Denton Record Chronicle
Sunday, Feb. 4, 2007
By Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe / Staff Writer

Water suppliers and individual Denton County residents who rely on wells may find increasing competition for their drinking water, according to a study recently released by the Texas Water Development Board. As a result, the county may be on track for a groundwater protection district.

The board commissioned the study as a postscript to the state’s new 50-year water plan, which didn’t evaluate the current clash between residential, municipal and industrial water wells. The failure of many private and some municipal water wells last year prompted the research.

Although some failures could be attributed to the drought, many people also pointed to the millions of gallons used to fracture and release natural gas from the Barnett Shale as part of the problem.

The study found that, overall, the future needs of gas drillers made up a small percentage of the total water needed for the area, from as little as 3 percent to as much as 13 percent, depending on the data and model. However, the study also conceded that the industry quenched its thirst about 60 percent of the time with fresh groundwater, often drawing from the same areas where rural users also depend solely on wells.

By 2025, gas drillers could need as much as 25,000 acre-feet per year, or about 75 percent of the annual capacity projected to come from Ralph Hall Lake, the study reported.

Bob Mace, director of the board’s groundwater division, said that because Texas laws don’t stop any landowner from drilling for water, there’s currently no way to address the problem.

“It’s like survival of the fittest out there,” with regards to wells and groundwater, Mace said. Whoever gets to the underground water first, wins, he said.

The board will continue to monitor problems, he said, and possibly include the estimates of water shortages in future plans. But the board’s powers of persuasion are limited to its ability to fund, or not to fund, water development projects that would bring new sources of groundwater or surface water, he said.

Instead, Mace said he believes a proposed plan by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which identifies areas that need a groundwater protection district, could go a long way toward addressing the problem. The commission identified Denton County as one of many Barnett Shale counties needing a district.

A groundwater protection district would control the amount of water that could be taken from all the wells in the district in a designated amount of time.

Under the proposed plan, once a county has been identified as needing a district, county leaders have two years to form one. If they don’t, the commission would form the district.

While the oil and gas industry is currently exempt from groundwater districts, Mace wasn’t sure how long that would last.

“It’s hard to know what the Legislature will do with this,” Mace said. Years ago, Texas outlawed underground flooding for oil exploration due to the amount of water it used.

Representatives of Devon Energy said they were watching the proposed changes in groundwater protection rules “with interest.”

“Any solution to water problems needs to incorporate all users,” said Phil Cook, Devon’s operations manager in the Barnett Shale region.

Cook said that the company has been working on solutions to the problem, including recycling production water for reuse in the field. The company is testing two different systems and, when they are all in use, can recycle about 2 acre-feet per day.

The company also is looking at the possibility of using saltier water for operations, but that has complications that need to be sorted out before the company can adopt any of them widely, he said. For example, the industry would have to figure out how to neutralize the salt water before its use in gas drilling, as salt would corrode some of the drilling machinery.

David Burnett, a petroleum engineer at Texas A&M University who developed one of the recycling systems, said even with the widest possible use, recycling production water would reduce demand for water by only about 30 percent.

He criticized the board, saying officials should work to more widely publish and disseminate water maps that would steer the industry toward abundant sources of more brackish water and ultimately away from drinking water. He said off-the-shelf technology to use the saltier water was already there, but the industry was too slow to change. “They’ve just never done it before,” Burnett said.