Using sewage to collect oil and gas by frackers

In the oil and gas sector today, different countries of the world like America may face a number of challenges, such as low oil prices, the rise of electric vehicles and proposals to limit fracking. The industry is running out of water could be one of its biggest problems.

In such a country, the oil boom is being driven mostly by the growth of fracking — injecting water into shale formations to free up deposits of oil and natural gas that were never economically accessible before.

Nevertheless, much of that oil and natural gas is found in the most arid parts of the country, where water is relatively scarce.

Jerry, mayor of Midland, Texas said we are in the middle of the desert, and two years ago we came out of a seven-year drought.

Nonetheless water use by the oil and gas manufacturing in the Permian Basin, an area of West Texas and New Mexico that is at the mid of the fracking boom, has shot up from only 1 billion gallons in 2011 to84 billion gallons last year, with the respect to data from University of Texas senior research scientist Bridget Scanlon.

Moreover, the growth of fracking has also resulted to a massive jump in population, putting a strain on water resources in the region. That has left the oil and gas companies scrambling to find the water they need for survival.

Some towns around Midland Odessa, Texas, are now selling most of its municipal wastewater to oil companies for use in their injection wells. One of the leaders in the field, Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD), agreed to spend huge amount of money to upgrade the wastewater treatment facility of Midland, Texas, in return for the right to buy its wastewater for up to 40 years. The company is using about 5 million gallons a day of municipal wastewater to help it reach the up to 21 million gallons of water it uses every day for productions.

Securing that water source would ease the burden of looking for water with which the company can survive in the competitive market.

Again, the 21 million gallons of water Pioneer uses on a typical day would be enough to fill 42 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Lithgow claimed that very little of the water it uses is fit for human consumption. Apart from the wastewater, most of the well water it uses comes from deep aquifers that produce brackish water not suitable for human consumption.

Pioneer can collect about 21 million gallons of water for manufacturing in the company. Though, that water is even more contaminated than deep aquifer or wastewater. In the past, the oil and gas producing company has not been able to reuse much of that water, but recently Pioneer has started to learn how and is reusing about 5 million gallons of water a day for different purposes.

Most of the water captured as oil and natural gas are collected may not be useful for anything without treatment. It would be disposed of in wells nearly a mile or more deep, far below the aquifers used as a source of water.

Human water supplies for general uses could be endangered by the industry sending so much water into the Earth's shale layers as part of the fracking process or disposal wells.

Because that water use is disrupting what is known as the "water cycle" through which water circulates naturally between land, atmosphere, and bodies of  water in order to become useful again.

But with fracking, that is water that is taken out of the water cycle, in Texas, water is increasingly in short supply. There is growing in demand for increasingly scarce resources.

The University of Texas' Scanlon said that fracking's request for water still trails what is used by agriculture. And she agrees with the industry's position that much of the water being used in fracking wouldn't be available for anything important without prior treatment.