“Seeking Oil, 'Monster Fracks' Grow Thirstier Yet”, Sept. 27, 2023, Hiroko Tabuchi and Blacki Migliozzi, 2,954 words, The New York Times
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction: On Sept 28, 2023, Collectivist Action posted an excellent article, “The Ever Given and the Monstrosity of Maritime Capitalism - Boston Review”, that discussed global shipping, and that sagely noted that the maritime shipping operations have reached a point of such gigantic proportions that they are directly and indirectly menacing the world we all live on and depend on for our lives.
On Wednesday, September 27, The New York Times published an article, “Seeking Oil, 'Monster Fracks' Grow Thirstier Yet”, that looks at the excesses of Hydraulic Fracturing commonly referred to as “Fracking”, as concerns the water supplies of various parts of the U.S. Water supplies that have already been depleted and/or that have been over used for industrial agriculture or other mining or industrial uses, are being heavily used now for fracking extraction operations. The New York Times article is a fine popular level look at the situation, for a more technical treatment see Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States, December 2016, Office of Research and Developmen EPA-600-R-16-236ES, at <https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-12/documents/hfdwa_executive_summary.pdf>. The first serious use of horizontal fracturing to extract oil and gas took place in North Texas in the 1980s in the Barnett shale deposits there.
It is important to realize that using Fracking to extract oil and natural gas is, in reality, a desperate move on the part of the U.S. fossil fuel industry. The lifespan and productive period for the average fracked oil or gas well is short. These wells generally produce the majority of the oil and gas they will produce during the life of the wells in the first three years and their productivity begins to fall off sharply after that point. This phenomenon is shown graphically in Figure 1 here below (See, “Horizontal wells produce majority of lifetime oil, gas in first three years”, July 12, 2017, Oklahoma Watch, at < https://nondoc.com/2017/07/12/horizontal-wells-first-three-years/ >: “Fracked Shale Oil Wells Drying Up Faster than Predicted, Wall Street Journal Finds”, Jan 10, 2019, Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog, at <https://www.desmog.com/2019/01/10/fracking-shale-oil-wells-drying-faster-predicted-wall-street-journal/>)
This compares very unfavorably with the output history of the standard oil wells drilled without using fracking. The most extreme example of this is the famous Ghawar Oil Field in Saudi Arabia, the most productive and one of the longest lived oil fields in history. Ghawar was first discovered in 1948 and went online, producing copious amounts of oil, in 1951. Ghawar then produced about 5 million barrels of oil per day for decades. The oil just emerged out of the ground without any sort of augmentation methods until 1958, when Saudi Aramco began using gas injection to push the oil out. In 1964 Saudi Aaramco began using seawater injection. The field produced 5 million barrels a day for decades and according to some recent figures is still producing 3.8 million barrels a day of oil and 2.5 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas. Ghawar’s graph of production per day and over time would look very different from what we see with the recent fracked wells in the U.S. (See, “The King of Giant Fields”, Oct 4, 2010, Rasoul Sorkhabi, GEOExPro, at < https://geoexpro.com/the-king-of-giant-fields/ >; “Ghawar Oil Field”, n.d., anon, Hydrocarbons, at < https://www.hydrocarbons-technology.com/projects/ghawar-oil-field/ >; “Ghawar Field”, n.d., anon, Wikipedia, at < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawar_Field >
These fracking operations are now very widespread in the U.S. Maps 1 & 2 below show some of the extent of these extraction activities in the U.S. Map 1 shows the active fracking areas as of 2011. Activities have only increased since then and the amounts of water being used have grown by a large amount. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal published an important article in which they questioned the rosy scenarios the fracking operators have promoted (See “Fracking's Secret Problem--Oil Wells Aren't Producing as Much as Forecast; Data analysis reveals thousands of locations are yielding less than their owners projected to investors; 'illusory picture' of prospects”. Jan 2, 2019, Bradley Olson; Matthews, Christopher M; Elliott, Rebecca, Wall Street Journal)
Map 3 shows a related fossil fuel extraction operation. While not, strictly speaking, a fracking operation the Tar Sands mining, transport, and refining system of operations is a profligate user of water; and producer of toxic waste water so polluted that it is beyond the capability of our technology to clean it up at any reasonable price. Like the various Fracking operations the entire Athabascan Tar Sands extraction, transport, refining and marketing operation is so vast and complex and destructive that it is actually not possible that it really produces any useful energy resources. Capital is now over reaching itself in sociological, economic, and environmental terms on a global scale; whether that is in the goods transportation sector, the energy (fossil fuel production) sector, or the horrific violence used against dissenters and poor people who have the temerity to resist the depredations of Capital.
