Oil and gas companies are increasingly reusing “produced water” as West Texas aquifers are being depleted and the practice of injecting wastewater into disposal wells triggers more earthquakes.
Fracking uses water — about 16 million gallons per well per year in the Permian — to break open underground shales that hold oil and gas, but mostly super-salty water, buried remnants of ancient oceans.
“We have looked at getting that water and recycling it,” Shifflett said. “I’m very interested in doing that, but at present it’s just too expensive.” Frackers mix into the water proprietary solutions with scores of known and unknown chemicals which still need to be identified before they can be dealt with, he said. Then treatment technologies will need to be developed and tested for those specific toxins.
Today, injection capacity, the amount of well space permitted for fluid disposal, continues to grow, although the rate is slowing. In 13 counties of the Permian Basin, records from the Texas Railroad Commission show 6,462 injection wells permitted in the last 10 years, including 344 in the last year.
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