Parched Texas Ranches Offer a Solution to Shale’s Water Woes

Oil companies in the Permian Basin are exploring desalination to recycle fracking wastewater for agricultural use.

In the heart of North America’s most prolific oil field, West Texas is suffering from a water imbalance: Crude producers have too much while drought-hit farmers can’t get enough.

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Oil wells across the Permian Basin, which collectively produce about 5.7 million barrels a day of crude, also generate 21 million barrels of water as a by-product of fracking.

That water is unwanted because it’s as much as 10 times saltier than the ocean, so most of it is reinjected underground.

But that practice has triggered earthquakes and geyser-like leaks at the surface. More recently, it has fueled concerns about damage to remaining reserves of shale oil.

That’s spurred the US oil industry to look for alternative solutions before the problem becomes a serious constraint on their activities.

Crude producers and companies that handle wastewater have launched pilot desalination projects. The potential use of cleaned-up water by local agriculture was discussed recently at a conference organized by the Produced Water Society, an industry group.

“We’ve had to sell our herd down because of dry weather, because we don’t have forage for our cows to eat,” rancher Jody Yates, 69, told a tour group. “We’ve tried irrigation, and it’s kind of going away, so what you guys are looking at is something that we are very interested in.”

Farmers and ranchers aren’t the only option. Shale companies are looking at selling water to data centers, power generators and the construction industry.

The technology also exists to make wastewater safe for human consumption, said Jeremy Louder, owner of the 13,000-acre 2J Farms in Stanton. The question for that is: At what cost?

“The driver,” he told the conference, “is going to be at the point that you can’t get oil out of the ground because you don’t have anywhere to go with the water.”

–David Wethe, Bloomberg News