OI LFI E LD WATE R MANAG E M E NT
Gravity’s Hull saltwater disposal (SWD), located in Howard County, Texas, can inject up to 50,000 bbl/day of produced water
back into the earth. However, the company says it has been able to reduce the injection volumes needed at the Hull SWD to
around 21,000 bbl/day thanks to increased produced water reuse projects with E&P companies.
networks and large-scale recycling and water treatment facilities.
Establishing an extensive network of pipelines and treatment
facilities is a key step to creating that circular economy of water
management, which can help to reduce the need to draw from
freshwater aquifers.
“What the Evolution Pipeline System allows XRI to do is move
approximately 500,000 barrels of water per day from the central
Midland Basin — where there remain seismic concerns and
defined seismic response areas — down to Reagan County and
Uptown counties, where XRI owns and operates full-cycle water
infrastructure in the southern portion of the Midland Basin,” Mr
Durand explained. “When we move water to those counties, where
there’s been minimal disposal injection historically, we are trans-
porting significant water quantities up and down XRI’s pipeline
infrastructure, treating the produced water and moving treated
recycled water to operators who want to minimize or avoid dis-
posal throughout the basin.” The company is currently developing
a similar set of projects in the Delaware Basin.
Further, it also hopes to provide financial incentives for E&P
companies to move away from water disposal, by providing
treated produced water for its operator clients at a lower cost per
barrel than the injection of water into disposal wells. “At XRI, we
have always viewed disposal of water as a last resort only, and
that philosophy and practice is not going to change,” Mr Durand
stated. “It is critical that industry continues to embrace recycle
and beneficial reuse as technologies continue to emerge.”
Today, XRI handles almost 1.5 million bbl/day of produced
water , which is treated at one of 30 water recycling facilities
throughout the Permian Basin. “Disposal avoidance will continue
to gain importance as a key metric of success,” he said.
Disposal wells will likely still be important in
foreseeable future
Gravity personnel discuss operations at the Long 350 SWD in
Howard County. The company says its field personnel now
often see up to 100,000 bbl/day of produced water volumes
being shifted back and forth between Gravity’s SWDs and ac-
tive reuse projects, all located on the company’s 500,000 bbl/
day Howard County Super System.
32 Gravity Water Midstream is the water management business of
Gravity Oilfield Services, which also runs a power rental solutions
business. Its water management solutions include high-volume
sourcing, pipeline transport, reuse and disposal through a net-
work of fluid logistics assets and infrastructure. That includes
fresh and brackish water storage pits, produced water gathering
and freshwater sourcing pipelines, and saltwater disposal wells.
The company owns almost 300 miles of pipeline, 53 saltwater
disposal wells, and 12 fresh and brine water facilities with over 6
million bbl of storage capacity. Gravity also has multiple produced
water recycling assets, some of which are mobile and can be
moved around within its system based on E&P activity.
The business is operated in three parts, said Trace Hight, Chief
Commercial Officer of Water Infrastructure. The first is a sourcing
segment that delivers frac water to the field; the second focuses
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OI LFI E LD WATE R MANAG E M E NT
on gathering produced water into a disposal network; and the
third is a produced water reuse business. It’s the reuse business
that is growing strongly, he said, with E&P customers requesting
to recycle more of the produced water that Gravity gathers before
treating and transporting it back to the field.
In fact, that reuse business now constitutes more than half of
all sourcing the company does. Year to date, 53% of the water the
company has provided for hydraulic fracturing has been gathered
and recycled by Gravity within its own systems before being
piped back out to the field.
The company says it is also working to maximize water usage
between operators. “If we have additional water volumes in our
systems where we can identify a beneficial use for that water with
other customers, we will move those volumes to them instead of
disposing of the water,” Mr Hight explained. “We are always trying
to optimize that water within our systems before running out of
options and having to inject it back into the formation.”
Still, Mr Hight said he believes disposal wells will continue to
be important for the foreseeable future. “Injection back into the
formation is sometimes the most cost-effective solution for this
water,” he noted. “With something like evaporation, for example,
we can’t come close to managing the barrels we process each day.
