Water...and Oil

I recently watched a documentary on television that explored a conflict between land owners and oil companies in Colorado. More than half a century ago, the oil companies began obtaining the rights to explore and extract oils and gases from beneath the land. The landowners who signed these rights away could see no harm, and potentially much profit, from doing so. What mattered a drilling rig here and there on such a vast expanse of land? Now, it seems, it matters.

Oil companies have gradually and steadily accumulated the rights to drill and extract from a huge percentage of the privately owned (and some public) lands in the western United States, and California is no exception. Over the span of years there appears to have been relatively little conflict between land owners and oil companies. Yes, there have been spills and there have been complaints, but with the presence of foreign oil at reasonable prices home reserves have been used moderately and extraction processes have involved minimal impact. For the landowner an ameliorating affect has always been the greed side of the equation; the possibility that the big strike will be on your land, when at once you become a partner with the oil company and realize the wealth that comes from oil profits. But there is less tip-toeing around the bore hole these days. On the downslope of the oil industry, resources that had been overlooked before are drawing new attention and new technologies are being applied. The mood is a bit more desperate. 

Enter 'fracking', the common term for hydraulic fracturing. Simply, the process injects pressurized fluids into bore holes to cause the rock to fracture and release the gas and oil it contains. Proppant in the fluid, usually consisting of sand or ceramic grains, keeps the fractures from closing again after the pressure is released. The instant of the fracturing of the rock has been compared to a small earthquake, a thought that makes those of us living along the San Andreas fault understandably nervous. The gas that is released makes its way to the surface, is piped to compressor stations to purify it, and is then piped on to the consumer. The fracking fluid that returns to the surface is stored by various means and/or trucked away. A portion of it is never recovered and remains under ground. 

The documentary that I viewed highlighted some problems from fracking. There was a spillover from a pool of used fracking fluid into a river, the open air burning of volatile and harmful waste gases, new bubbles of methane gas appearing in a rancher's field, and, most concerning, the contamination of water supplies. A particularly memorable film clip showed a man positioning a lighter near his open tap and the 'water' instantly igniting becoming a flaming torch. 

A reader who enjoyed my recent article "The Prophets of Doom" will remember that one of the five projected potential causes for the demise of the United States discussed in that forum was lack of potable water. Anyone who lives in the western slopes drainage area has historically been hyper aware of the need to protect our water supplies. 

So the question arises, where does the waste water that does not return to the surface after fracking go? Particularly in relationship to the aquifers upon which communities rely for their water supplies. This question, and the presence of several new drilling rigs and increased activity in the Cat Canyon oil reserve area above our own San Antonio Creek drainage area prompted me to engage in some research. 

Never a geology major, I had always imagined that an aquifer was a huge pristine lake of pure water existing in a specific location somewhere under my feet which when emptied would leave a large hole in the ground. Some aquifers are like that, I learned, but most are essentially an underground drainage system in which water is contained, seeping gradually out along a path of least resistance through fractured rock formations and gravels until it either bubbles to the surface, joins a river, or empties into the sea. The key to maintaining a successful aquifer is replenishment: it must fill at the same rate it is emptied. Replenishment can come from rivers and streams, from ice and snow melt, and from state water.

Ground water is the sole source of water supply to the San Antonio Basin, specifically deep percolation rainfall and stream seepage. There are no surface diversions and there are no deliveries of state water to the basin. A 2003 analysis by the CRCD confirmed a study begun in 1942 and updated in 1999 which estimated an average annual overdraft of 9500 AFY (Acre Feet per Year). Input to the basin is an estimated 15,000 AFY annually. You do the math. Imagine soaking in a full bathtub kept cozy by warm water from the tap and draining at the same rate that the water enters. Now imagine the drain is opened so that the outflow is increased to one and a half times the inflow. How long until you are sitting in an empty tub covered in soap? Agriculture is the heaviest user of the water supply, no surprise here, some 20,000 AFY annually. By contrast, the town of Los Alamos uses a mere 270 AFY. 

Having established the tenuous nature of the water supply in my aquifer, I turned my attention to the quality of the water. I learned that the average quality is estimated at a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) concentration of 710mg/l (milligrams in one liter). But that's an average. As the water seeps from east to west down the Los Alamos Valley its TDS load increases. At the far western reach of the aquifer lies the Barka Slough, a wetland created by a surfacing consolidated rock formation that underlies the valley. Here the TDS is 3780 mg/l., in contrast to the extreme eastern end measured at 263 mg/l. What happens? The ground water absorbs contaminants  from agricultural return flow and the dissolution of soluble minerals which accumulate as the water moves westward under the valley floor.

There is also evidence of poor quality connate (water trapped in rock when it formed) water in fracture zones in underlying bedrock beneath the valley, an ever present but unavoidable hazard. 

Now let's return to the resurgence of oil recovery activity in the Los Alamos Valley above the San Antonio Groundwater Basin. Vencoco reports (February 2011) drilling two horizontal wells in the Santa Maria basin (the adjacent aquifer) and "awaits four-stage fracs expected in a few weeks". Their interest is in the Miocene Monterey formation, a biogenic deposit underlying the California Coast Ranges, Transverse Ranges, and adjacent basins. It is a rich petroleum preserve, newly available now that oil companies have "cracked the code" of shale oil recovery. In fact, the U.S. Energy Administration expects oil production to climb from "5.4 million b/d in 2009 to 5.7 million b/d in 2035, most from more enhanced oil recovery and oil-bearing shale plays onshore". Drill, baby, drill, indeed! 

The EPA is uncertain enough of the dangers that they have launched a study "to understand the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and drinking water resources". The study is expected to be completed by 2014. We can't know exactly which chemicals are injected into bore holes to cause fractures because each company has its own formula and guards it carefully, in much the same way your grandmother guards her famous brownie recipe. Oil companies are exempted from revealing the precise formulas. The bill that would reverse this secrecy, the Frac Act, has sat in committee in Congress for two years.    

In the Southern Los Alamos Valley oil fields the Monterey formation has been tapped at depths of 1400 feet to 4000 feet. Safety from water contamination is in depth: Marcellus shale fracking in Pennsylvania is done at depths of 8000 feet, creating substantial separation from groundwater aquifers. Now, four miles north of Los Alamos, within a few hundred yards of San Antonio Creek, another drilling operation is underway. Nitrogen trucks, a curtained site between the creek and the drilling operation, and many large container trucks are on site.  Nitrogen has many uses in oil production and one of them is using its high pressure characteristics in hydraulic fracturing. And a frac job involves as much as a million gallons of surface derived water, water that is already in overdraft in the Los Alamos valley.

I have taken my own advice and made myself aware of the water supply facts in my own community. The facts are disconcerting. But no more so than the tenuous water futures around the state, the country, and the world. And I can't help wondering how we can justify the risk to diminishing water supplies in order to obtain an energy source that by its use must necessarily contribute to Global Warming and thus continue the cycle that is diminishing our water supply. Without water, the benefits offered by this energy source do me very little good.