Every fracking job requires 2 million to 4 million
gallons of water, according to the Groundwater Protection Council. The
Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has estimated that the 35,000 oil and
gas wells used for fracking consume between 70 billion and 140 billion gallons
of water each year. That’s about equal, EPA says, to the water use in 40 to 80
cities with populations of 50,000 people, or one to two cities with a
population of 2.5 million each.
Some of the most intensive oil and gas development
in the nation is occurring in regions where water is already at a premium. A
paper published last month by Ceres, a nonprofit that works on sustainability
issues, looked at 25,000 shale oil and shale gas wells in operation and
monitored by an industry-tied reporting website called FracFocus. Ceres found
that 47 percent of these wells were in areas “with high or extremely high water
stress” because of large withdrawals for use by industry, agriculture, and
municipalities. In Colorado, for example, 92 percent of the wells were in
extremely high water-stress areas, and in Texas more than half were in high or
extremely high water-stress areas.
“Given projected sharp increases in production in
the coming years and the potentially intense nature of local water demands,
competition and conflicts over water should be a growing concern for companies,
policymakers and investors,” the Ceres report concluded. It goes on to say
that:
Prolonged
drought conditions in many parts of Texas and Colorado last summer created
increased competition and conflict between farmers, communities and energy
developers, which is only likely to continue. … Even in wetter regions of the
northeast United States, dozens of water permits granted to operators had to be
withdrawn last summer due to low levels in environmentally vulnerable headwater
streams.
Another recent study by the University of Texas
looked at past and projected water use for fracking in the Barnett, Eagle Ford,
and Haynesville shale plays in Texas, and found that fracking in 2011 was using
more than twice as much water in the state as it was three years earlier. In
Dimmit County, home to the Eagle Ford shale development in South Texas,
fracking accounted for nearly a quarter of overall water consumption in 2011
and is expected to grow to a third in a few years, according to the study.
Moreover, an April report by the Western
Organization of Resource Councils found that fracking is using 7 billion
gallons of water a year in four western states: Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, and
North Dakota. “Fracking’s growing demand for water can threaten availability of
water for agriculture and western rural communities,” said Bob Leresche, a
Wyoming resident and board member of the group.
The national oil and gas trade association, American
Petroleum Institute, correctly notes that the “industry’s water use is small
when compared to other industrial and recreational activities.” But even though
hydraulic fracturing usually accounts for just 1 percent or 2 percent of
states’ overall water use, the Ceres study notes that “it can be much higher at
the local level, increasing competition for scarce supplies.”
New ways to frack
Not surprisingly, the oil and gas industry, along
with companies drawn by the opportunity to profit from a better way to frack,
are all seeking ways to reduce and even eliminate fracking’s thirst.
A new company in Texas, Alpha Reclaim Technology,
sees using treated wastewater from municipal sewage-treatment plants as part of
the answer. Founded in 2011, the company has signed up cities to provide about
21 million gallons of treated wastewater a day and is negotiating with oil and
gas exploration and production companies to make the switch in the Eagle Ford
shale play.
With regard to water use and fracking, Jeremy
Osborne, the company’s vice president and general counsel, says, “We are really
in a collision course here in Texas”—a course he says is accelerated by drought
and population growth.
But Jillian Ryan, Alpha Reclaim Technology’s vice
president for government affairs, said changing longstanding practices in the
oil and gas industry can be a challenge. While the industry talks a good game
about conserving water, Ryan says, “We can have a hard time getting oil and gas
companies to live up to what they are talking about. Nobody wants to change.
It’s easier to drill a water well where they are drilling [for oil and gas].”
Another player in this oil and gas niche is GASFRAC
Energy Services, a Canadian company that says it has successfully fracked about
2,000 wells using liquid propane gas in place of water. Most of these wells are
in Canada, but about 100 of them are in Texas.
Environmentalists and fracking critics, however, are
alarmed at the thought of fracking with propane. Prompted by the possibility
that GASFRAC would be employed in New York state and could evade a state
moratorium on fracking by using propane instead of water, environmental groups,
including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, protested
to the commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation.
Similar to water-based fracking, the groups said, fracking with propane also
requires “the addition of toxic chemicals.” Because GASFRAC’s method is
proprietary, the groups said in their letter that “there is little
publicly-available information on the process” and the exact chemicals it uses.
Propane is also very flammable, and in two cases in
Alberta in 2011, fires broke out during GASFRAC fracking operations, injuring a
total of 15 workers.
Cornell University engineering professor Anthony
Ingraffea is among those who are very skeptical of fracking in shale formations
with propane and other alternatives to water. Ingraffea has been studying
fracturing since doing research for his doctorate in the 1970s. He finds that
even modern fracking practices, using millions of gallons of water per well to
yield what he says is just 10 percent to 15 percent of oil and gas out, are
“very inefficient and inelegant.”
Using propane or a propane-butane combination,
Ingraffea says, has a positive side in that it eliminates a key problem with
water-based fracking: the disposal of vast quantities of flowback water that
returns to the surface after fracking is completed and is often contaminated with
things such as salts and radioactivity.
But, he added, no one has yet clearly demonstrated
that fracking with propane or some of the other alternatives—such as using a
nitrogen or carbon dioxide gel—can compete on economics with water. Propane, he
said, “is expensive and nobody really knows how much it takes to develop a
typical shale gas well with a lateral that is a mile or two long.”
Oil and gas service companies such as Halliburton
and Schlumberger have thrown a lot of money and bright minds at seeking
efficiencies over many years, said Ingraffea, and if there was a “silver bullet
you would think those companies would have hit it very hard.”
As the Ceres report concludes:
Shale
energy development highlights the fact that our water resources were already
vulnerable before additional demands were introduced. Regulators, water
managers and ultimately all significant economic players who rely on abundant
supplies of water must double-down their efforts to better manage this limited
and most precious resource.
About the author: Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow
at the Center for American Progress.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment