Oil and gas operations on the Front Range doubled the amount of freshwater used in fracking over the past 10 years even as oil production declined, according to a new report by the nonprofit advocacy group FracTracker Alliance.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the water-intensive process that oil and gas developers use to access fossil fuels stored in rock formations deep underground. They inject water and other substances at high pressure into well bores, breaking up the bedrock to unlock oil and gas reserves within. The used water – which industry calls “produced water” - can be treated, recycled and reused. But that doesn’t always happen, often leading to the overconsumption of freshwater, a precious resource amid a historic regional megadrought.
The FracTracker report relied on state data to show the oil and gas industry had produced enough fracking wastewater over the past 10 years to completely satisfy all of the industry's water needs if they had recycled it, thus eliminating the need to tap into freshwater reserves.
But Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commissioner John Messner said it’s not so simple.
“There are a number of different oil and gas producing basins in the state of Colorado, and each one is very different and unique,” he said.
Produced water conditions and handling varies considerably across the state, and that means there’s often a geographic mismatch between where the produced water is generated and where it would be useful for drilling new wells.
In western Colorado’s Piceance Basin, for instance, fracking produces plentiful wastewater and developers in the area long ago established the infrastructure for recycling it. Indeed, operators there regularly treat and reuse their produced water.
But when it comes to the Denver Julesburg Basin, which occupies much of Weld County and is Colorado’s most active for oil and gas, fracking produces much less water per well, and operators rarely recycle it when the drilling is done.
“There is limited infrastructure available for water transportation, for water storage, for water treatment” in the oil fields of Northeast Colorado, Messner said.
According to Messner, those regional variations complicate FracTracker’s assertion that frackers could rely solely on produced water.
At the state level, there may be enough produced water to supply all new wells being drilled, but that would require moving water from the Piceance Basin in Northwest Colorado all the way across the state so it could be used in the Denver Julesburg Basin, where most new wells are being drilled.
“The math may show that's possible,” Messner said. “[But] the infrastructure, the technology or just the reality of it on the ground may not be the case.”
Messner formed a working group last year, the Colorado Produced Water Consortium, made up of state and federal agencies, research institutions, universities, NGOs, local government and industry, with the mission of reducing the state oil and gas industry’s use of freshwater.
“[The consortium’s] goal is really to try to find the magic solution where we can develop, reuse and recycle water while having a no-net-adverse impact. It’s not available today, but it's certainly something that we'll be continuing to try to figure out,” Messner said.
The group will sponsor ongoing research and develop policy recommendations to the state.
That work got a boost at the state legislature this year, when State Rep. Andrew Boesenecker of Fort Collins successfully sponsored a bill that requires operators to report their water consumption, reuse produced water and cut down their overall water use.
“What we need is a beginning-to-end understanding of how much freshwater is used and how much produced water comes about as a result of oil and gas operations,” he said. “What happens to that produced water and what happens to that freshwater after it's used in oil and gas operations? How is it disposed of, how is it stored?”
His bill, HB23-1242, addresses those questions.
“It becomes a conversation about, where are our natural resources best prioritized?” Boesenecker said. “Knowing that fresh water, and the cost of fresh water and the lack of fresh water, impacts everything from business to housing in our state.”
The bill passed in the legislature but has not yet been signed into law.
