Recycling Oilfield Water Has Far to Go
IndustryTracking the players in the http://www.nflcardinalsofficialshop.com/John_Brown_Jersey_Cardinals ever growing energy and environmental world.
In an Austin warehouse, a four year old company called Omni Water Solutions is working on a way to recycle water used in hydraulic fracturing. Its technology involves a large container, dubbed a "Hippo," that purifies water from oilfields via filters and other means. The scrubbed water could potentially be reused in the fracking process, which requires roughly 4 million to 6 million gallons of water per well.
Warren Sumner, Omni's chief executive, said that during field trials in 2011, he had even showered in the company's recycled water, when his trailer ran low on fresh water.
The recycled water was free of chlorine and hardness, and "you'd be amazed how good you feel especially after washing your hair," Sumner said.
Technologies like Omni's are Women's John Brown Jersey developing rapidly amid rising interest in recycling Texas' oilfield water.
The large amount of water required for fracking has drawn scrutiny, especially as drilling proliferates in arid parts of West and South Texas. Natural gas companies recycle water as a matter of course in another of the nation's major drilling regions, the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania. But recycling is only getting started in Texas because using freshwater is relatively cheap.
"Recycling for us it varies from area to area, again is 50 to 75 percent more expensive than the alternatives," Jay Ewing, a Barnett Shale based representative of drilling company Devon Energy, told a joint hearing last month of the House Natural Resources and the House Energy Resources committees.
Photo by Spencer Selvidge/Texas Tribune
A bottle of "produced water," which has come up from the oilfields and smells pungent. Held by a lab technician at Omni Water Solutions.
Recycling is expensive because the water that comes out of the oilfields needs a good cleaning before it is reused. In a fracking job, millions of gallons of water, laced with sand and chemicals to make the drilling easier, are sent down a well to blast apart rock and retrieve oil or gas. Some of that chemical laced water comes back up the well along with the oil and gas. Other water that had been underground near the oil and gas deposits also flows back up. This returning water often contains material like boron or sulfates that can impede the drilling process. It can even contain naturally occurring radioactive materials.
"You do see it. We strip it," Bill Weathersby, chief executive of a Houston based recycling Ben Gardner Youth Jersey company, Energy Water Solutions, said of the natural radioactive materials.
Other harmful contaminants must also be taken out, by technologies such as filtration or distillation, before the water can http://www.cowboysnflofficialauthentic.com/authentic-ben-gardner-jersey.html be reused in the oilfields.
A recentstudypublished by the Texas Water Development Board found minimal recycling in many drilling regions of Texas. In 2011, according to the study, recycled and reused water accounted for 2 percent of the total water used in the Permian Basin around Midland, 5 percent in the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth and 0 percent of the water used in South Texas' Eagle Ford Shale. The emphasis on recycled water was highest 20 percent of total water use in the Panhandle's Anadarko Basin. (The report was written by University of Texas researchers and funded by the Texas Oil and Gas Association.)
In Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale, the situation is reversed. About 90 percent of water that comes to the surface during a fracking job gets recycled, according to David Yoxtheimer, an extension associate with the Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research at Penn State University.
A key explanation for the difference lies in the options for getting rid of the water that comes back after a fracking job. In Texas, water not getting recycled is trucked to a disposal well, where it gets buried. Texas hasmore than 50,000 disposal wells for oil and gas waste, according to the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates oil and gas drilling.
Pennsylvania, by contrast, has about five disposal wells, according to Yoxtheimer. That's because of different geology and tighter regulations.
This means that it's much easier and cheaper for Texans to find a nearby well to bury their fracking waste. Pennsylvanians have to recycle their fracking waste, unless they want to pay large sums to truck it to disposal wells in Ohio.
"It is a little backwards," Yoxtheimer said. "We're a water rich state here, and we're recycling every drop possible," whereas drought prone Texas does far less recycling.
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