Via MyWestTexas.com, an article on the water energy paradox, and the possibility that the oil and gas industry will switch en mass to tapping brackish aquifers for hydraulic fracturing within five years:
Water and energy are hopelessly entangled — you can’t have one without the other.
But figuring out how to get either cleanly and affordably makes for a complex jumble of policy, economic and environmental considerations, said Michael Webber, who runs an energy research group at the University of Texas at Austin.
“We use energy for water, we use water for energy” said Webber, who spoke last week at the Austin Forum at Austin’s AT&T Conference Center . “That energy-water relationship is already under strain.”
There is no clean water without electricity to pump it and treat it. And electricity needs water to cool power plants or nuclear facilities, while oil and gas requires water for drilling.
Droughts, heat waves and hurricanes — all common in Texas — can shut down the power grid and municipal water systems.
On top of that comes a new oil and gas boom in Texas that’s using water in previously unheard of amounts.
“This is an interesting test bed,” Webber said.
Drilling horizontal wells and the use of hydraulic fracturing to crack open shale formations have opened up new oil and gas fields across the state. Hydraulic fracturing uses 2 million to 9 million gallons of water along with sand and chemicals pumped at high pressure to break open dense rock, releasing trapped oil and gas.
“This is a lot of sand and water and chemicals,” Webber said.
People focus on the amount of water used and on the concern that hydraulic fracturing water will seep thousands of feet into a freshwater aquifer.
Instead, Weber said problems are more likely to come from other aspects of drilling.
“There are real water quality risks from (hydraulic fracturing),” Webber said. “It’s just not exactly where people think they might be.”
The water that returns to the surface after hydraulic fracturing is often stored in drilling pits and contains everything from drilling mud to radioactive materials. If pits aren’t lined properly, that fracking water can contaminate ground water, Webber said.
Water that comes back up a well after hydraulic fracturing has to be disposed of somewhere, and it’s usually trucked to a disposal well, which Weber said means accidents and surface spills are a concern. Texas has about 50,000 disposal wells, about one-third of all those in the U.S.
But Webber said hydraulic fracturing can actually be a relatively clean source of energy when water use is considered.
Conventional oil and gas production uses 1 to 5 gallons of water to create 1 gallon of fuel. Shale oil and gas production is more water intensive, using 5 to 10 gallons of water to create 1 gallon of fuel.
But growing corn for ethanol uses 500 to 2,000 gallons of water per gallon of fuel created.
Algae uses 10,000 to 100,000 gallons of water for each gallon of fuel created.
“It’s something to keep in mind. You don’t tend think of oil as clean or environmentally friendly, but from a water perspective it’s actually pretty lean,” he said.
The issues are further complicated by climate, said Tom “Smitty” Smith , state director of consumer and environmental group Public Citizen . “The water consumed in energy production assumes we’ll have water at historic levels as opposed to less water.”
But he said climate scientists believe South Texas will become drier over the next several decades. “We can’t rely on energy resources that consume enormous amounts of water and assume it’s sustainable,” Smith said.
That means even though CPS Energy uses wastewater for cooling its plants, which Smith thinks should be a model followed by other utilities, that water may one day have to sustain river flows downstream instead.
“Similarly, we have to question the use of freshwater in (hydraulic fracturing),” Smith said. “Each individual frac job doesn’t use a lot of water or produce a lot of air emissions. It’s cumulative.”
Tapping brackish instead of freshwater aquifers is one option, but not a common one.
“Now industry is using treated effluent, brackish water, saltwater, water without chemicals. They’re experimenting with more things,” Webber said. “We need it faster. The number of wells is going up.”
David Blackmon, a managing director of FTI Consulting and a spokesman for the industry website Energy in Depth, said he expects that in three or four years the oil and gas industry will switch en mass to tapping brackish aquifers for hydraulic fracturing.
“I think the key for Texas and the oil and gas industry, and it’s happening, is to be able to quit using fresh water for hydraulic fracturing,” Blackmon said. “Some of the biggest reservoirs of brackish water are in the Permian Basin.”
And sometimes fracturing water is reused, but there are some unexpected hurdles to that, including common oil and gas lease terms in South Texas.
Mineral owners — who often own the surface of the land, too — may require their operators to purchase water from them.
“They make it worse by requiring oil and gas companies to use their water,” Webber said. “The companies want to do reuse, but it’s like, ‘No, you have to use water from me.’ “
On the south end of the Eagle Ford, 80 percent of the water is used by agriculture. Oil and gas companies want to use another 5 percent for shale drilling — a smaller slice and a far more profitable one, but it rubs many locals the wrong way.
“The oil and gas guys are the marginal user,” Webber said. “They’re the new guy.”
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