A few weeks ago a New Mexico source emailed to let me know that a handful of oil and gas wells were being “completed,” or hydraulically fractured, along the shores of Navajo Lake, which straddles the Colorado-New Mexico line. That, in itself, was interesting, since drilling for natural gas had come to a near-standstill in that region in recent years. High prices are leading a bit of a comeback, apparently.

But the remarkable part was that instead of trucking the water in for the fracturing, they were drawing it straight out of the reservoir via a big pipeline. They were sucking up oodles of water—as in tens of millions of gallons—and mixing it with a secret soup of chemicals and injecting into the wells along with tons of sand. The aim: Fracture the shale deep underground to release the methane.

I suppose sucking the water straight out of the reservoir is preferable to taking it from a neighboring community’s drinking water supply and trucking it miles to the well site. What strikes me about the former method is that it’s saying the quiet part out loud: Oil and gas extraction consumes enormous amounts of fresh water—including from the severely stressed Colorado River system—even as farmers and cities and other water users are forced to make sacrifices to save water. 

The Navajo Lake situation also provides a nice illustration of the water-energy nexus, or the ways in which water consumption and energy production are inextricably intertwined. Put simply: Energy extraction and power production consume huge amounts of water, and moving and treating water requires large quantities of power. 

Take the Central Arizona Project, which diverts water from the Colorado River and carries it across the desert hundreds of miles to Phoenix and Tucson. It uses so much power to pull the water from the river and lift it nearly 3,000 vertical feet over its 336-mile course, that the feds built it its own power plant—the now-defunct Navajo Generating Station. The power plant, in turn, used as much as 9 billion gallons of water per year—pumped up from Lake Powell—for cooling and steam generation. The coal mine used water, the coal was shipped by a train that used power that needed water that needed power to pump it to the power plant and so on and so forth. Think about it too much and your brain might explode. 

I’ll go deeper into other realms of the nexus in future dispatches. For now, I’ll focus on hydraulic fracturing. But first, a little glossary/explainer about the difference between what is commonly referred to as “fracking,” and hydraulic fracturing, with help from this nifty EPA diagram.

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• Conventional Drilling: Using a rig and giant drill bits to bore straight into the earth to the reservoir of crude oil and methane (a.k.a. natural gas), which is usually in sedimentary rock formations (typically sandstone) that were deposited at the bottom of a sea. The oil and gas are remnants of very old plankton that have been transformed by time, heat, and pressure into hydrocarbons. 

• Coalbed Methane Development: Drilling for natural gas or methane located in coal seams. This method drove the 1990s-early 2000s booms in New Mexico, SW Colorado, and Wyoming. Wells are relatively shallow and yield huge amounts of produced water or wastewater (see below).  

• Fracturing or Completion: The act of fracturing the host rock to free up oil and gas and stimulate production after the well is drilled. Old school wildcatters simply shoved some nitroglycerine or dynamite down the well hole and detonated them. In a couple of instances the U.S. government, in their eternal wisdom, thought it would be a good idea to detonate nuclear bombs in oil and gas formations in Colorado and New Mexico to free up the hydrocarbons. It worked, but the natural gas was radioactive. 

• Hydraulic Fracturing, Hydrofracturing, or “Frac’ing”: This is an evolved version of fracturing, in which water, combined with a long list of ingredients and sand, is injected at super high pressures into the well. The ingredients usually include hydrochloric acid, along with biocides (e.g. ethanol, glutaraldehyde), breakers (ammonium persulphate), clay control, corrosion inhibitors, foamers, friction reducers, surfactants, scale inhibitors, and a variety of other things, including walnut hulls. Almost every well, whether drilled conventionally or not, is hydraulically fractured. 

• “Fracking,” Shale Drilling, or Horizontal Drilling + Multi-Stage Hydraulic Fracturing: This is considered an unconventional method of drilling for oil and gas locked up in shale formations. While it’s long been known that shale formations contained oodles of oil and gas, it wasn’t until the 1990s that a method was developed to get at them profitably, sparking booms from Pennsylvania to Texas, North Dakota to New Mexico. This entails drilling straight down to the target formation, then turning the drill bit at a 90-degree angle, and continuing horizontally for thousands of feet through the shale. The well is then hydraulically fractured in multiple stages, requiring more water and sand than conventional fracturing jobs. Most wells drilled since about 2008 are of this type. 

