The new black gold? Brian Schoonover works for Water Rescue Services, a group that treats brackish and "produced" water so it can be used in hydraulic fracturing. Here he holds a mason jar of produced water, ready for treatment.
This article is part of an occasional series on water and hydraulic fracturing by the Texas Tribune and StateImpact Texas.
On a recent morning, Tommy Taylor, a manager with the drilling company Fasken Oil & Ranch, stood in the West Texas desert beside two huge pools of water. One contained freshwater, and the other contained brackish water from the Santa Rosa aquifer 1,700 feet beneath Taylor’s feet.
Fasken has been mixing the two sources as part of a pilot program to use brackish water in hydraulic fracturing, so that the water-intensive drilling process doesn’t deplete local freshwater wells.
“We would like to get to where we’re using 100 percent” brackish water, Taylor said.
In regions of Texas like the Permian Basin, where the water needs of fracking have run up against a historic drought, drillers are increasingly turning to brackish groundwater previously thought too expensive to use. Fracking a well requires roughly 4 to 6 million gallons of water, which gets mixed with chemicals and sand to break up the rock and retrieve the oil or gas. In the Midland-Odessa region, where reservoirs sit 95 percent empty and cities and towns have been under severe water rationing for years, drillers are scrambling to find new sources of water.
Photo Illustration by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
A bill to provide major funding for new water projects in Texas was passed by the House today.
The Texas House approved legislation today that would use $2 billion to fund more water projects in the state. HB 4, by Rep. Allan Ritter, R-Nederland, would create a water bank that would offer loans for projects like new water reservoirs, pipelines and conservation projects.
“As Mother Nature has reminded us in the last couple of years, we can’t change the weather,” Ritter said at the outset of the hearing, “but with sound science and far-sighted planning, we can conserve and develop supply to meet our future demands.”
The floor hearing was a significant step for the passage of the bill, but despite widespread support at the Capitol, it wasn’t a sure bet. During more than four hours of debate on the bill, it faced sustained opposition from a few lawmakers, some of them affiliated with the Tea Party, whose amendments would’ve effectively gutted the funds. They were ultimately thwarted by other Republicans.
While the boom in South Texas has brought a time of economic plenty, it's putting a hurt on roads.
You don’t have to go far from Greg Sengelmann’s office in the center of Gonzales to see something’s different about South Texas these days. “That’s the city’s RV park that we put in, to house all the [oilfield] workers out there,” he says, pointing to dozens of motorhomes parked on a grass hill outside the J.B. Wells Arena (also home to youth rodeos and vintage airstream rallies). “You’ll see probably ten other ones throughout the county.”
Sengelmann is the General Manager for the Gonzales County Underground Water Conservation, tasked with managing and protecting the area’s groundwater. As drilling rapidly expands in the Eagle Ford Shale and other parts of Texas thanks to the spread of hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking”) and horizontal drilling, it’s changing small towns and communities.
“I think it’s a net positive,” says Sengelmann. “I think people are mainly happy about it. Because it’s bringing in a lot of money and new activity.”
The questions are whether those changes are all for the better, and how long the money and activity will last.
Students from small towns in Texas are filling up community college classes that have titles like “Drilling” and “Well Completions.”
Dave Fehling / StateImpact
At Coastal Bend College, oil & gas instructor Roy Coley with students Kollin Harless and Nicole Burks
At Coastal Bend College in Beeville in the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale, just 46 students enrolled for petroleum training courses in 2008. Last year, there were 1,086. Many of the students are lured by promises of salaries that used to be found mostly in bigger cities.
“There’s so many more opportunities for jobs now in all these little small towns around here,” said Kollin Harless who’s from Three Rivers, population 1,834. He’s studying “mud engineering” to learn how to ensure that drilling fluid—or mud as it’s called—is properly formulated and injected at a drilling site. He expects an annual starting salary in the neighborhood of $60,000.
One of his classmates, Nicole Burks, started college with an entirely different career goal.
This article is part of an occasional series on water and hydraulic fracturing by the Texas Tribune and StateImpact Texas.
Call it hydraulic fracturing — without the hydro.
In most hydraulic fracturing operations, several million gallons of water, together with sand and chemicals, get pumped down a hole to blast apart rock that encases oil or gas. But with water increasingly scarce and expensive around Texas, a few companies have begun fracking with propane or other alternative liquids.
