The severe drought this year has heightened concerns about drillers' heavy water usage for hydraulic fracturing of natural gas and oil wells in areas such as the Barnett Shale in North Texas and the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas.
Enter recycling.Fountain Quail Water Management, based in Roanoke in southern Denton County, has become a leader in the still-evolving and growing industry of recycling a portion of the water used in "fracking" wells, as well as recycling some "produced water" that comes up a wellbore along with gas.The company is buttressing its operations with the development of a compact, highly mobile unit, appropriately dubbed the Rover, for primary treatment, or "pre-treatment," of the salty wastewater created while completing natural gas and oil wells. Pre-treatment is the first processing step in making the water suitable for reuse. For example, the recycled wastewater is often used in fracking additional wells.When a Barnett Shale gas well is fractured, 2 million to 3 million gallons of water, along with a large volume of sand and a lesser quantity of chemicals, are pumped down a wellbore under high pressure to create fractures in rock, through which gas can flow into the wellbore.On a typical Barnett Shale gas well, roughly 10 to 20 percent of the water used in fracking might come back up the well as "flowback water" that can be recycled.The Rover "is a system you can basically drive from well pad to well pad," said Luke Thomas, vice president of business development for Fountain Quail, a subsidiary of Aqua-Pure Ventures, based in Calgary, Alberta.In a statement, Aqua-Pure Chairman Richard Magnus said, "We believe this technology, which enables producers to recycle water on demand near the wellhead, will quickly become a widely accepted practice in our industry."The first Rover has been tested at a gas well wastewater recycling operation near Ponder in Denton County and will soon be dispatched elsewhere, Thomas said. The testing was done in conjunction with Devon Energy, the largest producer in the natural gas-rich Barnett Shale. Oklahoma City-based Devon has had a long-standing arrangement with Fountain Quail to treat and recycle part of its well wastewater.Over the next year, Fountain Quail plans to build a fleet of at least 10 Rover units, Thomas said.Fountain Quail has been expanding rapidly in the past year and now has operations in three major shale-drilling fields: the Barnett, the Eagle Ford and Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale.It is also establishing operations in the Fayetteville Shale gas field in Arkansas.In the pre-treatment process, contaminants such as dirt, clay, metals, and traces of oil and chemicals are removed.A single Rover unit has the capacity to pre-treat 10,000 barrels of wastewater per day, Fountain Quail said.After the Rover unit pre-treats the wastewater, what is left is clean brine that "may be used for a broad range of drilling operations," Fountain Quail says on its website.For example, "some producers in the Marcellus blend the [brine] water with fresh water to obtain a desired water content for reuse," Thomas said.The Rover can be used independently or in tandem with Fountain Quail's Nomad mobile evaporation units that can produce distilled fresh water that can be used in fracking additional wells and a concentrated salty solution that can be used as a "kill fluid" to contain gas pressure when work needs to be done inside a wellbore or at the surface.Online: www.fountainquail.comJack Z. Smith, 817-390-7724Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
