Oil and water: The right mix?

Everyone agrees hydraulic fracturing uses a lot of water, but is it so much as to cause alarm?

The raw numbers sure sound worrisome: tens of millions of gallons a year.

But what’s the context? Are the oil companies leaving Colorado high and dry? Has all of the fracturing going on across Northern Colorado diverted that much water from our farmers? Will children need to learn to brush their teeth with a lot less swishing and spitting?

SPONSORED CONTENT

Business Cares: May 2024

As Mental Health Awareness Month unfolds in Colorado, it serves as a reminder of the collective responsibility to prioritize mental well-being.

As it turns out, the numbers aren’t quite what they appear.

Water use in fracturing makes up less than 1 percent of Colorado’s total annual water consumption, according to a Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission report.

The largest water users by far are, as you might imagine, farmers.

Still, ever-sensitive to their image, oil and gas companies are studying how they can cut their water consumption.

They’re also recycling a greater amount of water that they use.

An oil or gas well drilled horizontally can require anywhere from 2 million to 5 million gallons of water. Also known as fracking, the technique involves pumping water, sand and chemicals into a drilled area to release oil and natural gas from shale.

Annually, about 13,900 acre-feet of water are used in fracturing in Colorado. An acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons.

If that sounds like a lot, it is.

On the other hand, at least 16.4 million acre-feet of water is consumed in Colorado every year. Actually, that figure is a conservative estimate, given that a large number of groundwater wells throughout the state are not factored in.

Meanwhile, an additional 10 million acre-feet of Colorado water each year end up in other states.

Despite these figures, environmentalists contend there is not enough water available in Colorado for fracking, especially as cities consider large water projects that will put additional pressure on supplies.

The numbers don’t support them. By 2015, the state oil and gas commission projects water use in fracturing will grow to only 18,700 acre-feet.

And compared with uses by industries such as agriculture, which consumes more than 85 percent of the state’s water, oil and gas development water use remains practically insignificant.

“In terms of the grand scheme of things, it’s a small amount,´ said Brian Werner, spokesman for the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District in Berthoud. A wholesale water provider, the NCWCD does not sell water to oil and gas companies directly, but its municipal customers do.

Moreover, competition for water is not nearly as fierce as some have portrayed.

After a recent auction of unallocated water held by the district, several reports accurately stated that frackers bid more for the water than farmers.

What those reports failed to note was that more than 90 percent of the water went to farmers and cities (84 percent to farmers and 8 percent to cities), Werner said. Only 8 percent went to industrial customers, including oil and gas development companies.

Everyone who bid for the water got it with the exception of one person who submitted a low bid, Werner said. Further, the average successful bid for water sold at the annual auction has decreased the past three years, despite erroneous reports saying the price had surged.

“In my mind, it’s pretty hard to draw the conclusion that the frackers who come into that auction this year have driven the price up,” he said.

New water uses, of course, can strain a system where water rights already are allocated, said Ken Carlson, a CSU professor of environmental engineering who is studying water use by oil and gas companies.

That said, “if we do the proper planning, it shouldn’t greatly impact or impact at all the way we’re using water in the state,” Carlson said.

Part of that planning involves finding ways oil and gas companies can limit their water use.

At CSU, Carlson and other researchers are working with Noble Energy Inc., one of the larger oil companies active in Northern Colorado, to study water-management issues.

One of those issues is how companies can recycle more of their water. It’s something that oil producers in other places throughout the state already are doing.

“The industry is aggressively looking at how best to recycle water,” Carlson said.

Currently, companies inject most of their used water into holes drilled 10,000 feet into the ground. They sometimes let the water evaporate in open pits, though that technique is not used as often.

Besides recycling, studies have focused on what kind of drilling techniques use less water.

Encana, which drills natural-gas wells near Erie, recycles more than 95 percent of water used in its Western Slope operations, spokesman Doug Hock said.

In the Denver-Julesburg Basin, the company is recycling 210,000 gallons of water per week through a pilot program, Hock said. The recycling program is part of an overall water-management plan through which the company aims to reduce its fresh water use.

Encana wells produce about 92,400 gallons of water daily that rise with natural gas, he said. It treats almost two days’ worth of that water and reuses it for hydraulic fracturing, reducing the amount of fresh water consumed.

It still has a long way to go, though. The company consumes an average 880,000 gallons of water per well during hydraulic fracturing, he said.

Saving water isn’t just about doing the right thing.

The more the oil companies can recycle, the lower their drilling costs.

And, as Hock said, “if we can recycle, it reduces the demand that we’re putting on the overall (water) supply.”

Not to mention perhaps helping to reduce the rhetoric.