PITTSBURGH – Using and wasting water has been a big part of the Marcellus shale conversation since the fracking boom began 10 years ago. But the industry has evolved, and a panel of experts talked about what the industry is doing now during a breakout session of the Shale Insight conference on Thursday.
Panel moderator Kevin Garber, with the law firm Babst Calland, said that in Pennsylvania in 2018, about 90 percent of the water that came back form well bores – called produced or flowback water – was reused or recycled.
But low gas prices have reduced the amount of drilling in the Pennsylvania-West Virginia-Ohio area, which gives operators fewer opportunities to reuse and recycle produced water.
Injection wells are the least desirable option, the panelists said. There aren’t that many, they have limited capacity and they pose regulatory and induced seismic activity issues.
Kris Perritt is an environmental scientist with Repsol, a multinational production company based in Madrid. “Fresh water is a finite resource. We don’t want to put it away, we need to use it,” he said.
He agreed with Garber that the low prices are posing challenges. He talked about the various ways that Repsol tries to best manage its water resources.
First is reuse/recycle. Taking used water from one well to a new well is the lowest risk, lowest cost option. But when no frack jobs are planned, for weeks or months, temporary storage on site or in a storage facility is another option.
A third option – depending upon timing, need and intercompany relationships – is water sharing. A producer with available water will work out an agreement with a company that can use it, and they’ll truck it from site to site. “That partnership has really developed among many operators in the Northeast.”
Sometimes there’s too much to reuse, or no one to send it to. One option in this case, he said, is taking it to an evaporation plant. That poses new problems: waste and salts left after the water is boiled away, and emissions from burning natural gas to boil the water.
But, as Garber pointed out, Antero recently idled its Clearwater evaporator plant in Doddridge County. Antero is evaluating its cost effectiveness in the low-price environment.
Perritt said he’s bullish on yet one more option. With the technology improving, that option is to treat and discharge produced water. Back at the beginning of the boom, that job was left to municipal facilities, which weren’t equipped to process the briny water, and in Pittsburgh the still-salty water was polluting the Ohio River.
But producers have advanced the technology and are able to do it in their own facilities, Perritt said. “I think that’s probably one of the more sustainable option we have to move forward.”
Justin Welker, water operations manager for Range Resources, dwelt a bit on water sharing. Range has recycled all of its produced water since 2004.
Now, taking on water from other operators, that figure has gone from 100% to 150%, he said. It’s taking 2 million barrels a year from other operators. “I think the water sharing is a good thing for the industry.” With good communications between operators, it saves them water and money.
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