Oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGL) aren’t the only commodities on the minds of producers. These day’s they’ve been thinking about water, too — a lot actually.

Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) stimulation of shale gas and oil wells has captured the imagination of the environmental community for its perceived contamination threat to drinking water aquifers. “Fracking is in the papers a lot,” lamented Marathon Oil’s Roger Pinkerton, director of North American onshore exploration. “I’ve met a lot of people who have heard that word; I haven’t met many who know much about it.”

Pinkerton was among the speakers at the recent North American Prospect Expo (NAPE) Business Conference in Houston where the record-setting Texas drought has brought another aspect of fracking to the fore: water consumption. In Texas, most water for fracking comes from underground aquifers, and the usage is less than that for agricultural purposes, according to Robert Mace, deputy executive administrator with the Texas Water Board (see NGI, June 20).

Based on research by the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, Mace said water usage for fracking in Texas is expected to peak around 2031. At that time it is estimated such use will still only be equivalent to about 20% of the water used for agriculture, Mace said.

Still, Pinkerton and others at the NAPE conference said they realize water consumption by the industry is an issue that needs to be addressed. Pinkerton noted the drought and said, “We’re convinced that we can protect freshwater aquifers and that brackish water can be used for fracking and cleaned up.” To address water disposal issues, Pinkerton said Marathon recycles as much frack water as it can.

Calgary-based CCS Corp.’s Phil Vogel, president of U.S. environmental and energy services, talked about environmental stewardship in water management at World Oil’s Shale Energy Technology Conference last week in Houston. While the upstream oil and gas industry appears to use a lot of water, the amount is only a sliver…less than 1%…of the overall water market, which is worth about $530 billion a year globally, according to Vogel.

While it cuts a small profile among water users, the oil and gas industry is garnering an increasing amount of scrutiny for its water use, Vogel said. Regulations are tightening on the industry’s use of and access to water, he warned. “Access to fresh water [by oil and gas interests] is becoming increasingly restricted and/or a last-resort option in many areas.”

For instance, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently warned that using water from the Colorado River Basin for shale oil production could impact agricultural and municipal water uses affecting 15% of the nation’s crops and up to 30 million people from Wyoming to Southern California (see Shale Daily, Aug. 23).

Irrigation and agriculture interests account for about 37% of water use, Vogel said. However, reusing produced water and relying less on fresh water is becoming increasingly important for the energy industry, he said.

“Why do we get blamed for all of the problems if we’re only using 1% of what’s being consumed on a daily basis? We use little but we’re basically blamed for everything,” Vogel lamented. Exacerbating the concern over the industry’s water use are inconsistent drought cycles, which “demand excellence in water management practices,” he said.

Water issues and the ability to manage produced/flowback water vary across the country, said Veolia Water Solutions and Technology’s Bob Bradley, senior process engineer, another speaker at World Oil’s conference.

“In the East the shale is dry,” he said. “You’re going to pump 100,000 bbl down the well to frack it, and you get 7,500 bbl back…The water’s much saltier, but there’s a lot less of it. As you move west, you get more wet shale, shales that are natural aquifers. You get all the frack water back, plus you get 100-200 b/d per well for the life of the well.

“Different water chemistry requires different treatment technologies…You’ve got to look at the regulations with regard to what’s required for discharge. And you’ve got to figure out what you want to do with it. Do you want to frack the next well with it, or are you going to discharge it to the environment? That’s pretty much dictated by how much water there is…In the western United States you’ve got a lot more produced water than what you need for fracking so there you have to dispose of it somehow.”

Range Resources Corp.’s Alan Farquharson, vice president of reservoir engineering and another NAPE speaker, said his company has been recycling frack water for at least a year. “We have not seen any detriment to our well performance,” he said. In the Marcellus Shale the impetus for Range to recycle water was the difficulty and cost of wastewater disposal. Now that the company has seen that it can work, it has shared the knowledge with other operators, Farquharson said.

Gene Citrone Jr. of Process Plants Corp., another World Oil speaker, is focused on the East, particularly the Marcellus Shale, where he believes there will be a market for his company’s technology to treat produced water with a mechanical process so it can be reused to frack wells. “We’re at the workbench ready for commercialization,” he said while holding up a short section of pipe with multiple openings, gauges and valves.

Someone in the audience described the device as a black box, and Citrone joked that he would have liked to put it in a black box so no one could see it. He did, however, describe the process as one involving multiple pressure changes that take place within the device, producing cavitation. What comes out is not drinking water but water that can be combined with fracking chemicals and proppant to do a frack job.

Citrone said water treated with the process meets Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection requirements for discharge into stream environments. “But that’s not our goal because we’re in the oil and gas industry” and the industry wants to reuse the water.

Collaboration and cooperation among producers is one way to address the water issue, but Schlumberger’s Chris Hopkins, vice president of unconventional resources, at NAPE emphasized technology as having the ability to provide the ultimate solutions.

“To me, pumping the volume of water and the kind of rates that we pump is probably unsustainable in the future going forward for a variety of reasons, environmental reasons, supply reasons…” he said. “So I think trying to come up with techniques that allow you to get better or the same productivity with less fluid, less horsepower, less energy so to speak, I think is key to future success, not just in the U.S. but internationally.”

Hopkins pointed to Schlumberger’s HiWAY fracking method as one example of how technology is enabling the industry to do more with less when it comes to drilling and well stimulation (see NGI, July 25).

The ultimate goal is to keep frack fluids in a closed-loop system in which everything is recycled, Hopkins said. “This is a whole area of technology that has just come around in the last three or four years, and this will improve as we go forward,” he said.

ConocoPhillips’ Glenn Schaaf, vice president of drilling and production, told the NAPE audience the industry needs to “frack unconventionally…We need to figure out a better way to do it. The current way is too resource-intensive.”

With that in mind, Schaaf looks to the Gulf of Mexico when thinking about wells in the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas. “We need to develop the technologies to use saltier, more brine-prone waters,” he said. “I would go so far as to say the Gulf of Mexico is relatively close to the Eagle Ford. I’m not sure why we can’t figure out how to take advantage of that. I think we can. I think that could be one of our early wins.

“I think we need to be thinking about alternative carrier fluids. What could be a better carrier fluid than using fresh water, using water period? Water is a prime resource…We’re not major users; keep that in mind. And we as an industry have got to do a better job of telling the public that we’re not major users of water in these very active plays. But we still need to do our part to reduce the use.”

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