Who Owns the Fracking Water?

Who Owns the Fracking Water?

The use of freshwater resources by the oil and gas industry to frack wells in Arkansas and in other states to produce shale gas should alarm concerned citizens. Thirty-three states have oil and/or natural gas production and, according to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, more than 90% of U.S. oil and natural gas wells use hydraulic fracturing. Tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands— more wells are planned across the country over the next decade.

According to the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission as of February 2012, there were over 4000 active gas wells in the Fayetteville Shale of Central Arkansas with the potential for development of 14,000 more wells over the next 20 years.

In June 2011, Argonne National Laboratories produced a report for the US Dept. of Energy on “Water Management Practices Used by Fayetteville Shale Gas Producers”. The report focused on “how gas producers obtain water supplies used for drilling and hydraulically fracturing wells, how that water is transported to the well sites and stored, and how the wastewater from the wells (flowback and produced water) is managed.”

The report includes figure 5 below which shows the distribution of the active wells in Arkansas.

The report describes three types of water issues that arise from shale gas development in the Fayetteville Shale. Those three issues are:

1.      Controlling the stormwater runoff from disturbed areas,

2.      Obtaining sufficient freshwater supply to conduct frac jobs on new wells, and

3.      Managing the flowback water and produced water from the well.

The report states:

·         The volume of water needed to fracture a well is an estimated 2.9 million gallons per well.

·         Due to multiple fracking cycles, actual operator data is an average of 4.3 million gallons of water used per well in the Fayetteville Shale (Mantell 2010a).

·         It is estimated that future Fayetteville Gas Drilling will average about 1300 wells per year.

·         Multiplying these per-well volumes by the extrapolated number of new wells completed in a future high production year gives an annual volume of 4.1 to 5.8 billion gallons of water needed for a full year.

·         Assuming the water is required evenly over the whole year yields an estimated daily volume requirement of 11.2 to 15.8 million gallons/day.

This amount of water drawn from only a few counties in the state represents nearly 17% of water used daily by livestock in the entire state in 2005. Since the freshwater used freely by the oil and gas companies is returned from the well as wastewater it must be disposed of properly. This usually means being pumped down into injection wells.

To dispose of this wastewater there are currently 14 injection wells in the Fayetteville shale region, some of which have been associated with recent earthquake swarms. Due to these earthquakes, the State of Arkansas has imposed a moratorium on injection wells over a large area of the Fayetteville Shale Gas play. It is not known what is currently being done with the wastewater from the active wells or what the companies plan to do with the huge amounts of wastewater projected over the next 20 years.

Clearly something needs to be done about the uncontrolled use of freshwater on a massive scale which the oil and gas industry has planned. This is not a local or even a state problem and solutions must be found at the national level. At the very least, oil and gas companies should be asked to pay for the water they use and pollute if only to provide a fund to clean up of any future frack water spills. More importantly, a comprehensive water use plan should be developed which restricts the amount of water they could use impound in a given area per season. A baseline study of water quality in private water wells must be conducted and paid for by the industry. This is the only way that companies can be held accountable for the inevitable decline in water quality as the result of spills, earthquakes or faulty casing jobs. Finally, alternative sources and methods for frac technologies must be developed so that in periods of drought in Arkansas and other states, no surface water withdrawal will be permitted.

For further info see my website www.haveyoubeenpoisoned.com

David Lincoln

Enviro-Health Tracs
June 18, 2012