Using Colorado as its example, a Boulder, CO-based nonprofit law and conservation group, added its two cents to the growing list of advocate-sponsored studies of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), concluding there are definite impacts on water supplies and the communities they serve from the widespread use of the oil/gas drilling technology.

Western Resource Advocates (WRA) examined all available data on water and fracking used in Colorado in compiling its report, “Fracking Our Future: Measuring Water and Community Impacts from Hydraulic Fracturing.” Advocating that policymakers and the industry take a step back, report author Laura Belanger, a water resources and environmental engineer at WRA, said there needs to be assurance that “we aren’t over-allocating our most important natural resource one frack job at a time.”

Belanger agreed that natural gas is needed to transition to cleaner energy in the future, but that water also is needed for a higher priority — survival. While past studies have shown the overall estimated water use from fracking to be less than most major municipal and industrial processes, the estimated range of annual water use in Colorado (22,100 to 39,500 acre feet) is equal to what is needed to meet the annual residential water needs in a city of nearly 300,000 population.

The WRA report advocated more advance resource planning for oil and gas development in Colorado with a strong focus on water, but it also acknowledged that “more comprehensive and publicly available data on oil/gas water demands and water supplies are needed.” It recommends slowing the oil/gas development long enough to “make informed, thoughtful choices” regarding water.

This report makes several blanket assumptions based on Colorado’s experience, which earlier this year estimated that fracking water use would grow to 18,700 acre feet by 2015. WRA’s assumptions are that fracking’s water use is 100% consumptive, meaning it can’t be reused, compared to residential water use in which 90-95% of indoor water can be returned to wastewater treatment plants. The environmental-based group also assumes that water use for each hydraulic fracturing job varies widely, and trucking water to and from well sites is becoming a big business in some Colorado counties.

“It is a travesty that in a water-starved state like Colorado we are using so much water for oil/gas drilling,” said a resident quoted by WRA, Barbara Fernandez, who retired last year after 24 years as a staff member at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

In advocating the state adopt a “deliberate and responsible manner” in future oil/gas development, the WRA report said the state “cannot afford to continue developing new oil/gas wells without understanding the associated water needs in order to determine if the water is available or if we are over-allocating this resource.”

The report contends that oil/gas development water needs are significant compared with municipal use and local supplies. It cites Weld County, one of several energy intensive counties on the Front Range, as having water use for drilling and fracking last year that equaled one to two-thirds of the county’s total public supply and domestic water use. Weld also was where more than half of the state’s new wells were drilled in 2011.