This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 18, 2012 -WASHINGTON – Nationwide, the hydraulic fracturing – or “fracking” – process for capturing oil and gas is now using billions of gallons of water a year – by one estimate, the equivalent of what a million Americans consume annually.
As more and more water is being diverted for fracking in the oil-boom state of North Dakota, environmental groups are criticizing that consumption. And, with the Midwest drought shrinking rivers and reservoirs, some question whether the water diversion -- if it increases at a higher rate than is now projected -- eventually could even impact river navigation in dry years.
“With growing amounts of gas and oil fracking in the Dakotas and other parts of the Missouri river basin, the industry demands for Missouri River water could be huge,” says Caroline Pufalt, the conservation chair of the Sierra Club's Missouri chapter.
The industry plays down the water impact, as do officials from North Dakota and other states where fracking is booming. While the Army Corps of Engineers studies the issue, the industry is being allowed to use water from the largest of the six mainstem Missouri River reservoirs, Lake Sakakawea, at no cost.
In a drought year when barge traffic is threatened on the Missouri and middle Mississippi – and lawmakers from Missouri, Illinois and other Mississippi River states want the Corps to release more water from the reservoirs to ease the problem – it's difficult to assess whether the amounts of water diverted for industrial uses is significant enough to make much of a difference downstream.
“It’s pretty hard to make an estimate” of how much water fracking is likely to draw from the Missouri River reservoirs, said Pufalt. “That’s what the Corps of Engineers is going to have to do if they set up a policy to sell the water.”
How much water for fracking – and at what cost?
There’s no doubt that, in western North Dakota, the “oil boom” made possible by fracking has led to demands for millions of gallons of water. The process uses pressurized water, sand and chemicals to break open oil-bearing rock deep underground.
Fracking industry leaders have predicted that North Dakota will surpass Alaska within a decade in oil production. That is giving the state’s oil and gas industry considerable political clout at a time when its water usage is climbing.
As the number of wells using fracking expands rapidly, there is also an increased water demand from “re-fracking” some older wells and using different drilling techniques. That is why the industry wants to use more water from Lake Sakakawea and other sources.
Earlier this year, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple said industrial water users with pending permits would have no-cost access to river water, and said Corps officials had told him that permits would be issued without “further unnecessary delay.”
That includes about 100,000 acre feet of water from Lake Sakakawea. (An acre-foot is the amount of water covering an acre, one foot deep.)
In the meantime, while not assessing fees for the water currently used, Corps officials are studying what (if any) price should be assessed for industrial and municipal users of water from the Missouri’s reservoirs.
Tiffany Vanosdall, the Corps’ project manager for the ongoing “Missouri River Municipal and Industrial Water Storage Reallocation Study,” told the Beacon that last July’s “surplus water report” for Lake Sakakawea estimated that the fracking industry’s water demand would be about 27,000 acre-feet of water a year, over the next 10 years.
She said that would represent about 0.3 percent of the available storage in Lake Sakakawea, which has a total usable storage capacity of about 23.8 million acre feet. (By one environmental group’s measure, 27,000 acre-feet would be about what 14,000 families would consume in a year.)
“Since that report only addressed short-term needs, we will conduct an analysis of the long-term water demands in the basin, including oil and gas development, in the reallocation report,” Vanosdall wrote in an email to the Beacon. She added that “the majority of water in the oil and gas water demand projection is for fracking operations.”
As part of its effort to get public input, the Corps held one of its “scoping meetings” on Aug. 22 in St. Louis, attracting about 45 people. Other sessions were held in St. Joseph, Mo., and five other Missouri River cities, ranging northwest to Montana. A report on the meetings will be posted on the above website next month.
Vandosall said the Corps is writing a draft M&I reallocation report and environmental impact statement, likely to be “ready for public review in early 2014.” That report will reflect the results of the Corps’ study, which will examine the impact of industrial water allocation on the “authorized purposes and operations of those reservoirs.”
Environmentalists are skeptical. Jim Redmond, a Sioux City, Ia., resident who represented the Sierra Club on the Missouri River recovery implementation committee, said he worries that the draft report on Lake Sakakawea “drastically underestimated the amount of water this industry will need once the 10-year study period has ended.”