The Athabascan Tar Sands mining, transport, refining and marketing operation is the worst single fossil fuel operation on Earth at this point in time. It is a disaster for North America and the world at large.
In general Fracking is an inappropriate use of the resources that we, as collective humanity, have at our disposal. Just this short analysis of fracking fluid spills is a cause for concern:
“Several studies have documented spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids or additives. Nearly all of these studies identified spills from state-managed spill databases. Data gathered for these studies suggest that spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids or additives were primarily caused by equipment failure or human error. For example, an EPA analysis of spill reports from nine state agencies, nine oil and gas well operators, and nine hydraulic fracturing service companies characterized 151 spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids or additives on or near well sites in 11 states between January 2006 and April 2012 (U.S. EPA, 2015c). These spills were primarily caused by equipment failure (34% of the spills) or human error (25%), and more than 30% of the spills were from fluid storage units (e.g., tanks, totes, and trailers). Similarly, a study of spills reported to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission identified 125 spills during well stimulation (i.e., a part of the life of an oil and gas well that often, but not always, includes hydraulic fracturing) between January 2010 and August 2013 (COGCC, 2014). Of these spills, 51% were caused by human error and 46% were due to equipment failure.
“Studies of spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids or additives provide insights on spill volumes, but little information on chemical-specific spill composition. Among the 151 spills characterized by the EPA, the median volume of fluid spilled was 420 gallons (1,600 liters), although the volumes spilled ranged from 5 gallons (19 liters) to 19,320 gallons (73,130 liters). Spilled fluids were often described as acids, biocides, friction reducers, crosslinkers, gels, and blended hydraulic fracturing fluid, but few specific chemicals were mentioned.1 Considine et al. (2012) identified spills related to oil and gas development in the Marcellus Shale that occurred between January 2008 and
August 2011 from Notices of Violations issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. The authors identified spills greater than 400 gallons (1,500 liters) and spills less than 400 gallons (1,500 liters).
“Spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids or additives have reached, and therefore impacted, surface water resources. Thirteen of the 151 spills characterized by the EPA were reported to have reached a surface water body (often creeks or streams). Among the 13 spills, reported spill volumes ranged from 28 gallons (105 liters) to 7,350 gallons (27,800 liters). Additionally, Brantley et al. (2014) and Considine et al. (2012) identified fewer than 10 total instances of spills of additives and/or hydraulic fracturing fluids greater than 400 gallons (1,500 liters) that reached surface waters in Pennsylvania between January 2008 and June 2013. Reported spill volumes for these spills ranged from 3,400 gallons (13,000 liters) to 227,000 gallons (859,000 liters).
“Although impacts on surface water resources have been documented, site-specific studies that could be used to describe factors that affect the frequency or severity of impacts were not available. In the absence of such studies, we relied on fundamental scientific principles to identify factors that affect how hydraulic fracturing fluids and chemicals can move through the environment to drinking water resources. ….”
(See, Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States, page 22, December 2016, Office of Research and Development, EPA-600-R-16-236ES, at <https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-12/documents/hfdwa_executive_summary.pdf>.
“Seeking Oil, 'Monster Fracks' Grow Thirstier Yet”, Sept. 27, 2023, Hiroko Tabuchi and Blacki Migliozzi, 2,954 words, The New York Times
Giant new oil and gas wells that require astonishing volumes of water to fracture bedrock are threatening America's fragile aquifers.
Increasingly complex oil wells are sweeping across Texas, birthplace of the fracking revolution, and the nation.
A Times analysis found that these new wells can consume millions of gallons of water, often taken from dwindling aquifers.
To satisfy that thirst, energy giants are drilling not just for oil, but for the water they need.
Nationwide, fracking has used up nearly 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011. That's how much tap water the entire state of Texas uses in a year.
Along a parched stretch of La Salle County, Texas, workers last year dug some 700 feet deep into the ground, seeking freshwater. Millions of gallons of it.
The water wouldn't supply homes or irrigate farms. It was being used by the petroleum giant BP to frack for fossil fuels. The water would be mixed with sand and toxic chemicals and pumped right back underground -- forcing oil and gas from the bedrock.
It was a reminder that to strike oil in America, you need water. Plenty of it.
Today, the insatiable search for oil and gas has become the latest threat to the country's endangered aquifers, a critical national resource that is already being drained at alarming rates by industrial farming and cities in search of drinking water.
