriel, CEO of XRI Holdings, which recycles oilfield wastewater within the Permian Basin, the nation’s high oil-producing area.

This month, XRI announced a 230-mile enlargement to its current 450-mile Permian pipeline community. Unlike different Permian pipelines, these carry water from oilfields to remedy crops and again, linking the foremost oil producers’ batteries of tanks. XRI, based mostly in Houston, can be including three more remedy crops to its current 30.

Fracking doesn’t require significantly clear water and the remedy to arrange it’s fairly easy, Gabriel mentioned. It’s the pipeline community that makes it economical, offering the equal of oilfield plumbing to switch the laborious technique of trucking in water and trucking out waste.

“You open a valve and you can have all the water you need,” Gabriel mentioned. “I think we’re going to see enormous advances around this concept in the coming years.”

XRI at present manages 1 million barrels of wastewater per day and recycles 800,000 — a small portion of the whole quantity produced by Permian Basin oil fields.

Recently, Texas convened water consultants for a state-funded research of recycling that so-called “produced water,” the time period for wastewater from oil wells. Released this yr, the Texas Produced Water Consortium report estimated Permian Basin wastewater manufacturing at roughly 11 million barrels, or 462 million gallons, per day in 2019, the final yr of obtainable information. Since then the determine has possible elevated consistent with hovering Permian oil and gasoline output.

In response to a survey by the Texas consortium, fracking companies on common mentioned they have been already reusing about 30% of their wastewater. Even in the event that they happy 100% of their want with recycled water, they’d nonetheless have hundreds of thousands of barrels of produced water left over on daily basis.

Underground disposal remained a less expensive choice than reuse, it mentioned, however won’t be so for lengthy.

“Scarcity conditions,” the 130-page report mentioned, “will eventually make this an economically viable option.”

According to the newest Texas water plan, statewide water provides will lower by roughly 18% inside 50 years, “primarily due to depletion of aquifers.”

“Without additional supplies … one-quarter of Texas’ population would have less than half of the municipal water supplies they will require in 2070,” the plan mentioned.

“Managed depletion” of aquifers in West Texas

Fears hit particularly laborious within the state’s western desert and plains, the place fracking is booming. Almost 80% of this huge area’s documented water demand is met by a fancy assortment of aquifers — colossal, subterranean formations that crammed up over hundreds of thousands of years.

“We’re just planning to deplete it. It’s not like we’re conserving it. We’re just making the crash landing slow and somewhat tolerable,” mentioned Jeff Bennett, a hydrogeologist within the West Texas city of Alpine who labored for 15 years for the National Park Service close by.

Planners referred to as it “managed depletion” — the intentional use of the useful resource to its finish.

Such a destiny awaits the Ogallala Aquifer, the nation’s largest underground physique of water, which swoops into West Texas from the north, and for which the Texas Water Development Board calls “managed depletion” its “management strategy.”

Models recommend folks are drawing from the Ogallala at 6.5 occasions its recharge price, in line with Robert Mace, government director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University in San Marcos.

“It’s like a savings account. Your paycheck is $1,000 per month and you’re spending $6,500 per month,” he mentioned. “You came in with some money from grandpa and that balance is just going down.”

The figures come from complicated fashions knowledgeable by partial, self-reported water use data collected by a patchwork of groundwater districts. Where no districts exist, there are no permits or limits.

Atop the Pecos Valley Aquifer, which underlies a lot of the fracking heartland, five adjacent counties lack groundwater districts. In one among them, Winkler County, the TWDB expects aquifer ranges to fall by as much as 161 toes between 2010 and 2070.

“Nobody is managing it,” Mace mentioned. “You pump whatever you want, you do whatever you want.”

He mentioned fashions anticipate the Pecos Valley Aquifer to assist calls for via 2070, however not indefinitely.

“How did you go broke?” Mace mentioned, paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Of 883 lively water wells registered with the TWDB on the Pecos Valley Aquifer, 237 are for livestock, 209 for irrigation and 131 for public provide.

Another 146 are for industrial use. These wells could serve quite a lot of processes, from energy technology to chemical refining. Many present water for the fracking course of, registered to house owners together with BP, Sinclair Oil & Gas, ExxonMobil and Gulf Oil Company.

Demand for fracking water has skyrocketed

It’s unimaginable to know precisely what number of water wells are used for fracking or how a lot they pump as a result of the Texas Water Code exempts oil and gasoline producers from reporting and allowing necessities.

The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated freshwater consumption for fracking within the Permian Basin of Texas grew by 2,400% between 2010 and 2019, to 72 billion gallons, roughly one-and-a-half occasions the quantity of water used by the City of Austin that very same yr.

Fracking makes use of water — about 16 million gallons per properly per yr within the Permian — to interrupt open underground shales that maintain oil and gasoline, however principally super-salty water, buried remnants of historical oceans.

Freshwater goes down the properly and more than twice its quantity of brine comes again up, blended with the hydrocarbons.

The Texas consortium report estimated that Permian wells produced 3.93 billion barrels (about 165 billion gallons) of fracking wastewater in 2019, a yr when the entire basin (together with components of New Mexico) produced 1.4 billion barrels of oil.

Some of the water is reused in fracking, however the massive majority is pumped underground and discarded. Planners have thought of treating it to irrigate crops as an alternative, which California does with wastewater that’s a lot much less salty and doesn’t embody fracking fluids. But for now, that is still a high-tech ambition with the a lot dirtier Permian water.

