The industry will tell you that, comparatively, fracking uses little water. And the industry is right, or at least it was eight years ago. According to the 2005 USGS water-use report, oil and gas operations, subsumed under Mining operations, used about one percent of all water used in this country. Of course, since that year the use of horizontal high-volume fracking has gone into high gear. Between 2008 and 2011, oil and gas leases in six Colorado counties more than doubled.
As previously USGS water-use reports came out every five years--1995, 2000, 2005--it is perplexing that eight years after the 2005 report the USGS does not appear to have updated its statistics. Note that 2005 was only a few years after the technique for drilling horizontal wells had been successfully accomplished and fracking wells were few.
On a potentially related note, last year the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency announced it was eliminating air-quality
impacts from its environmental study of fracking due out in 2014.
After the water has been driven into the ground for a fracking well, much of it
returns. Actually, more than what was introduced returns. Does this mean that fracking actually
produces water? Not really.
The water returns in two stages. The first, called flowback or flow water,
returns almost immediately, in the first seven to ten days post-injection. It largely consists of the fluid that was
injected into the well in the first place.
Of what was injected, about 20% to 50% is thus recovered.
(So one-half or more remains behind.)
After the first wave of flowback emerges what is called produced water. Produced water is not really returned; it was already underground. The distinction between flowback and produced water is subtle because produced water, like flow water, is not nice water. Associated with oil, gas, and methane-coal formations, it has high levels of dissolved solids and salts, as well as such hydrocarbons as methane, ethane, and propane. It also contains radioactive materials such as radium isotopes. Hydraulic fracturing can actually concentrate levels of radioactive materials.
Free at last, this water can well up for
months. To clean it is not
cost-effective (although, incredibly, federal legislation declared fracking
wastewater as non-hazardous).
What drillers do with this groundswell of wastewater is to force it into
injection wells or leave it in open-air pits.
Colorado currently has more than 700 toxic-waste injection
sites. Injection wells are often relatively and
sometimes entirely unregulated. They may
be lined or not. Depths and placement
are under local control. Or not.
At the beginning of 2012, a little more than
a year ago, about 9,000 square miles of public land--10% of Colorado--had been
leased to oil and gas interests. People also lease land privately, however,
and, since most land in the Wattenberg field north of Denver and on the state's
eastern plains is private, private leases potentially surpass leases of public land. Thus a conservative estimate is that over 20%
of Colorado is held by oil-and-gas interests.
Mineral rights trump those of landowners, public or private[2]. Approximately 70% of Colorado lies above oil-bearing shale formations and new leasing has been in the neighborhood of
1,000 square miles annually.
On February 14 of this year the Bureau of Land
Management leased the mineral rights to about 69,000 acres of Colorado public land. About one-quarter of this land went for two
dollars an acre, a rate established in 1922 and never changed. More property would have been on the block at that time but for public consternation; after a cooling-off period, that land just might find its way back to the block. The leases are good for 10 years. At a public meeting in Castle Rock, Colorado,
a couple of years ago, a hydrologist for the industry said they expect 60,000
new wells--more than doubling the current number--in Colorado over the next 20
years.
Waskom drew a distinction between withdrawal and consumption of water. While withdrawn water is taken out, much of it returns down the drain. Consumed water does not return. In Colorado alone between two and eight million gallons of fresh water are poured annually into each fracking well. That is enough fresh water to fill over half a million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Virtually all of that water will be consumed. And this is just the beginning.
Although three-quarters of the earth is covered with water,
less than one percent of it is available for human, plant, and
animal consumption. Over the last century water use has been
growing at more than twice the rate of human-population increase. Colorado has just so much fresh water
available to it, and all of it is allocated.
That which is taken for fracking must come from other intended
uses. Does Colorado have enough water to
have it consumed in single-use fracking?
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