Competing for Water, Driving Climate Change
By Ted Schettler, Science Director, SEHN
Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of oil- or gas-laden shale thousands of feet below the surface requires enormous amounts of water, mixed with chemical additives and a proppant to keep the cracks open (usually sand) injected at high pressure to free the fossil fuels and bring them to the surface mixed with contaminated water and brine for processing. The search for oil and gas has become the latest threat to groundwater aquifers that are also essential for crop irrigation, livestock watering, and various other industrial and domestic needs.
According to an extensive New York Times investigation, fracking wells have increased their water use seven-fold since 2011 as horizontal drilling techniques deep below ground have been refined and lengthened. Fracking a single oil or gas well commonly requires 4-20 million gallons of water, but newer “monster fracks” can use as much as 40 million gallons. The New York Times report says that, all together, oil and gas operators have used about 1.5 trillion gallons of water in the last twelve years, much of it coming from underground aquifers.
The New York Times investigation of national groundwater trends also found that most aquifers are in decline because of over-pumping. Large industrial farms, industrial development, growing cities, and regional droughts exacerbated by climate change are depleting groundwater resources more rapidly than they can be replaced. In most regions, water used for fracking is a relatively small percent of total water use, but in arid, major oil- and gas-producing regions like West Texas and New Mexico, competition for this limited resource is heating up.
Although surface and groundwater frequently interconnect, they are regulated in very different ways. For surface water, the 1972 Clean Water Act provides federal oversight for industrial wastewater discharges and consistent water quality criteria for pollutants.
Groundwater, by contrast, is almost exclusively regulated by a patchwork of withdrawal or appropriation systems, pollution statutes, and land ownership rights that vary by state. Federal oversight is largely limited to making certain that groundwater used for drinking water in municipalities is protected from fecal contamination.
In arid western states, including Texas and New Mexico, which lead the nation in oil and gas production in the United States, groundwater rights and regulations vary widely. Most are generally based on principles of prior appropriation and beneficial use, meaning that, during times of water shortages, the earliest rights holders have preference over those granted rights later and water should not be wasted. But Texas considers groundwater to belong to individual landowners who are only loosely overseen by local Groundwater Conservation Districts (GCD), while New Mexico considers groundwater to be publicly owned and places it under state regulation via a withdrawal permitting process.
The growth of oil and gas hydraulic fracking in arid regions has created a market for water that can be more profitable to farmers who would otherwise use groundwater for crop irrigation. Their ability to sell water to energy companies varies from state to state. In Texas landowners can pump, use, or sell it as they choose (“rule of capture”). GCDs do not interfere with that ownership. Across the state border in New Mexico where groundwater is publicly owned and farmers are granted permits to withdraw it for agricultural purposes, landowners wishing to sell their water to an energy company instead of watering crops with it must apply for a change in their permit status. These differences in groundwater management have created a growing market for West Texas groundwater in nearby Southeastern New Mexico oil fields that sit astride the same aquifer.
Water is not only used to carry out fracking operations, it also flows up in large volumes out of fracked wells along with oil and natural gas, with the highest volumes recorded in the Permian basin of Texas and New Mexico. This “produced water” includes flowback of water injected for fracking and brine from deep in the reservoir. It contains salts, various organic compounds, metals, chemicals used in fracking, and radionuclides in varying proportions, making it difficult and expensive to treat for reuse. Consequently, once separated from the oil and gas, most of the produced water is injected deep underground in Class II wells, where it is permanently lost from the hydrological cycle and increases the risk of earthquakes. Some states allow the produced water to be treated to certain standards and then disposed of in surface water or spread on agricultural land. But until now, very little has been recycled/reused for fracking new wells.
In arid New Mexico, second only to Texas in oil and gas production, where water is increasingly scarce, a Produced Water Research Consortium was established in 2019 to coordinate a research and development program to accelerate technology enabling environmentally sound and cost-effective reuse of produced water for various purposes. Last fall New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced a $500 million commitment to purchase adequately treated produced water to use for various industrial purposes as an incentive to private capital to build treatment facilities in the state. Critics are skeptical that, even when treated, such contaminated water will have much use beyond fracking for more oil and gas, further contributing to climate change, droughts, floods, and rising sea levels that are imperiling water quality and availability in much of the world.