“We’re not even fully sure what’s in it” 

David Shifflett, 74, farms hay and pecans in Reeves County, the place data from the Texas Railroad Commission — which oversees the oil and gasoline trade — present 557 disposal wells permitted within the final 10 years, together with 44 within the final yr.

On the roads close to Shifflett’s house, a fleet of tanker vans steadily ferries wastewater to the wells. The high-pressure injections have caused earthquakes, damaging Shifflet’s irrigation system. He helps the oil producers, he mentioned, however he desires them to cease pumping waste underground.

“We have looked at getting that water and recycling it,” Shifflett mentioned. “I’m very interested in doing that, but at present it’s just too expensive.”

Every spring and summer season, he pumps 1,000 gallons per minute for 2 weeks per 30 days onto 140 acres of pecan bushes. And he pumps 10 days every month onto 150 acres of hay year-round.

Shifflett owns 11 wells. The freshwater beneath his land belongs to him by proper. To irrigate, he pays just for development, pumps and pipes. Adding high-tech remedy and transport from oilfields would multiply his prices many occasions over. The economics of groundwater are a lot better, for now.

“It’s going to be energy-intensive and expensive to treat this water,” mentioned Dan Mueller, a senior supervisor on the Environmental Defense Fund and a member of the Texas Produced Water Consortium. “We’re not even fully sure what’s in it.”

Frackers combine into the water proprietary options with scores of identified and unknown chemical compounds which nonetheless have to be recognized earlier than they are often handled, he mentioned. Then remedy applied sciences will have to be developed and examined for these particular toxins.

For now, the consortium discovered, research and pilot tasks are wanted earlier than Permian produced water is confirmed protected for even nonedible crops like cotton. Making it cost-effective is an entire different problem. Reuse as ingesting water stays principally out of the query.

“If you can use it for fracturing wells, then that’s the way to do it,” mentioned Mueller, a civil engineer. “It’s the option of minimal treatment as opposed to very heavy treatment.”

Pipelines scale back value of water reuse

Unlike farmers, oil producers can reuse their soiled effluent with out intensive purification or well being issues over poisonous constituents. The trade has recognized the advantages of doing so.

“Not only does produced water recycle and reuse offset the need for fresh water for fracturing operations, treated produced water works better than fresh water,” learn a 2019 white paper from the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. “Reuse is likely to increase as the midstream industry matures and injection capacity is unable to keep pace with production.”

Today, injection capability, the quantity of properly area permitted for fluid disposal, continues to develop, though the speed is slowing. In 13 counties of the Permian Basin, data from the Texas Railroad Commission present 6,462 injection wells permitted within the final 10 years, together with 344 within the final yr.

The Texas consortium discovered underground disposal was the most affordable choice for coping with Permian produced water. It famous that prices fell 75% the place pipeline infrastructure changed truck transport.

Companies like XRI are making an attempt to make the identical change for handled reuse.“The market is so quickly changing,” he mentioned. “We see quite frankly significant cost savings available to the customer with recycling.”

It took time for the pipe community to link up sufficient wastewater producers and reusers, he mentioned. Now, prospects can ship off waste and draw new water from a system on web site, no vans concerned.

In the top, the way forward for produced water reuse will rely upon economics.

“It’s going to come down to the cost-benefit analysis,” mentioned Perry Fowler, government director of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network. “You have to reframe this discussion with regard to ensuring there are adequate water resources.”

“I would much rather, personally, see water being reused than going to injection wells,” he mentioned.

Texas’ upcoming legislative session might yield motion. Fowler steered the state’s severance tax, which is paid by the oil sector, might be tapped to subsidize remedy prices and incentivize reuse.

Alex Ortiz, water useful resource specialist for the Sierra Club in Austin, mentioned the state might mandate permits for water wells utilized in fracking, setting freshwater consumption limits designed to drive reuse. But he’s not anticipating it.

“It’s Texas. There’s going to be a carrot, not a stick,” Ortiz mentioned.

For Ira Yates, the fourth-generation beneficiary of an 8,000-acre household oil lease within the West Texas city of Iraan, the way forward for the Permian Basin contains large-scale produced water reuse whether or not or not the Legislature opts to behave.

“When people begin to see there is economic value in that dirty water, people are going to start claiming it,” mentioned Yates, 71, a member of the Produced Water Society who now lives in Austin. “Today it’s a liability but it will end up being an asset.”

Despite the apparent water issues in West Texas, he mentioned, there are few native voices advancing systemic sustainability. The rural area’s brightest college students sometimes flee on the first likelihood they get, Yates mentioned; those that stay find yourself too tied up making paychecks and supporting households to battle for reform.

He thinks authorities have two choices: put cash into produced water reuse now or wait till shortage drives water costs excessive sufficient to draw personal enterprise.

“We don’t have time for the free market to handle that challenge,” Yates mentioned. “If we can land a rocket on a platform in the middle of the ocean, we can clean up water. It’s just a matter of cost and whether we’re willing to do it.”

Disclosure: The Environmental Defense Fund, Exxon Mobil Corporation and the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers have been monetary supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news group that’s funded partially by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Financial supporters play no position within the Tribune’s journalism. Find a whole list of them here.