Also concerned is Pufalt, who contends that the Corps’ assessment of industrial water needs “could be problematic given industry pressure and the Corps' historically poor economic projections, such as the failed forecasts for navigation levels.”
Assessing impact of fracking on water quality
The effect of fracking on river levels is a lesser concern to most environmental groups than the impact of the process on water quality.
Depending on the site, a typical fracking well consumes about 5 million gallons of water. The “flowback” – which varies widely, from 15 percent to 80 percent of the injected water – returns to the surface, tainted by chemicals. As much as 100,000 gallons of chemical additives are used in some fracking operations.
The industry contends that most of those chemicals are trapped in the rock layers where they are injected, thousands of feet underground. However, a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that fracking for natural gas under the Marcellus Shale layer in Pennsylvania may lead to harmful gas or liquids flowing upward – and possibly contaminating some drinking-water supplies.
"The biggest implication is the apparent presence of connections from deep underground to the surface," Robert Jackson, a Duke University biologist who helped write the study, told a ProPublica reporter. "It's a suggestion based on good evidence that there are places that may be more at risk.”
Redmond told the Beacon that he regards fracking as a bigger threat to the quality of water in the Missouri River basin than to the volume of water in the river, although he is also concerned by the amount of water consumed.
"The pollutants that are going to get into the water around the fracking sites is a major issue," Redmond said.
Ironically, the major river routes – some of which might be affected by water reductions – could also became a primary route for fracking firms to transport some of its wastewater, often refered to as “brine.”
A Public Source article Sunday reports that the U.S. Coast Guard, which regulates the nation’s waterways, is assessing whether such transport is safe and should be allowed. The report said the shale-gas drilling industry wants to move some of its wastewater – considered toxic by environmentalists – by tanker-type barges on rivers and lakes.
Nearly 12,000 miles of waterways could be open to the barge tankers, each carrying 10,000 barrels of wastewater. “It may be hazardous,” said Commander Michael Roldan, chief of the Coast Guard’s Hazardous Material Division, told Public Source. “If it is, it would not be allowed to ship under bulk.” He said the Coast Guard has been considering whether to allow the industry to use the waterways for about a year.
While it was unclear exactly what the barge routes would be for transporting the wastewater, there is at least one way that Missouri – which isn't a logical site for fracking itself because it does not have vast reserves of natural gas under its surface – is playing an important role in the nationwide fracking boom.
Several eastern Missouri firms – including Mississippi Sand LLC, which has a big quarry south of Festus – are major suppliers of so-called “frack sand,” a relatively pure silica sand used under pressure to help crack the shale rock underground. That sand is sent to fracking sites in several states.
Piping Missouri River water to Colorado?
While the potential impact of fracking on Missouri River water levels has gone under the radar, another water issue – a proposal to pipe Missouri water to Colorado– got a lot of media attention last week.
When the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation issued a report on potential strategies to supply more water to states along the Colorado River, one option it assessed was an idea to transport billions of gallons of water from the upper Missouri River by pipeline across Kansas and into Colorado.
But that concept for a 600-mile pipeline – much of it on an uphill route – to provide the Colorado River basin with 600,000 acre-feet of water annually is considered a highly unlikely option, mainly because it would be extremely expensive and would likely take decades to accomplish.
“I don’t think it’s a realistic thing to talk about today, and it would have never been a good thing to do,” said U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. “It looked to me that that was a proposal right out of the 1930s” – referring to huge federal projects of the “big dam era.”
Last week, Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar said the problems in financing, getting congressional approval and constructing such a pipeline were likely too difficult to make the project feasible. In a conference call with reporters, he said Western states should focus on more realistic solutions.
While piping Missouri River water westward might be helpful to Colorado, Blunt told reporters that it would “really create problems” in the Midwest.
“At the very time when we’re having a debate trying to get the upper [Missouri River] states to go along with giving us the water we need, to talk about diverting a bunch of that to the Colorado system doesn’t seem to me to be a good idea at all.
“I can’t imagine a situation where I would be in favor of that or not do whatever I could to stop that from happening.”