The amount of water consumed by the oil industry, revealed in a New York Times investigation, has soared to record levels. Fracking wells have increased their water usage sevenfold since 2011 as operators have adopted new techniques to first drill downward and then horizontally for thousands of feet. The process extracts more fossil fuels but requires enormous amounts of water.
Together, oil and gas operators reported using about 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011, much of it from aquifers, the Times found. Fracking a single oil or gas well can now use as much as 40 million gallons of water or more.
These mega fracking projects, called ''monster fracks'' by researchers, have become the industry norm. They barely existed a decade ago. Now they account for almost two out of every three fracking wells in Texas, the Times analysis found.
''They're the newcomers, a new sector that burst onto the scene and is heavily reliant on the aquifers,'' said Peter Knappett, an associate professor in hydrogeology at Texas A&M University, referring to fracking companies. ''And they could be pumping for several decades from aquifers that are already over-exploited and already experiencing long-term declines.''
Fracking, which is shorthand for hydraulic fracturing, has transformed the global energy landscape, turning America into the world's largest oil and gas producer, surpassing Saudi Arabia. Supporters say it has strengthened America's national security and created valuable jobs.
But fracking has long been controversial. The process of cracking the bedrock by injecting chemical-laced water into the ground can lead to spills and leaks and can affect the local geology, sometimes contributing to earthquakes. Critics of fracking say it is an irony that so much water is being diverted to produce fossil fuels, given that the burning of fossil fuels is causing climate change, further straining freshwater resources.
The Times documented the surging water usage by examining an industry database in which energy companies report the chemicals they pump into the ground while fracking. But the database also includes details on their water usage, revealing the dramatic growth.
The problem is particularly acute in Texas, where the state's groundwater supply is expected to drop one-third by 2070. As the planet warms, scientists have predicted that Texas will face higher temperatures and more frequent and intense droughts, along with a decline in groundwater recharge. Some experts have warned that water issues could even constrain oil and gas production.
In the western portion of the Eagle Ford, one of the state's major oil-producing regions, aquifer levels have fallen by up to 58 feet a year, a 2020 study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found, and fracking's water demands could result in further regional declines of up to 26 feet.
Since 2011, BP has dug at least 137 groundwater wells in Texas for its oil and gas operations and reported using 9.1 billion gallons of water nationally during the past decade. EOG, one of the country's largest frackers, consumed more than 73 billion gallons of water for fracking at the same time. Apache Corporation, Southwestern Energy, Chevron, Ovintiv and other major operators also have intensified water usage, the Times analysis found.
Oil companies require no permits to drill their own groundwater wells and there is no consistent requirement that groundwater used for fracking be reported or monitored. As drought has gripped Texas and the surrounding region, many communities have instituted water restrictions for residents even as fracking has been allowed to continue unabated.
Pockets of public resistance are emerging. In New Mexico, a coalition of tribes and environmental groups is suing the state, saying that fracking companies are using up precious water resources and that the state has failed to protect the interests of residents. In Colorado, residents are fighting a proposed fracking project they fear would not just use up local freshwater resources, but risk contaminating a reservoir their community depends on.
Holly Hopkins, an executive at the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, said the industry was ''focused on meeting the growing demand for affordable, reliable energy while minimizing impacts on the environment.'' Its members, she said, were ''continuing to develop innovative methods to reuse and recycle'' water used for fracking.
In a statement, Apache said 80 percent of the water it used for fracking was either non-fresh or recycled from previous fracks. BP said it was ''executing several pilot projects to recycle water'' that would ''minimize freshwater usage.''
Chevron said that water was vital to its operations and that it aimed to use water efficiently and responsibly, saying that it used brackish or recycled water for fracking. Southwestern and Ovintiv did not respond to requests for comment.
In La Salle County -- where workers were drilling the water well last year that would supply BP -- the local aquifers have already been strained by decades of pumping to feed crops and cattle. The local groundwater district, Wintergarten, estimates that fracking's water needs could surpass those of irrigation by 2030 (though the oil industry's notorious boom-and-bust cycles could change that).
Despite the new demand, Wintergarten has little say over the use of water for fracking.
According to its rules, when ''moderate'' or ''severe'' droughts occur, people should stop washing their cars and restaurants should refrain from serving glasses of water unless a customer asks. But only during ''exceptional'' droughts do the rules extend to fracking, and even then they merely discourage it.