“We don’t use any water,” said Eric Tudor, a Houston-based official with GasFrac, a Canadian company that fracks with propane geland butane. “Zip. None.” At a GasFrac operation in South Texas last month, a sticker on one worker’s hard hat showed a red slash through the word H2O.
Water-free fracking still remains an early-stage technology, with potentially higher initial costs than conventional fracking methods. But as lawmakers and oil regulators focus on the large quantity of water used for fracking wells, the concept is getting a closer look. Continue Reading →
The Texas Railroad Commission, comprised of Chairman Barry T. Smitherman (center), and commissioners David Porter (left) and Christi Craddick (right) hold an open meeting in Austin, Texas on Jan. 15, 2013.
Tuesday’s meeting began routinely, with discussion of oil and gas cases. The commissioners also voted to approve new rules to make recycling of oilfield water easier — a change that both industry groups and environmentalists have sought amid water scarcity concerns. Commissioner David Porter hailed the new measure as an “incredible step forward,” and the other two commissioners also praised it. (The new rule will take effect on April 15.)
About an hour in, however, the meeting got tense. Commission Chairman Barry Smitherman began grilling Porter about a 113-page report on the Eagle Ford Shale that Porter had put together (with input from local officials and industry groups) and published this month. As has been previously reported, Smitherman was irked because he did not see a copy of the report before Porter circulated it to news outlets.
Smitherman noted how “very, very slick” the report was — with such high-quality paper that his pen could not mark it up. He asked Porter how much the report had cost to compile and who had funded it. “Did you pay for it personally, or was it paid for by the commission?” Smitherman asked. Continue Reading →
Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (Ret.) is speaking in Texas on the threat to national security posed by climate change.
By now you’ve probably heard about the potential for global climate change to impact the environment, the economy, even the range of vampire bats. But what about national security?
That’s exactly what retired Navy Vice Admiral Lee Gunn has been talking about in Texas this week.
Gunn served in the U.S. Navy for thirty-five years. He joined the Center for Naval Analysis (now known simply as CNA) after his retirement in 2001. He’s in Texas on behalf of CNA’s Military Advisory Board, a group whose report “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change” brought attention to the security aspect of climate change in 2007.
During his visit, Vice Admiral Gunn is talking with policymakers and leaders in the energy industry about investment in renewable technologies and security issues. He also stopped by KUT’s Newsroom to talk with StateImpact Texas’ Mose Buchele.
StateImpact Texas: How do you think national security will be threatened by climate change?
Keep an eye on these notable bills passing through the legislature this week.
This week, a bunch of bills that could affect everything from Texas’ energy and environment to the names of state regulatory agencies will be heard at the Capitol. We’ve compiled a short list of the bills that would have an impact on energy and environment in the state for you to keep an eye on, along with some of our earlier reporting on these issues.
A rancher in South Texas burns cactus to feed cattle.
New numbers out this week show an increasing percentage of Texas facing drought conditions, according to the US Drought Monitor Map. More than 96 percent of the state is classified as at least “abnormally dry.” That’s an 8 percent increase in the past week.
State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon warned on his blog earlier this week that Texas reservoir levels are back to where they where in August 2011, near the peak of the drought. “If the drought continues as I have depicted it, [by] the end of the summer it will be the second-worst drought on record, behind only the drought of the 1950s,” Nielsen-Gammon writes.
In a series of disturbing charts, Nielsen-Gammon shows that precipitation trends for the current water year (which began in October) are much closer to the extreme drought of 2011 than a normal year, and predicts reservoir levels in the state will drop below 50 percent in September. The Texas Water Development Board shows reservoir levels in Texas currently at just over 66 percent.
If the drought does continue, cattle ranchers are in for a summer similar to that of 2011, when they suffered over $3 billion in losses. Some South Texas farmers have already had to resort to an emergency method of feeding their cattle, and it’s not cheap.
Photo courtesy of Justin Sullivan and Getty Images
A new bill could require fracking companies to mail a list of the ingredients in their fracking fluid to residents living near a proposed well.
Under legislation considered at the Capitol this week, hydraulic fracturing companies in Texas could soon be mailing a list of “fracking” fluid ingredients to residents near oil and gas wells.
House Bill 448, authored by Rep. Dawnna Dukes, D-Austin, would require drilling companies to mail a list of the ingredients they plan to use in the fracking fluid to residents living within 500 feet of the proposed well.
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This article is part of an occasional series on water and hydraulic fracturing by the Texas Tribune and StateImpact Texas.
