Halliburton's New Technology Enables Reuse of Produced Water
Engineers at Halliburton Co. believe they may be on the cusp of a major breakthrough in hydraulic fracturing that could quench the practice's insatiable thirst for water.
During the annual IHS CERA Week convention happening here, the oil field services giant announced the launch of a suite of technologies and services that can allow drillers to use briny, brackish water or nonpotable water produced in oil and gas extraction for hydraulic fracturing operations, without any treatment.
"We feel like they are game-changing," said Walter Dale, a business manager for water solutions at Halliburton. "You look at the rush of people that are trying to treat the water to high quality, to make a frack fluid, and now we're coming to the market saying: 'Look, let's not treat the water, let's not take the salt out. We can make frack fluids out of it.'"
It is well known that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, requires consuming large volumes of water -- up to 4 million or 5 million gallons per well. Recycling and reuse is beginning to make inroads into the business but has a long way to go. Although recycling rates are thought to be reaching nearly 70 percent in the eastern Marcellus Shale natural gas zone, in other shale fields recycling and reuse rates are put at 10 percent or less.
The standard industry practice is to blend fresh water with sand or ceramic proppants and chemicals to give the frack fluid the precise properties drillers think they'll need to optimize hydrocarbon extraction. The flowback fluid that is returned when production commences is typically discarded, usually in injection wells. The process is expensive and contributes significantly to the trucking traffic that irks people living near wells.
Fracking without fresh water has been an industry goal and a move that Texas state oil and gas officials have been urging it to take. The Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates oil and gas, is considering voluntary guidelines for water recycling.
Produced water pulled from wells elsewhere in the oil patch can be moved to frack jobs for use in shale and tight rock formations with Halliburton's technology. Or companies can draw from underground brackish water stores and use that, potentially saving millions of dollars on freshwater purchases while avoiding the ire of local landowners concerned about groundwater depletion.
"We see it as a huge change," Dale said in an interview. "We started by looking out in the ocean. We're making fracks with seawater every day, so we had some really sharp guys that knew how to do this and started looking at it, saying, 'Do we need to take all these things out?' And the answer is no."
By "things," Dale is referring to total dissolved solids (TDS), water technology parlance for the salt, dirt, brine and other materials that make water unsuitable for use in households or for agriculture. Halliburton's new application, called H2OForward, combines an existing suite of technologies the company is already commercializing for improving the chemistry of the fluid and reducing harmful organisms that develop in fluids underground.
These systems, marketed by the company as CleanStream and CleanWave, help drillers reduce the volume of fresh water they employ for unlocking oil and gas trapped in tight rock and shale formations thousands of feet underground. Dale says operators now have the option to forgo fresh water entirely in the process and just use the water they may have already pulled out of the ground.
H2OForward works "with any waste stream," including brackish or produced water laded with up to 285,000 parts per million of TDS, Dale said. Conventional and marginal oil and gas wells are known to produce more water than oil -- industrywide the ratio is around three to five barrels of water for every barrel of crude oil.
Changing the formulations, and the price
Halliburton believes the system can revolutionize the way operators are developing the United States' booming shale oil and gas reserves, and the company is eager to market and sell its wares. Dale said the use of the briny and brackish mixture the oil patch can produce does not negatively affect hydrocarbon production volumes.
"We've changed the formulations," he added. "It significantly changes the price point, and we hope it will drive further recycling in the industry to less freshwater use."
Halliburton says it has applied its new system to more than 60 wells in the Permian Basin region of west Texas and the Bakken Shale of North Dakota.
The technology may be ideal there because those formations are known to yield lots of water for drillers to deal with. Deploying it to the south Texas Eagle Ford Shale will prove more difficult, Dale explained, because "the Eagle Ford is very thirsty; it doesn't give back water."
No more waste?
Water management specialists in the oil and gas industry say technologies are emerging that may one day see water waste in drilling reduced by 90 percent or more. Whether to treat and recycle frack fluid, and how much, is primarily an economic question and not a regulatory one, but experts say more companies are willing to take on the extra expense.
"We see every day people willing to pay more per barrel," Johan van Thermaat, vice president of investor relations at the water management services firm High Sierra Water Services, said during a discussion of experts at the conference.
Companies are also, in a few cases, pooling their resources to transport the water they need for oil field hydraulic fracturing by pipeline networks, reducing truck hauls that in some cases encompass 60 percent to 80 percent of a company's water management budget.
As far as these new technologies and practices are coming along, experts in water use for oil and gas extraction don't think they will eliminate the waste stream. There will still be a need for some disposal down injection wells, they said.
"There's always going to be a waste product," said Kevin Molloy, the oil and gas sector leader at CDM Smith, an engineering and consulting firm.
Nathanial Gronewold, E&E reporter
Republished from EnergyWire with permission. EnergyWire covers the politics and business of unconventional energy. Click here for a free trial
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