"Oil and gas operators dramatically increased their reliance on high-quality water for fracking even though they produced enough wastewater to supply the operations."
"In the middle of the longest-running drought in more than a thousand years, Colorado energy companies diverted rising volumes of the state’s freshwater resources for fracking, a new analysis shows.
Colorado operators doubled their use of high-quality water to prepare wells for fracking over the last 10 years, with diminishing returns on oil production, the nonprofit group FracTracker Alliance reported earlier this month. Average volumes of water used per well quadrupled over that time, the analysis found.
Colorado standards governing what water sources energy companies can access for fracking and how they dispose of wastewater are unsustainable and “incredibly wasteful,” concluded Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker’s western program coordinator, in the report.
Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, injects water, sand and chemicals of varying toxicity under high pressure to splinter rock and prepare wells for extracting oil and gas trapped within rock formations. Completing wells can prove water- and energy-intensive as operators extend the length of horizontal wells to reach sequestered fossil fuels. It can also yield massive amounts of wastewater, known as produced water."
