Recent Trends in Water Use and Production for California Oil Production

Abstract

Recent droughts and concerns about water use for petroleum extraction renew the need to inventory water use for oil production. We quantified water volumes used and produced by conventional oil production and hydraulic fracturing (HF) in California. Despite a 25% decrease in conventional oil production from 1999 to 2012, total water use increased by 30% though much of that increase was derived from reuse of produced water. Produced water volumes increased by 50%, with increasing amounts disposed in unlined evaporation ponds or released to surface water. Overall freshwater use (constituting 1.2% of the state's nonagricultural water consumption) increased by 46% during this period due to increased freshwater-intensive tertiary oil production. HF has been practiced in California for more than 30 years, accounting for 1% of total oil production in 2012 from mostly directional and vertical wells. Water use intensity for HF wells in California averaged at 3.5 vol water/vol oil production in 2012 and 2.4 vol/vol in 2013, higher than the range from literature estimates and net water use intensity of conventional production (1.2 vol/vol in 2012). Increasing water use and disposal for oil production have important implications for water management and have potentially adverse health, environmental, and ecological impacts.

“No Fracking Way” vs. “Drill Baby Drill”: A Restructuring of Who Is Pitted Against Whom in the Narrative Policy Framework

“…Hydraulic fracturing has the potential to significantly contribute to New York's economy, particularly in economically depressed, low-income, rural areas. However, hydraulic fracturing is also associated with potential environmental and human health hazards (Adgate, Goldstein, & McKenzie, 2014;Gillen & Kiviat, 2012;McKenzie, Witter, Newman, & Adgate, 2012;Osborn, Vengosh, Warner, & Jackson, 2011;Ridlington & Rumpler, 2013;Tiedeman, Yeh, Scanlon, Teter, & Mishra, 2016). During 2008-12, 263 New York towns, cities, and villages passed 419 policies supporting or opposing hydraulic fracturing.…”

Evaluating the Feasibility of Using Produced Water from Oil and Natural Gas Production to Address Water Scarcity in California’s Central Valley

“…Although California's oil and gas operations and existing water shortages are largely concentrated in the Central Valley, moving water to demand centers would still require relatively long pipeline networks [20]. The cost of building out piping infrastructure is not included in this analysis but would be a substantial upfront cost.…”

“…While prior analyses have explored the potential to utilize reclaimed water, brackish groundwater, agricultural drainage, and seawater for supplementary water supplies [10][11][12][13][14], little work has explored treating water produced at the site of oil and gas production [15][16][17]. Recent studies have quantified flowback and produced water at varying spatial resolutions [18][19][20][21], but few have attempted to analyze both the quality and quantity of produced water at the well level, a barrier that has restricted such assessments. California, the third largest crude oil producing state in the US in 2015, generates significant amounts of produced water (i.e., water transferred from geologic formations to the surface during fossil fuel production).…”

“…Although a small fraction of this water is returned to a watershed untreated and made available for beneficial use by other sectors (e.g., crop irrigation, livestock watering, industrial uses, etc. ), there is evidence that surface water disposal has had adverse health and environmental effects, and, therefore, might not be an attractive solution over the long term [20,23,24].…”

Groundwater Recharge for a Regional Water Bank

“…The KWB is located 12 miles west of Bakersfield in Kern County, CA. The region relies on imported surface water from the State Water Project (SWP) and Central Valley Project (CVP) to meet local water demand, 87% of which is agricultural [3]. Agriculture accounts for 20% of exports from the county, totaling over US$7 billion in sales in 2017 [4,5].…”