The more reuse we perform for our customers, the less freshwater
that has to be pulled out of the ground for a hydraulic fracturing
job or injected back into the ground. This is a win-win for every-
one.” This doesn’t mean that the industry shouldn’t continue to
examine beneficial reuse for produced water, a practice that is
still in its early stages. “We continue to look for other ways we
can use this water that are beneficial to all stakeholders,” he
explained. “Can we, for example, treat the water sufficiently, recy-
cle it and use it for irrigation for farming? As we look at droughts,
water shortages and population growth in Texas, can we use this
water to help with the state’s water problems?”
A willingness to invest will be critical, as will open-minded-
ness to looking at the water management discipline differently.
“We need to find those opportunities to run pilot projects to fully
gauge the impact and long-term viability of beneficial reuse,”
he remarked. “It will be difficult to determine the economics of
transporting the water from where it’s at to where it may be ben-
eficially reused, and which party or parties are able to bear that
financial burden.”
The key for now, Mr Hight concluded, is finding a balance that
allows E&P companies to advance sustainability while achieving
their economic goals — mostly through lowering their drilling and
completion costs — and rising to meet the ESG mandate of creat-
ing positive impacts in the communities where they are active.
Integrated water management process
TETRA Technologies, an energy services and technology com-
pany, believes that water management in the upstream oil and
gas industry requires an integrated solution uniting capabilities
in sand management, automated water treatment and recycling,
and water transfer.
One of the company’s patented technologies for water manage-
ment is the TETRA SandStorm, an advanced cyclone technol-
ogy that separates the solids and sands from the fluids during
flowback. The proprietary design provides centrifugal action to
accelerate and capture smaller particles while remaining under
erosive velocities of the multiphase flow, with no flow restriction.
Sand in the flow stream has long been an industry concern, as
it can cause damage to everything from the casing to downhole
equipment and even to downstream facilities, resulting in poten-
tial loss of or delay in production. The technology is designed to
increase the frac sand and solids capture with higher efficiency
than traditional sand separators and cyclonic sand traps. It also
captures much smaller particles, down to lower-single-digit
micron size.
“We’re eliminating over 99% of the sand and proppant that’s
coming back from these produced wells using the TETRA
SandStorm system,” explained Jon Malone, Director of Business
Development. “This has a great benefit for our customers because,
by significantly reducing that sand content, we’re effectively
eliminating the risk of it damaging their production and topside
equipment.” Further the system can be automated through a
series of values and chokes to reduce personnel exposure and
HSE risk by reducing the need to manually disconnect compo-
nents and clean them.
Another critical step of the integrated water management pro-
cess is water reuse or recycling, which involves treating the pro-
duced water to a certain key performance indicator so that it can
be used during completions and hydraulic fracturing operations.
Because of the industry’s need to reduce freshwater use and the
wide variance in water quality and consistency across subsurface
saline water, produced water and effluent water, the company has
seen substantial growth in this business. In fact, it hit a milestone
of 8 billion gallons of treated and recycled water within 2022.
One technology that recycles and treats the produced water is
the SwiftWater Automated Treatment system (SWAT). It encom-
passes a combination of technologies and processes, including
automated chemical injection into the influent produced water
stream; a clarification process that uses dissolved air flotation
technology to remove suspended matter from the water; and a low
media consumption filtration technology that polishes the water.
Once the produced water has sand removed and is treated,
the company looks at how to transfer the water most effectively
from the reuse facility to the completions site. Its TETRA Steel, a
double-jacketed lay-flat hose that was introduced to the market in
2012, has a higher pressure rating than that of conventional lay-
flat hoses to enable a faster rate of water transport.
“TETRA Steel lay-flat hose was our entrant into that premium
product space, as we saw that the industry was transferring
more and more water via lay-flat hose versus buried pipeline
infrastructure,” Mr Malone explained, noting the HSE benefits for
operator personnel by eliminating the need to bury pipeline in
the ground.
The company is also working on new upgrades for the TETRA
Steel hose to make it lighter and to make its couplings more resis-
tant to corrosion. Additionally, construction of the hose material
will be more robust and resistant to wear, Mr Malone said.
“With more water being moved through lay-flat hose, we see
that market growing, so we want to ensure we provide a technol-
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