Putting Produced Water to Beneficial Use
What is Produced Water?
Produced water often contains high concentrations of dissolved salts. It can also contain hydrocarbons, oil field production chemicals, and total suspended solids occurring naturally in the reservoir.
How much produced water comes from oil and gas development?
The total volume can vary significantly by region and well. Operators in the Permian Basin, primarily located in Texas with portions in New Mexico, currently produce in excess of 20 million barrels of produced water per day, with that volume to steadily increase through 2030.
How does the oil and gas industry manage produced water today?
Most produced water is disposed of in subsurface formations. In recent years, however, this option has become more constrained due to declining available disposal capacity in formations as basins mature.
Producers are currently reusing significant volumes of produced water for hydraulic fracturing and enhanced oil recovery. Rather than sourcing fresh water, operators treat produced water and recycle it back into ongoing operations.
The use of these management strategies is insufficient to manage the volume of water produced every day.
How does finding a solution to the management of produced water benefit everyday Americans?
Without viable alternatives to disposal, oil and gas production could be prematurely limited in some core regions (e.g., the Permian Basin), potentially imposing additional costs on energy development and reducing state and local revenues associated with production.
Arid regions are experiencing significant freshwater shortages due to rising baseline demand, while simultaneously managing the disposal of large volumes of produced water. Jurisdictions with insufficient freshwater supplies may face difficult decisions on water use restrictions or allocations, in addition to increased water bills.
Finding solutions to treat and reuse produced water for non-potable, beneficial purposes is an opportunity to both fully realize oil and gas production while offsetting freshwater demand in arid regions.
What’s Needed to Advance Beneficial Reuse of Produced Water?
The beneficial reuse of treated produced water requires public and private stakeholders as well as state regulatory support. Extensive university research has shown that produced water can be effectively treated through processes such as pre-treatment, desalination and polishing to remove salt and other organic impurities. The oil and gas industry is working to develop applications that can use treated produced water at scale for economic development purposes such as land application (e.g. irrigation for non-food crops, range land restoration) and industrial reuse (e.g. data centers and power generation).
To achieve the positive goals of beneficial reuse state regulatory schemes must be tailored to allow for the ability to treat and use produced water in a manner that is consistent with the Nation’s energy and water needs and the environmental goals created by the Clean Water Act.