• Produced Water (or Wastewater): Water that occurs naturally in conjunction with oil or gas (along with “flowback” or the water injected during frac’ing) and that is “produced” by the well alongside oil and gas. It is usually briny (can be 3x as salty as seawater) and contaminated with hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and is occasionally even radioactive. It is usually disposed of by injecting it deep underground, which can induce seismic activity. 

Okay, I hope that clears things up. Now on to the data. 

• 1.3 million gallons Amount of water pumped into a single Permian Basin well, on average, during each hydraulic fracturing job in 2011 (when the shale, or fracking, revolution was just getting started). 

• 11.2 million gallons Amount of water used to fracture the average Permian Basin well in 2016, after fracking had taken hold. 

• 17 Number of hydraulic fracturing jobs completed in New Mexico during a single week this September.

  

   

• 15,223,683,573 gallons or 46,720 acre-feet Amount of water used for hydrofracturing oil and gas wells in New Mexico in 2021. That would fill up a nine-mile-high, football field-sized tank. 

• 10% Percent of water used in a 2.35-million-gallon hydraulic fracturing job in the San Juan Basin that was reused. The remaining 90% was fresh water.  

• $93 million Amount NGL Energy Partners reportedly paid for 122,000 acres of New Mexico ranch land to acquire 1,500 acre-feet of water rights and locations to drill produced water injection wells. It’s another form of “buy and dry.” 

• 67.2 billion gallons Amount of wastewater “produced” by New Mexico oil and gas wells in 2021. About 60% or more was then injected even deeper underground or into aging oil and gas wells to stimulate production.

• 181 meters tall and 580 meters in diameter Dimensions of the pile of salt contained in a year’s worth of produced water from the New Mexico portion of the Permian Basin. 

And how about those wells on the shores of Navajo Reservoir? Logos Energy “completed” or hydraulically fractured and presumably put into production four wells in its Rosa unit in mid-September. The reports on the completion, which should tell how much water was used, have not yet been uploaded to the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division’s web page. But they do have the original plan for nearby wells’ water withdrawals on file so we can have a good sense of what each required.

Way back in 2010, Jason Sandel—now the executive VP of his family business, Aztec Well—applied for a diversion permit from Navajo Reservoir to deliver water to two wells that Williams was planning on drilling (Logos later acquired the properties). Williams wanted to drill two horizontal test wells into the Mancos shale formation each with a total depth of about 13,000 feet. Then they would “stimulate each lateral with 13 stages of 15,000 barrel slickwater per stage.” That would add up to about 390,000 barrels or 16.5 million gallons for both wells. 

Sandel wrote that the project would require 85, 400 barrel frac tanks lined up in a row onsite, but said it would take 94 truckloads of water per night to keep the operation moving (the energy-water-energy nexus at work again). Therefore, he argued, it made more sense to pump the water straight from the reservoir, under water rights leased by San Juan Basin Water Haulers Association. 

Only that would require some energy, too: Two 460-volt, 88-horsepower submersible pumps (with two more on standby in case of breakdown) would suck 5,000 gallons of water per minute from the reservoir to one of 15 big frac tanks. Then it would be moved by another pump into a filtering unit before sending it to the well pads.

It appears a similar system was used for the four wells completed in September, except that they are significantly deeper (I pulled the file on one and found it had a total depth of more than 19,000 feet—see above diagram). Deeper wells usually require more hydraulic fracturing fluid, i.e. water. So they likely guzzled up a bare minimum of 32 million gallons of water—or about 100 acre-feet.

Researchers will often point out that on the whole, the oil and gas extraction industry uses far less water than agriculture. It’s true. At the same time, 32 million gallons isn’t merely a drop in the bucket. In fact, it would probably be enough to irrigate nearly 50 acres of dry beans or corn on the Navajo Agricultural Products Industries fields just downstream on the San Juan River. That’s a lot of burritos (insert methane jokes here).

I’ll let you decide whether it’s worth it or not.