RRC takes a much-needed stand on oilfield earthquakes

On a cloudy December 15 afternoon, I was in Houston talking to a colleague on the phone in Midland when a 3.6-magnitude earthquake shook the oil-rich city. She nearly fell out of her chair, and quickly ended the conversation by saying, “I want to reassure my children.” This was one of 15,000 earthquakes to hit the West Texas Permian Basin in the past five years.

The Permian Basin was a prolific economic engine for Texas and a vital energy resource for the United States. The basin is the center of the US shale revolution, uses half of all US drilling rigs, produces approximately 5 million barrels of oil per day, and houses the largest shale-reserve base on the planet. Its resources are geographically deep and vast, with one of the thickest hydrocarbon structures in the world extending 300 miles from Big Lake to Carlsbad, New Mexico.

But the Permian Basin has a problem: a problem of 15 million barrels a day. Approximately three barrels of brackish water are produced for every barrel of oil, and that wastewater needs to go somewhere. Much of this water is dumped into thousands of deep injection wells known as brine discharges. Many of these injection wells were drilled on or near old but historically inactive fault lines. Scientists have warned for years that deep water injections can compress these faults and trigger earthquakes. With 5,200 earthquakes in West Texas in 2021, double the number observed in 2020, this is no longer a theoretical debate. Earthquakes are now affecting West Texas cities from Pecos to Big Spring on a weekly basis. The Texas Railroad Commission, the main Texas oil and gas regulator, has responded in a pragmatic, data-driven way by severely limiting wastewater disposal in parts of six counties, affecting how millions of barrels of oil are produced per day.

RRC is a storied Texas corporation founded in 1891 to organize first the railroad and then the nascent oil industry. For 130 years, the CRC has been central to protecting the nation’s standing as the unofficial capital of American energy, and in protecting its environment and communities. The seismic data used by the RRC is collected by the seismic software TexNet. In 2015, the Texas Legislature headed by Governor Abbott passed a law that created TexNet to scientifically identify the causes of increased seismic activity through the collection and analysis of continuous seismic data. The rapid rise in West Texas earthquakes has prompted regulatory action based on data from the Regional Research Center to mitigate induced earthquakes while still facilitating the development of the state’s most important energy asset.

Over the past two years, the Water Recycling and Recycling Center has organized and encouraged the development of water recycling and storage facilities by numerous clients. These facilities recycle the produced water for use in the completion process thus reducing reliance on deep well injection into basement formations where fault lines exist. The RRC has also developed strict commercial recycling permit standards known as Section 6-H11 (“Div.6-H11”). These rules are necessary because they protect West Texas aquifers, waterways, and ecosystems from productive water pollution. The water produced typically contains oil, chemicals left over from the hydraulic fracturing process, suspended solids and, when improperly stored, can create toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. Commercially permitted recycling facilities operating under Section 6-H11 are held accountable by strict reporting, linkage, engineering, monitoring and other standard RRC regulations.

Over the last months of 2021, RRC responded more aggressively with first-of-its-kind seismic response measures that severely limit deep-well wastewater injection into seismically active areas, particularly around the Odessa Midland population centers. These measures encouraged the safe recycling of wastewater or at least its redirection away from population centers and seismic accumulations.

To understand these actions, it is important to understand how Permian Basin operators have managed billions of barrels of fresh water and wastewater over the past decade and how it has evolved.

Permian Basin Supply Chain (2010)

In the early 2010s, operators used fresh water from local aquifers to begin single-well development operations. Upon completion, the wastewater byproduct was trucked to local disposal wells for injection. In the early days of shale, there were very few seismic-induced tremors and it wasn’t really understood. By the late 2010s, multiple well development technologies had materially improved efficiency but also increased the demand for fresh water for fracking and deep well injectors for wastewater disposal.

Permian Basin Supply Chain (2020)

While additional water infrastructure was built to handle the increasing industrial demands, the water reservoirs supporting the Permian Basin began sending a distress signal: aquifers began to deteriorate and injection formations began to vibrate. RRC was quick to act. Today’s water supply chain depends less on fresh aquifers and more on the consumption of recycled produced water. The water produced now travels almost exclusively through the pipeline, rather than by truck, to recycling or disposal facilities away from population centers or concentrated earthquake areas.

Make no mistake about it, brine draining from deep wells is here to stay. With more than 2,000 active disposals in Texas, it is an essential tool in the management of produced wastewater. However, with data-based regulations and considered stewardship, the RRC has encouraged operators to be better stewards of the Permian Basin by either recycling produced water when possible or moving it to disposal sites outside population centers or seismic agglomerations when it is not. Thank you, Chairman Wayne Christian, Commissioner Christy Kraddick and Commissioner Jim Wright for your thoughtful leadership of the Permian Basin, its people, and its resources.

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Jason Gennaro is the CEO of Breakwater Energy Partners. The breakwater has constructed the largest commercially permitted productive water recycling facility in the state of Texas. He holds master’s degrees from Harvard and Georgetown.

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