Water costs fell 75 percent where pipeline infrastructure replaced truck transport to...
Large volumes of water and sand are used in the process of fracking wells in the Haynesville shale in East Texas. The wells are operated by XTO Energy, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil.Fracked wells in West Texas don’t just produce petroleum. Much more than anything else, they spit up salty, mucky water.
Fracking doesn’t require particularly clean water, and the treatment to prepare it is pretty simple, Gabriel said. It’s the pipeline network that makes it economical, providing the equivalent of oilfield plumbing to replace the laborious process of trucking in water and trucking out waste. In response to a survey by the Texas Consortium, fracking companies on average said they were already reusing about 30 percent of their wastewater. Even if they satisfied 100 percent of their need with recycled water, they would still have millions of barrels of produced water left over every day.
“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 said.Fears hit especially hard in the state’s western desert and plains, where fracking is booming. Almost 80 percent of this vast region’s documented water demand is met by a complex collection of aquifers, the colossal subterranean formations that filled up over millions of years.
The figures come from complex models informed by partial, self-reported water-use records collected by a patchwork of groundwater districts. Where no districts exist, there are no permits or limits. Fracking uses about 16 million gallons of water per well per year in the Permian to break open underground shales that hold oil, gas and — mostly — super-salty water, the buried remnants of ancient oceans. Freshwater goes down the well, and more than twice its volume of brine comes back up, mixed with the hydrocarbons.
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