‘Monster fracks’ are bigger and they’re more thirsty
COTULLA, Texas — 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 petroleum giant BP to frack for fossil fuels. The water would be mixed with sand and toxic chemicals and pumped 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 being drained at alarming rates by industrial farming and cities in need 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 40 million gallons of water or more.
These giant 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 overexploited 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 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. The database 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 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, has consumed more than 73 billion gallons of water for fracking at the same time. Apache Corp., Southwestern Energy, Chevron, Ovintiv and other 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 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% of the water it used for fracking was either nonfresh or recycled from previous fracks. BP said it was “executing several pilot projects to recycle water” that would “minimize freshwater usage.”
Chevron said water was vital to its operations and that it aimed to use water efficiently and responsibly, saying 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, Wintergarden, estimates that fracking’s water needs could surpass those of irrigation by 2030 (although the oil industry’s notorious boom-and-bust cycles could change that).
Despite the new demand, Wintergarden 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.
‘Horizontal’ frack
Wintergarden. Evergreen. Big Springs.
The place names that dot Texas’ 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,” Bill Martin, a rancher and farmer who heads the Wintergarden Groundwater Conservation District, said 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 it pooled underground as long as 30,000 years ago, according to scientists’ estimates, 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% of the 110,000 wells fracked between 2011 and 2016 were in regions with high or extremely high water stress, including basins in California, Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas.
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 sprawling Permian Basin in Texas, 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.
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, although 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 from 2011 to 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.
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,” Atencio said. “We thought, ‘Is this our water? How much water are they tapping?’ ”
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.
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,” Chan said. “I didn’t expect to go up against a multibillion-dollar industry.”
Rich Coolidge, a spokesperson 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 he 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 reuse 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 to keep down dust, remains contentious because of safety concerns.
So, in states like Texas, it remains cheaper to use groundwater.
Martin, the rancher and farmer who heads the Wintergarden 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.