The Produced Water Society's annual Permian Basin Summit is focusing on finding uses for produced water, the five to 10 gallons of water typically produced per barrel of oil, a CBS7 report said.
“That water is stored alongside the oil that surfaces when rock is fractured,” Society Vice President Ben Samuels said. "That water is pretty brackish. It’s pretty nasty. Especially when you get through the production process, a lot of those production chemicals are in there, and so you have to do a lot of treatment.”
Produced water can be put back into the ground, stored in pits for reuse in production, or used in new ways, such as in farmed crops that aren't eaten, experts said.
“You can treat the water,” Samuels said. “And what I mean by that is, introduce other chemicals that will reduce that bacteria and reduce some of the chemicals that are in the water that came out of the ground. So you can use it to do things like farming cotton.”
Finding new uses for produced water "is easily the most innovative portion of the sector right now,” Michael Lozano, who handles government relations at the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, said. “From a big perspective, we’ve seen large investment and interest in this from the University of Texas Permian Basin, we’ve seen it at Texas Tech, and of course, the Produced Water Society and of course our members at PBPA are really focused on this new segment of the industry.”
One concern is seismic activity and the relationship of produced water to underground pressure.
“And to the point the industry can be cognizant of that and be part of the solution, we’re really trying to endeavor to do that,” Samuels said, according to the CB7 report. “So you know, if you come to the conference, you’ll see seismicity brought up time and time and time again. It’s really throughout the agenda.”