SAN FRANCISCO: The latest domestic energy boom is sweeping through some of the nation’s driest pockets, drawing millions of gallons of water to unlock oil and gas reserves from beneath the earth’s surface.
Hydraulic fracturing, or the drilling technique commonly known as fracking, has been used for decades to blast huge volumes of water, fine sand and chemicals into the ground to crack open valuable shale formations. The practice is growing in what’s called the Utica formation in eastern Ohio.
But now, as energy companies vie to exploit vast reserves west of the Mississippi, fracking’s new frontier is expanding to the same lands where crops have shriveled and waterways have dried up due to severe drought.
In Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming, the vast majority of the counties where fracking is occurring are also suffering from drought, according to an Associated Press analysis of industry-compiled fracking data and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s official drought designations.
While fracking typically consumes less water than farming or residential uses, the exploration method is increasing competition for the precious resource, driving up the price of water and burdening already depleted aquifers and rivers in certain drought-stricken stretches.
Scarce resource
Some farmers and city leaders worry that the fracking boom is consuming too much of a scarce resource, while others see the push for production as an opportunity to make money by selling water while furthering the nation’s goal of energy independence.
Along Colorado’s Front Range, fourth-generation farmer Kent Peppler of Mead, Colo., said he is fallowing some of his corn fields this year. He can’t afford to irrigate the land for the full growing season, in part because deep-pocketed energy companies have driven up the price of water.
“There is a new player for water, which is oil and gas,” said Peppler, who also serves as president of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. “And certainly they are in a position to pay a whole lot more than we are.”
In a normal year, Peppler said he would pay anywhere from $9 to $100 for an acre-foot of water in auctions held by cities with excess supplies. But these days, energy companies are paying some cities $1,200 to $2,900 per acre-foot. The Denver suburb of Aurora made a $9.5 million, five-year deal last summer to provide the oil company Anadarko 2.4 billion gallons of excess treated sewer water.
In South Texas, where drought has forced cotton farmers to scale back, local water officials said drillers are contributing to a drop in the water table in several areas.
For example, as much as 15,000 acre-feet of water are drawn each year from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer to frack wells in the southern half of the Eagle Ford Shale, one of the nation’s most profitable oil and gas fields.
That’s equal to about half of the water recharged annually into the southern portion of the aquifer, which spans five counties that are home to about 330,000 people, said Ron Green, a scientist with the nonprofit Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
Drought continues
The Eagle Ford, extending from the Mexican border into East Texas, began to boom in 2011, just as Texas struggled with the worst one-year drought in its history. While conditions have improved, most of the state is still dealing with some level of drought, and many reservoirs and aquifers have not been fully replenished.
“The oil industry is doing the big fracks and pumping a substantial amount of water around here,” said Ed Walker, general manager of the Wintergarden Groundwater Conservation District, which manages an aquifer that serves as the main water source for farmers and about 29,000 people in three counties.
“When you have a big problem like the drought and you add other smaller problems to it like all the fracking, then it only makes things worse,” Walker said.
Selling to drillers
West Texas cotton farmer Charlie Smith is trying to make the best of the situation. He plans to sell some of the groundwater coursing beneath his fields to drillers, because it isn’t enough to irrigate his lands in Glasscock County. Smith’s fields, like the rest of the county, were declared to be in a drought disaster area this year by the USDA.
“I was going to bed every night and praying to the good Lord that we would get just one rain on the crop,” said Smith. “I realized we’re not making any money farming, so why not sell the water to the oil companies? Every little bit helps.”