Fracking produces millions of barrels of wastewater every day in Texas. Some companies want to use it to irrigate farms.
The West Texas oil and gas industry has a problem: It has too much water.
This isn’t clean water, though. It’s a byproduct of fracking, a form of oil and gas extraction where pressurized fluid is injected into the earth to crack open ancient fossil fuel deposits, which — along with oil and gas — often contain water.
In the Permian basin, an 86,000-square-mile geological formation spanning parts of Texas and New Mexico, about 6 million barrels of oil are pumped each day, creating upwards of 24 million barrels of wastewater.
The industry term for this wastewater is “produced water,” when the pressurized fluid from fracking mixes with the naturally forming water below-ground. For every one barrel of oil extracted there’s about four barrels of produced water, which contains high levels of salt, chemical additives, and metals like radium and arsenic.
Produced water is usually dealt with by injecting it back into the ground. But space to store this polluted water through deep well injection in the Permian Basin is running out. This has led some companies to experiment with other options, like treating the water and using it for agricultural uses.
While not yet ready for widespread use on farms, some oil and gas companies are optimistic it could soon be implemented — but produced water researchers and environmental advocates worry it’s being rushed without knowing the full impact on the land.
One of the state’s largest produced water pilot projects is currently being conducted by Texas Pacific Water Resources. They’re a subsidiary of Texas Pacific Land Corporation, the largest landowner in the Permian Basin, which makes money through royalty interests from oil and gas production.
Right now, Texas Pacific Water Resources is trying to determine how many toxic compounds Texas farmland could withstand if it were irrigated with produced water. To figure this out, in 2023 they started small greenhouse experiments with 12 different planter boxes growing native grasses and alfalfa. Each box contained different combinations of soil types from Reeves and Loving counties in West Texas; they were irrigated with varying qualities of produced water.
“We did start seeing some accumulations [of dissolved solids] in the soil, and we started noticing some decline in the crop quality by the end of the study as well,” said Adrianne Lopez, research and development manager at Texas Pacific Water Resources.
“What would be the impact on the soil and in the microbes, and also on the groundwater quality? That is ongoing research.”
This happened when the planter boxes were irrigated with water that had total dissolved solids (TDS) at 1,500 parts per million. TDS is the number of organic and inorganic materials like metals or salts that are dissolved in a certain amount of water.
The TDS of produced water from the Permian Basin is about 120,000 parts per million before it’s treated. The drinking water guidelines in the U.S. for the maximum level deemed safe to drink is 500 parts per million, according to the Safe Drinking Water Foundation. Texas Pacific Water Resources’ standard for their treated water is anything under 500 parts per million, according to Lopez.
“The desired TDS for us is below about 300 parts per million,” Lopez said. “And I’d say the upper limit of what we would accept coming out of the treatment is 500 parts [per million].”
To do this, they use reverse osmosis and thermal desalination systems to remove the salts from the water. It then goes through a second treatment process to get rid of more toxic compounds that can pass through desalination systems, like ammonia, boron, and benzine.
In 2024, Texas Pacific Water Resources took their experiment outdoors. Using about an eighth of an acre, they planted alfalfa and irrigated different sections of it with varying qualities of treated water.
“We know it is going to be expensive to treat this [wastewater]. After it’s all said and done, can it even be done economically?”
“Our goal was to find a crop that could uptake a lot of water since the whole purpose of beneficial reuse and desalination is to get rid of a lot of water that oil and gas is running out of space to dispose of,” Lopez said. Alfalfa proved to be the best crop for this because it can hold up in the tough West Texas climate.
Now, Texas Pacific Water Resources is building a 10,000-barrel-per-day water treatment facility that will expand on their alfalfa and native grass experiments. They’re testing to see how many chemicals could be in the water without harming the soil.
“We’re looking at if the treated produced water has those constituents [like ammonia] in the water, and if we apply it to the ground, what the degradation, absorption, fate, and transport of those constituents in the soil will be,” said Pei Xu, a civil engineering professor at New Mexico State University. Xu is the research director for the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium, which Texas Pacific Water Resources has been collaborating with to conduct their soil and crop research.
“What would be the impact on the soil and in the microbes, and also on the groundwater quality? That is ongoing research,” Xu said.
A High Price Tag
But even as these treatment facilities scale up, some are concerned it’s still not a cost-effective alternative to storing produced water underground. That’s according to Dan Mueller, a water resources engineer who worked for the Environmental Defense Fund for more than a decade on produced water management issues in the Permian Basin.
He’s worried that there hasn’t been enough pilot testing to predict the exact cost of treating potentially millions of barrels of produced water every day.
“We know it is going to be expensive to treat this [wastewater],” Mueller said. “So after it’s all said and done, can it even be done economically?” Yet Texas Pacific Water Resources isn’t too concerned about the price because they anticipate produced water treatment will be a growing interest in the Permian Basin as disposal space underground becomes scarce.
“Right now, with a 10,000-barrel a day pilot, we’re not necessarily going to see all of those economies of scale yet because it’s still so small,” Lopez said. “But as it gets higher into the 50,000-barrel a day treatment systems to the 100,000-or-more-barrel a day systems, those costs are going to drop quickly as those sites get bigger.”
Proximity Problems
But even if produced water gets cheaper to treat, figuring out how to even get it to farmers will be another hurdle.
There’s very little farmland in the Permian Basin because of how dry the region is, which means Texas Pacific Water Resources would have to find a way to transport the treated water to farmers 100 miles away — or incentivize them to move closer.
One way to do this could be to allow surface water discharge of treated produced water, Lopez said. Texas Pacific Water Resources is currently seeking a surface water discharge permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) that would let them release treated water into the Pecos River Watershed in West Texas.
But the company has yet to get approval for this permit, which was submitted in February of 2024. They’re also waiting to hear back on a land application permit from the Railroad Commission of Texas, which would allow them to irrigate with produced water.
Recently passed Senate Bill 1145 could make that more challenging for them: The new legislation, which went into effect September 1, changes jurisdiction of land application permits for oil and gas operations from the Railroad Commission to the TCEQ. That means there could be different produced water standards Texas Pacific Water Resources will be required to meet.
Texas Pacific Water Resources has to find a way to transport the treated water to farmers 100 miles away — or incentivize them to move closer.
“We don’t know what their standards [for treated water] are going to look like,” Lopez said. “Once we get a permit from TCEQ, then we’ll have a better idea of how different the specs are going to be from surface water use to land application.”
Lopez is confident that their research has proved they can safely use treated water for a variety of purposes — including irrigation — but some environmental advocates say it’s being pushed too quickly.
“It feels like we’re rushing ahead of what we actually know,” said Evgenia Spears, water program coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Texas Lone Star chapter. They’re part of the Texas Produced Water Consortium that’s studying the economics and technology for treating produced water, and helps inform legislation like Senate Bill 1145.
While the Sierra Club supports the intent of that bill — which will allow the TCEQ to grant land application permits for produced water treatment projects — they don’t think it provides enough clarity on how those projects will be managed.
“The bill allows for the use of produced water in agriculture, but there is no clear system in place for the monitoring of environmental impacts associated with land application of produced water,” Spears said. “And there are no enforcement mechanisms in the language of the bill as it passed.”
The Sierra Club is pushing for clarity on these issues during the upcoming rulemaking that will dictate how SB 1145 is implemented.
“We want to make sure that there are standards that TCEQ has in place before we embark on agricultural reuses of produced water,” Spears said.
