Fracking Uses Huge Volumes of Water in Places Where It’s Dangerously Scarce
If you invest six minutes into the video in this article, you’ll learn that, unless something changes, 30 towns in West Texas will have run out of water by the end of the year. Not only are they suffering a terrible and long-lasting drought (that some believe is the result of climate change) but, ironically, they’re offering up a huge percentage of their water supply for use in fracking for oil and gas, a process that requires many millions of gallons per site. It has to come from somewhere, and it’s being sucked out from the dwindling reserve in their wells.
It’s hard to believe that the world is sitting around watching calamities like this unfold.
Craig,
It’s important to realize what is, and what is not, a lot of water. A few million gallons might seem to be a lot for a single user, but it’s small potatoes compared to farming or power generation.
A GW fossil fuel plant would use something along the lines of 2-4 TRILLION gallons of water in a year. A single inch of rain over 50 acres of land (50 “acre-inches”) is more than a million gallons of water.
Each of those townships that is running dry probably rest on ~100,000 acres or more… So if any of those townships had had just one additional inch of rain/year over the past 5 years (Texas has been ~10-20 inches/year below the expected rainfall over the past 5 years), they could have justified ~1000 additional fracked wells, but <100 kW worth of fossil power generation.
If Texas shifts from coal and natural gas (and nuclear) to wind and PV solar (geothermal and solar thermal have similar water consumption issues to those seen in fossil generation), they would save far more water than they would if they were worrying about fracking.
Of course, if they glassed-in a lot of their agriculture they'd save more water still, as that is BY FAR the greatest water consuming human-support activity.
😉