ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY
According to State Rep. Drew Darby, his new bill is designed to help Texas save water, by extending protections that will encourage oilfield producers to move toward treatment of produced water.
House Bill 49 would shield oil-and-gas producers, landowners and transporters from any liability from litigation associated with the produced water after they transfer it to another party for treatment.
According to Darby, O&G lawyers want solid statutory assurances their companies will be held harmless, if — for instance, a massive toxic-sludge spill were to happen as a result of the treatment process.
All About the Brine
The Permian Basin region of Texas generates more produced water than any other oil-and-gas region in America, by a lot.
And the stuff is toxic to just about everything, except for the halophilic (salt-loving), thermophilic and anaerobic microorganisms that actually thrive in the extreme subsurface conditions of the oil & gas industry.
But, if you were to pour a gallon of produced water onto your lawn, it would kill all of the grass it touched.
And you’d have to be crazy to actually drink any of the stuff.
So, there was broad support in West Texas for the creation of a consortium to look at ideas for reusing produced water.
To that end, the Texas Produced Water Consortium (TxPWC) was created by the Legislature in 2021 through Senate Bill 601.
The initiative, managed through the Office of Research and Innovation at Texas Tech University, has the stated goal of studying the “feasibility and economics of using produced water, a byproduct of oil and gas production, for beneficial uses outside of the oil and gas industry.”
“Instead of being disposed of underground, produced water can be treated to be beneficially reused in many industrial and non-industrial applications, including fire control, power generation, vehicle and equipment washing, and non-edible crop irrigation.”
Water Shortages in the Forecast
According to TxPWC’s 2024 report, based on data from the Texas Water Development Board, West Texans can look forward to an average water shortfall of about 1-million acre-feet per year by 2070.
In practical terms, that volume represents the amount of water San Angelo would draw in 74 years, based on current usage.
One thing Texans don’t mind investing in is water projects.
So, the people voted to establish a $1 billion water fund, with 25 percent of that amount earmarked for “promoting the development of new water including desalination of marine, brackish, and oil-and-gas produced water.”
It’s an idea that seems like a slam-dunk winner: West Texas with its severe fresh-water limitations would be crazy to say ‘no’ to any plans for treating produced water to a level appropriate for use by the public, or release into streams.
So, What’s the Problem?
The real question in all of this is what to do with the massive amounts of toxic slurry and sludge — including naturally-occurring radioactive materials — that future treatment facilities will need to remove from this water.
The chemistry of produced water from oil-and-gas operations is complex, but the simplest way to understand the difference between oil-and-gas water and spring water is to look at total-dissolved solids.
Total-dissolved solids is exactly what it sounds like.
If you are talking about salt water, the salt is dissolved into suspension, having bonded with the water.
Fresh spring water, from the average limestone aquifer, will typically have somewhere between 400- and 1000-miligrams per liter of total dissolved solids (TDS.)
(Between four-hundreths of a percentage point, and one-tenth of a percent.)
One gallon of spring water will weigh just about 8.3 pounds.
Sea water, from any-given ocean, will have roughly 35,000 milligrams per liter, or 35-parts per thousand, so every 1,000 grams (1 liter) contains 35 grams of salt, or 3.5 percent.
That means, for desalination purposes, that you would end up needing to remove 132.5 grams of salt per gallon. Which adds up.
In fact, that would amount to 29,211 pounds of salt for every 100,0000 gallons of water. (2,381 bbls.)
And that’s just plain salt. Nothing “harmful.”
The Saltiest Stuff on Earth
The produced water from the Permian and Delaware basins is some of the saltiest water on Earth, and — with the flowback from hydraulic fracking operations — it’s also loaded with “proprietary chemicals.”
Water from the Dead Sea — the planet’s saltiest body of water, has TDS measuring 424,080 mg/L, which represents a 34.2-percent concentration of salt.
One gallon of Dead Sea water will weigh 8.68 pounds, with a little over 6 ounces of salt dissolved within; so, in order to remove all the salt from that water you would need to remove 1.52 pounds of salt for every four gallons.
Water in several of the producing zones of the Permian Basin has more than 503,000 mg/L of total-dissolved solids, an extremely toxic level for plants and animals; it is 50.3 percent salt.
So, presuming the “clean” water is being released onto the surface of the Earth for the first time in eons, what are the people “cleaning” the water doing with the millions of tons of salty leftovers?
How Much Salt Are We Talkin About?
