New Mexico Official Discusses Options for Handling Produced Water from Energy Bonanza

By Ben Neary

NMWF Conservation Director

Winter has failed to materialize across New Mexico. Record warm temperatures combined with minimal snowpack have water managers bracing for a bleak irrigation season and beyond.

But while much of New Mexico is parched, the Permian Basin, in the southeast corner of the state, is wrestling with the question of what to do with too much water.

Every day, the oil and gas industry pumps hundreds of millions of gallons of groundwater from the Permian Basin as a byproduct of energy production. 

Current New Mexico regulations require energy companies to reinject this “produced water” from their operations back underground. There’s so much of the water that the industry faces the prospect of running out of places to put it.

Some in the energy industry are calling for developing state regulations to allow the treatment of the produced water for agricultural and other purposes. But some state regulators and environmental groups warn that adequate purification technology doesn’t yet exist for treating water on such a huge scale. They say that releasing it would pose an unacceptable environmental threat.

Zach Stoll, assistant director of the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium, will speak on the produced water issue at the New Mexico Wildlife Federation’s “Wildlife Wednesday” presentation on March 11 in Albuquerque.

The state created the consortium, headquartered at New Mexico State University, in 2019. Stoll said the group is charged with conducting research to fill in science and technology gaps to allow regulators to make informed decisions about produced water reuse.

The Permian Basin, straddling the New Mexico/Texas border, produces nearly 50 percent of the nation’s crude oil as well as huge quantities of natural gas. While that production generates enormous tax revenue for both states, it also produces as much as five barrels of water for each barrel of oil.

Stoll said operations in New Mexico alone produce an estimated 450 million gallons of produced water a day. With adequate purification and state approval, he said the water could conceivably be used to support wetlands and other uses to benefit wildlife.

“This produced water that we’re talking about is mostly formation water,” Stoll said. “This is old, dead oceans from when New Mexico was an ocean, hundreds of millions of years ago. So the earth changed, things got buried, along with all that ocean water, the dead dinosaurs and the plants. The dead dinosaurs and the plants are what turned into the natural gas and the oil, and these dead oceans below have just got commingled with all that stuff.”

The water is several times more salty than sea water, Stoll said, and there are tens of thousands of wells across the Permian Basin. He said pumping will likely continue for at least the next half century. 

“The thing is that once these wells are drilled, over time the wells all tend to produce more water than oil,” Stoll said.

While Stoll said producers must currently pump about five barrels of water for each barrel of oil, he said the ratio of water to oil will increase over time as oil reserves are drawn down. Major oil and gas companies are projecting ratios as high as 10-to-one water to oil by 2040, he said. “So we could have a doubling of water coming out of the ground over the next couple of decades,” he said. 

While Texas is exploring possible agricultural uses for its purified waste water, New Mexico’s regulations prohibit reusing the water, and instead require energy producers to reinject it back into the ground or otherwise dispose of it. 

For years, industry and environmental groups have squared off over industry proposals to draft new regulations allowing surface uses of the produced water in New Mexico for dust suppression, agricultural uses or possibly to create wetlands or other habitat for wildlife.

Last May, at the recommendation of the New Mexico Environment Department, the New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission enacted a five-year prohibition against discharge of produced water into streams, rivers, and groundwater.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has pushed members of New Mexico’s Water Quality Control Commission to overturn rules that ban the use of the produced water. She called for the Legislature to consider a bill in the session that ended this February that would have required the fast adoption of more permissive rules, but the bill failed to gain traction and died.

In recent months, the consortium has expanded its statewide outreach in what it calls an effort to help communities better understand produced water, water scarcity and the science shaping the state’s future water decisions. 

“Before the consortium, we were kind of in this Catch-22 where everybody saw how much produced water there was, and they wanted to treat it, but no regulations existed to allow that, and that’s still currently the case,” Stoll said. “So the regulators couldn’t regulate it because they didn’t know what the water quality needed to be and what constituents in that water needed to be regulated and at what level, so we did quite a bit of research to help tease that out, and that’s what the consortium was developed for.”

Stoll said the consortium has made progress in identifying what constituents need to be removed and how to remove them from the produced water.

“We’re getting there,” Stoll said. He said state regulators need to determine what the limits will be for purifying water for various purposes.

Stoll said pilot facilities in both New Mexico and Texas are purifying produced water. He said the consortium has collected water from some of the operations and has had it tested at third-party labs.

 “It looks really good,” Stoll said of the treated water. He said all the analyses the group has been doing fail to show any toxic effects from the treated water on aquatic species, plants or soils.

New Mexico currently sends much of its produced water to Texas for free, Stoll said. He said the water doesn’t count against New Mexico’s obligations to Texas to deliver surface water on the Pecos River.

If New Mexico fails to adopt regulations for how to handle the water, it will become an increasingly pressing issue for the energy industry. Stoll said that if companies can’t get permits to reuse the water, they’re going to be forced to spend money to evaporate it on the ground. 

Stoll said he hears much misinformation about what industry ultimately intends to do with produced water. “They’ll say, ‘oh, the oil and gas companies want to put toxic frack water on your chiles.’ No,” he said. “Everybody is talking about treating this water to a super high quality so it can be reused for something. Nobody’s talking about putting the really gross stuff as it comes out of the ground on anything.”

Stoll’s free presentation will start at 5:30 p.m., March 11, at the Marble Brewery Northeast Heights Tap Room, at 9904 Montgomery Blvd., NE, Albuquerque.