Similarly in Laredo, a city on the Mexican border that recently imposed water restrictions, residents may water their lawns only three days a week, and only at night. Laredo, which in recent years has become fracking territory, is facing an impending water shortage: By 2040, it's expected to exhaust the available supply of municipal water from the Rio Grande allocated to the city every year. Still, even during severe drought, fracking is excluded from city or state restrictions.
''This is Texas. If you're using water for oil and gas, it's considered exempt,'' said Ronald T. Green, a hydrologist who advises Wintergarten. So when fracking plans collide with drought, Dr. Green said, ''you just have to hope that if they're a good, community-oriented company, they might decide not to frack that well till next year.''
It's happening, of course, because there is money to be made in oil. And for those with access to water, it can be easy money.
Bruce Frasier grows onions in Dimmit, one of the three counties that make up the Wintergarten water district. But he also sells groundwater to a local fracking company for 50 cents a barrel. Given the growing size of fracks, ''If you've got the water to sell, you're making a fortune,'' Mr. Frasier said.
The 'Horizontal' Frack
Wintergarten. Evergreen. Big Springs.
The place names that dot Texas's parched plains hark back to a time more than a century ago when groundwater was plentiful.
''Back in those days, you could just dig, and the water would flow,'' said Bill Martin, a rancher and farmer who heads the Wintergarten Groundwater Conservation District, as he walked his land during a recent heat wave, his boots kicking up dust under a scorching sun.
But that water, sometimes called fossil water because scientists estimate that it pooled underground as long as 30,000 years ago, started to dry up as farms irrigated vast tracts of land. Farms that couldn't afford to drill ever deeper started to plant less or shut down.
Today, much of America's oil and gas comes from parched land like this. And now, fracking companies are the ones scrambling for water. A 2016 Ceres report found that nearly 60 percent of the 110,000 wells fracked between 2011 and 2016 were in regions with high or extremely high water stress, including basins in Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and California.
This is partly because of the increasing complexity and size of fracked wells. For example one technique, horizontal drilling, involves wells that stretch thousands of feet sideways, not just downward. In the Permian Basin, average well length grew to more than 10,000 feet in the first nine months of 2022, compared with less than 4,000 feet in 2010, federal data shows.
It is because water is so fundamental to fracking that the longer wells typically require far more water.
''As the easier-to-extract areas are tapped to their full potential, you need to use more and more desperate measures,'' said A.J. Kondash, an environmental scientist at RTI International, a nonprofit research organization, who has studied fracking's water use.
The problem is actually two-fold. Fracking companies are pulling more water out of the ground, and then, after the fracking process, they must treat or dispose of millions of gallons of contaminated water, removing it from the natural water cycle.
Some companies are making strides in reusing that fracking wastewater to drill for more oil and gas, but it's a small percentage. In the sprawling Permian Basin in Texas, the largest oil field in the country, just 15 percent of water used for fracking is recycled water, according to state estimates.
The Times based its water-use analysis on data from FracFocus, a registry of chemicals used in fracking that is operated by two national associations of state agencies, the Groundwater Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. In 27 states, companies report the data to FracFocus.
That data revealed surging water use even though the numbers, which are self-reported by industry, are sometimes incomplete.
Dan Yates, executive director of the Groundwater Protection Council, pointed out that the two agencies that run FracFocus have no regulatory authority. The onus is on individual states, he said, to make sure operators disclose timely and accurate data.
Rystad Energy, an energy research company, estimated that about 6 to 9 percent of fracked wells don't get reported to FracFocus.
Of course, water use by energy industries isn't limited to fracking. Water is important in oil refining and the cooling of power plants, and also plays a role in the mining of lithium and other minerals essential in the transition to cleaner energy.
Oil companies say the industry uses substantial amounts of brackish water not suitable for drinking, though there is little systematic tracking of how much. They also say that drilling fewer, longer wells reduces environmental disruption at ground level.
Industry groups also stress that oil and gas production uses a small fraction of the water required by other activities, like irrigated agriculture.
But researchers at Colorado State University who compared water used for fracking in oil- and gas-producing states between 2011 and 2020 found that, under arid conditions, frackers could use more water than irrigation. In La Salle for instance, under arid conditions, fracking used more water than irrigation and local homes and businesses combined. Fracking activity, they found, responded to oil prices, and seemed largely unresponsive to droughts or water restrictions.
Compounding the problem, about a quarter of Texas operates under rules that let landowners to pump as much water on their property as they like, regardless of consequences to neighbors.
''In Texas, if you own the surface, you own everything to the center of the earth,'' said Mr. Martin of the Wintergarten water district.