According to Railroad Commission numbers, Texas injects somewhere between 50- and 60 percent produced water back into the ground, which they estimate to be around 400,000 acre-feet of fluid.
The weight of 400K acre-feet of 10-pound brine would be 215-million tons, so, after the removal of almost all water, there would be 108 million tons of toxic solids to deal with.
That would be an amount similar to what 490 of the world’s largest container ships could carry, or 3,600 regular old-fashioned cargo ships. Or you could say the amount would be equal to the mass of 296 Empire State Buildings.
How Clean is Clean Enough?
Another important question is whether the agency making sure the water is clean enough to go into our waterways will have adequate personnel to keep up with the necessary oversight.
Under federal law, produced water may be discharged into waterways that are located west of the 98th Meridian, which includes every-bit of West Texas.
(40 CFR Part 435 subparts E and F)
This line on the map cuts the continental United States roughly in half, running from the north-east side of North Dakota, down the prairie, splitting Texas just west of Fort Worth and Austin.
The TCEQ, in its continued mission to supplant the EPA, petitioned for the authority to permit water discharges throughout the state, which was granted to TCEQ by the EPA in 2021.
In May of that year, the TCEQ released a draft permit covering discharges west of the line, which authorized produced water from low-producing stripper wells (10 barrels of oil per-day, or less) to be released into waterways.
The permit also authorizes discharges from both fracking sites and conventional drilling off the Texas coast into the Gulf of Mexico.
Wastewater that is treated and released to surface water is strictly regulated under the Clean Water Act via the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) or a state-delegated equivalent. In the Permian Basin of Texas that would be the Texas Pollutant Discharge Elimination System from the TCEQ, which mirrors NPDES.
But 435.13 only covers “oil and grease” on our side of the line, (maximum for any one day shall not exceed 42 mg/l; the average of daily values for 30 consecutive days shall not exceed 29 mg/l) leaving states to determine other factors like salt.
What Will They Have to Take Out?
Along with good-old hydrogen and oxygen, oilfield produced water also contains varying amounts of ammonia, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, barium, strontium, iron, manganese AND sulfate, chloride, bromide, phosphate, boron, silica, bicarbonate, naturally-occurring radioactive materials (NORM) — primarily radium isotopes such as radium-226 and radium-118, and carbon dioxide — in addition to dispersed oils, and specialized hydraulic-fracturing fluids.
From a chemistry standpoint, several different processes will be necessary to treat the water to TCEQ standards.
But there’s also, potentially, money to be made off of the recovery of some of the mineral compounds.
While lithium is present at the 10-150 ppm in Permian Basin produced water, there are also Rare Earth Elements, which are largely controlled by China.
According to economists, these minerals are critical to several production streams, and the threat of withholding them from the U.S. is being used as a bargaining chip in current trade negotiations.
That, along with the fact that everyone hates the idea of “wasting” water, is driving the idea forward.
It’s also worth noting that much of the fluid now classified as produced water began as fresh water that was trucked to a jobsite, mixed with chemicals, and used to frack a well.
When it flows back, it has to be disposed of, so it is trucked overland again, and usually, injected into a different zone approved for disposal of produced water.
But moving water around underground on that scale can have consequences, which may take years to become evident.
What We’ve Done for Decades
The Permian Basin was like the Wild-Wild West during boom times in every decade, and illegal dumping of produced water, has a long history in Texas and New Mexico, with the practice often resulting from overworked regulators, economic pressures, and the massive volumes produced during initial phases of oil and gas extraction.
In the past, it was mostly fresh water used for fracking operations, and after the flowback phase, it’s returned to the surface full of salts and dissolved ions (TDS), oil and organics, making it unsuitable for reuse as fracking fluid.
However, much less treatment is required to make this water ready for infield-fracking use when compared to the energy required to treat water to the stringent levels required for potability or surface-water discharge.
In Texas the Railroad Commission and the TCEQ encourage reuse, which does not require a permit if the water stays on the lease for O&G use.
While not all produced water is suitable for reuse, some areas in the Permian Basin are reusing more than 50 percent of their produced water.
Apache Corp. began a pilot reuse project in Irion County a decade ago, and locals there were thrilled, because aquifers in that area had taken a big hit from a recent drilling boom, and water wells around Barnhart were drying up.
Read More About It!
An original report Dylan Daddour for Inside Climate News digs in extensively about the subject, including the outline for plans that include building a Molten Salt Reactor.
