This quote is about a company in Texas that has been working diligently to switch their operations over to use brackish well water and produced and flow back water from their operations to continue their fracking process.
Fasken Oil and Ranch Ltd. has discontinued using freshwater for drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the Permian Basin, and now uses only treated brackish water from the Santa Rosa formation along with recycled produced and flow-back water.
“Plus, we were making quite a bit of produced water and wanted to be able to treat that water and reuse it rather than pumping it into our disposal system,” he says.
During the fall of 2014, Fasken was using 5,850 barrels a day of treated Santa Rosa water on four rigs drilling at the time, Davis reports. Fasken was producing 10,000-11,000 barrels a day of produced water, recycling about 80 percent of that daily total for use in fracturing operations, he relates.
Produced water is gathered at a disposal facility and piped into an electrocoagulation unit that causes suspended solids to coalesce, Davis explains. Water is pumped into an open-top steel tank that contains baffles to accelerate solids settling. Water then flows into two horizontal, 500-barrel settling tanks before being pumped into a 125,000-barrel double-lined storage pit. Water is pulled from the storage pit and pumped as needed to frac job sites.
To date, Fasken has been using a blend of 60 percent recycled water and 40 percent treated Santa Rosa water, he says. Despite the slowdown in drilling, Davis reports that Fasken will continue to use a combination of Santa Rosa and produced water to meet all future needs on some 2,000 well sites yet to be drilled.
“It may be a while before we seriously ramp up drilling again, but those sites will be drilled and completed eventually,” he says. “We require more than 2 million gallons of water per well, and considering the number of locations, the ability to drill and stimulate them without using freshwater will be just as important to us in the future as it is today.”
http://www.aogr.com/magazine/cover-stor ... ter-supply