The Hunt for Water
The letter from an oil company arrived for Mario Atencio's family in 2013, promising riches in exchange for a lease to drill near their home in northwestern New Mexico.
Then, Enduring Resources, the Denver-based oil and gas company that ultimately acquired the lease, started to drill.
Workers dug a water well near the area where his family raises livestock, tapping into the groundwater that had long sustained the grazing land the Atencios use to raise goats and sheep. ''They came in and they put in water pipelines. Huge pools filled with water,'' Mr. Atencio said. ''We thought, 'Is this our water? How much water are they tapping?'''
Mr. Atencio, a leader in the local Navajo Nation Chapter, is now part of the coalition of tribes and environmental organizations that in May sued New Mexico alleging that the state had failed to protect its residents from the harms of fracking.
A substantial portion of their complaint focuses on the strain that oil and gas development places on freshwater in New Mexico, one of the nation's most water-stressed states.
''We're facing some of the worst years of drought in the last 1,200 years,'' said Julia Bernal of the Pueblo Action Alliance, an Indigenous organization that is a party to the lawsuit. Yet energy companies were building water pipelines to serve fracking sites, she said. ''There are a lot of families that live in the region that don't have access to running water.''
New Mexico said it ''vigorously disagrees'' with the lawsuit's allegations and was proud of its work regulating oil and gas. Enduring Resources didn't respond to requests for comment.
Across the country, investments like these in water for oil and gas -- wells, pipelines and even water distribution companies -- are extensive and spreading.
In Colorado, the energy exploration companies Anadarko and Noble Energy have invested tens of millions of dollars in freshwater pipelines and have created companies to sell and distribute water for fracking. In 2020, Chevron acquired Noble Energy, together with its water business, in a transaction worth more than $13 billion.
When Kevin Chan moved to Colorado from California last year, to a neighborhood on the banks of the Aurora Reservoir, he said he was surprised to learn that more than 150 horizontal fracked wells were planned in the region around the reservoir. The wells would potentially require a total of 3.9 billion gallons of freshwater from a local water district and other sources, according to the energy company behind the project, Denver-based Civitas.
Concerned about the water use and risk of oil spills, he formed a community group, Save the Aurora Reservoir, to oppose the plan. In moving to Colorado, ''I was drawn to the proximity to the mountains, being able to go snowboarding,'' Mr. Chan said. ''I didn't expect to go up against a multibillion dollar industry.''
Rich Coolidge, a spokesman for Civitas, said several thousand feet of rock separated the Aurora reservoir from oil and gas production. He said the company was working with local water providers that sell surplus supply, but declined to give details.
Some local governments are starting to take action. In 2020, New Mexico halted sales of water supplies to oil and gas companies fracking on state land. This year, Colorado passed a bill requiring frackers to greatly increase their reuse of fracking wastewater. In May, Texas passed a bill designed to find more uses for fracking wastewater.
But cleaning up that wastewater, which contains hazardous chemicals, is costly and energy-intensive. Even if frackers were able to re-use their treated wastewater for all their production, the industry estimates it would still generate hundreds of millions of gallons of excess every day. And the diversion of fracking wastewater to other uses, whether for agriculture or to mist roadways in order to keep down the dust, remains contentious because of safety concerns.
So, in states like Texas, it remains cheaper to use groundwater.
Mr. Martin, the rancher and farmer who heads the Wintergarten water district, doesn't fault energy companies for that. He himself irrigates his cantaloupe fields using groundwater.
Still, as he contemplated a future of ever-dwindling aquifers, he struck a somber tone. ''If the water goes away, the whole community goes away,'' he said.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: Oil production's demand for water is taxing aquifers in Texas already strained by decades of pumping to feed crops and cattle. Top, an oil derrick and tanks outside Cotulla. Above, a field at Dixondale Farms near Carrizo Springs. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY SERGIO FLORES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES); ''We thought, 'Is this our water? How much water are they tapping?''' Mario Atencio said of drilling near his home. A coalition of tribes and environmental groups is suing the state over the practice. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SHARON CHISCHILLY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES); ''This is Texas. If you're using water for oil and gas, it's considered exempt'' from limits, said Ronald T. Green, a hydrologist. (A10); Bill Martin, a rancher and farmer in Dimmit County, Texas, looks back to the days when water was plentiful.; Mario Atencio was promised riches by an oil company in exchange for rights to drill on his family's land in New Mexico. (A11) This article appeared in print on page A1, A10, A11.
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