(photo: Jay Janner)
Frackers Guzzle Water as Texas Goes Thirsty
30 September 13
Rain has been scarce in South Texas, where the oil and gas boom is depleting precious aquifers.
n
summer, the bison on Thunderheart Ranch opt for the feathery shade of a
mesquite tree as temperatures reach 100. This land, just a handful of
miles from the Mexican border, was once known as The Wild Horse Desert,
lawless, rough brush country where, in a good year, 21 inches of rain
fell and in a bad year, less than a dozen descended from the clouds. "My
grandfather used to say we get two 10-inch rains and never get the
other inch," says Hugh Fitzsimmons, owner of the 13,000-acre ranch.
Fitzsimmons hails from an old Dimmit County family
that has several large holdings in the area 100 miles southwest of San
Antonio. He also serves on the local Wintergarden Groundwater District
and spends a good deal of his time worrying about the falling water
levels in the underground aquifer that serves the sparsely populated
county.
Even as fall officially begins in Texas and
temperatures dip into the low nineties, 97% of the state is suffering
from an extended drought that is pitting neighbor against neighbor in a
battle over water. Lakeside restaurants are closed, boat docks stand
high and dry, farmers are at odds with suburban gardeners, and small
town wells are depleted. In the state's booming Oil Patch, the earth is
cracked and the grass is brittle, but water is still gushing to hundreds
of hydraulic fracturing operations. It's water in, energy and dollars
out at a gold-rush pace that some say cannot continue.
Similar fights could soon happen almost anyplace where
fracking operations are growing and water is scarce. Fracking giant
Schlumberger estimates there will be a million new wells drilled around
the world in the next 20 years. The fracking process pumps large amounts
of pressurized water deep into the earth to dislodge oil and gas
deposits. The amount of water needed varies, depending on the geology of
the formation, but the average South Texas well takes some four to six
million gallons of water over a period of several days as the rock
formations are fractured, according to an industry source.
Fracking companies point out that their industry
consumes only 1% of all the fresh water usage in Texas, less than
suburbia or agriculture. But drilling is using up water in some of the
state's driest areas, like Dimmit County. "We have a ticking time bomb,"
Fitzsimmons says. Given the falling levels of the aquifer, it would
take "a flood of Biblical proportions," he says, to recharge the
county's water reserves.
Drillers working the Eagle Shale Formation in South
Texas use approximately 15,000 acre-feet (nearly 4.9 billion gallons) of
water annually - about half the annual recharge in normal years - from
the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer under Dimmit and its neighboring counties,
according to the Southwest Research Institute, the non-profit, San
Antonio-based research and development organization. To put that in
perspective, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates the average
U.S. household uses about 100,000 gallons of water a year.
That voracious thirst has caused tensions with locals
like Fitzsimmons. He says he's seen the water level in a well on his own
property fall by two-thirds in the last three years and longtime water
well drillers are now digging down two or three hundred feet where once a
shallower hole would suffice.
Dimmit County is no stranger to drought. In the
mid-1800s, early settlers arrived to an area they described as a "poor
man's heaven," where springs bubbling up into streams were home to
"giant catfish, crawfish and mussels." The local groundwater board takes
its name from the "Winter Garden" label given to the area in the early
1900s when irrigation and ample rainfall led to a boom in farming. But
drought struck in the late 1920s, when the springs dried up from
over-use, and again in the 1950s. The Wild Horse desert and cattle
ranches took back much of the land.
Oil and gas exploration began in the second half of
the 20th Century, but it didn't explode until the recent fracking boom.
In 2009, there were just 107 oil and gas wells in Dimmit County. By
2012, there were 2,137, and what Fitzsimmons says was a "firehose of
money" in wages, royalties and tax revenue. Last year, sales tax
receipts were up 87% in Dimmit, and triple digits in neighboring
counties. Landowners benefitted from income generated by old mineral
rights leases, some of which, like those on Fitzsimmons' family land,
dated back to decades earlier when drilling was a less water-intensive
operation.
"It is not the process that I object to," says
Fitzsimmons, "but it's all the ancillary issues that come with it. Air
quality declines as some wells flare off gases, and heavyweight rigs and
water-hauling trucks destroy back-country roads. But most of all,
locals want the frackers to use less water."
About two-thirds of the water used in a fracking
operation remains underground after drilling. The remaining third that
comes back to the surface has to be removed from the site and treated if
it is to be used elsewhere. Often it's fed into a disposal well. Some
states, including Colorado, require recycling of all fracking water
ejected from the well. Texas has added incentives to encourage drillers
to recycle, but does not mandate it.
The oil and gas industry is moving "very quickly" to
develop recycling and other injection options, according to David
Burnett, director of technology at Texas A&M's Global Petroleum
Research Institute. Recycling trucks are now wending their way down
caliche country roads in Dimmit County and elsewhere. Scientists at the
University of Texas at San Antonio are investigating charcoal as a
potential water treatment solution for so-called backflow water, the
brackish underground water that is sometimes pulled up during the
drilling process.
Another solution would be to tap the 2.7 billion
acre-feet of brackish water that lies beneath Texas. Salts and chemicals
in the water that are incompatible with the fracking process can be
removed, according to Burnett, whose research involves using membranes
to treat water. Halliburton, a major player in the fracking industry, is
aiming to reduce fresh water use by 25% in the U.S. by the end of 2014,
according to industry reports. Reducing freshwater use "is no longer
just an environmental issue - it has to be an issue of strategic
importance," Salvador Ayala, vice president of well production services
told an industry group recently, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In Texas, the fresh water infrastructure is growing.
There are now 44 inland desalination plants in the state and 10 more,
including one just south of San Antonio, have been approved for
construction. Earlier this year, the state legislature put a $2 billion
water infrastructure measure on this fall's ballot. But as Fitzsimmons
says, "You are not going to build your way out of this problem. We need
to conserve and recycle."
They also need rain. Cowboys, farmers, and now oilmen
are looking east, hoping a slow moving tropical depression will come
ashore from the Gulf of Mexico, and southwest, praying for a Pacific
hurricane to move over the Sierra Madre in Mexico. South Texas is
thirsty.
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