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Planning for Future Water with Ben Samuels · Conservation Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:12
  Speaker B: Welcome back to another episode of Conservation Stories. This is a podcast brought to you by the Sandhill Area Research Association, Sarah, as we like to call it. I'm your host, Hillary Timmins Sims, and I am joined today by Ben Samuels. Ben works with the produced water, which we've had a couple of PODC on produce water before. But I'm really excited for Ben to be here because this is going to be more of an international look at this topic and deep dive into some of the policies and issues that are coming up. So, Ben, thank you so much for coming.
• 0:47
  Speaker A: Absolutely appreciate the time. Appreciate you giving me the opportunity to join you today.
• 0:51
  Speaker B: Well, and the nice thing is Ben's actually here in studio with us. We don't usually get to see people face to face, so that is really nice. Thanks for coming in. From Midland, correct?
• 0:59
  Speaker A: Absolutely. Yep. Midland. I've been out there for about 11 years now, and I'm trying to buck the trend of, of everything being on zoom. Wanted to sit here in studio face to face and think it's a fundamentally different feel.
• 1:09
  Speaker B: It really is. It really is. Thanks for being here. Well, can you give us a little bit of your background and, and tell us, you know, how you got involved with produced water? And so if people will probably remember that produced water is the water that we kind of call the new water that's being produced out of oil and gas production. Lots of that.
• 1:30
  Speaker A: Absolutely. It's become a really hot button issue and it's really, you know, there's a lot more on it than there has been in years past by way of sort of introduction to myself. Born and raised in Houston, went to undergrad in Boston, and then was, you know, really deciding what industry and where I wanted to be. I know I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, knew I wanted to be in an industry that was dynamic and had a lot of different touch points. And so oil and gas was a natural fit for that. And so back in 2014, went and got a post BA in professional land and Resource Management. And then I've had boots on the ground out in Midland ever since April of 2014. Started my career on the mineral side of the business, on the subsurface. And so I got a really good sense of those deals, how those are put together, those contracts. And the reason I bring up contracts is because as we talk about produced water more and more in this conversation, it really comes back to those contracts, how they're written. And there were a lot of those contracts in oil and gas leases that when they were written, they had no conception of that water was going to be as important as it is, and those minerals in that water were going to be as important as they are today and as they're going to continue to be in the near term. And so that also sort of led, you know, leads me into the career trajectory and transit transition. I spent about four or five years in minerals doing transactional work on behalf of a couple of private equity shops and some family offices. And back in 2017, 2018, I started to become a lot more interested and focus on the water and the surface side of the business because of some of those reasons, because it became or was becoming more and more of an issue, more and more of a topic.
• 2:57
  Speaker B: Of conversation in your entrepreneurial. And so people that think like entrepreneurs, they see stuff, they see it before other people see it.
• 3:05
  Speaker A: Trying to stay ahead of the curve.
• 3:07
  Speaker B: Right of the game. Exactly.
• 3:08
  Speaker A: And so, you know, I started doing more work on that side, and that started with advisory with some ranchers. And, you know, that was everything from beneficial reuse initiatives to how can we use the land that is available to the best of the our abilities. I think I'll briefly pause and talk about land stewardship, because I think that that really is the backbone. A lot of the things that I do now and a lot of the things. Or a lot of the ways that I think about these things.
• 3:30
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 3:30
  Speaker A: But I think may be a little bit of a. Maybe a misnomer around what stewardship is, in the sense that I'm a strong believer that we need to be looking at the natural resources and looking at the processes that we're employing to develop those natural resources in a way that future generations can take use of that and appreciate that. But at the same time, I think there's an important distinction of making sure that our processes and the strategies that we're employing today are actually beneficial for the stakeholders today. And I think that there's sometimes when you bring in all the stakeholders, you bring in the epa, you bring in local government, you bring in landowners, you bring in surface owners, you bring in mineral owners, and then you talk about operators, and there's a lot of people in that building that all need to be treated fairly. And, you know, how do you really go about crafting policies around these things when. And I'll pause here because I know that I'm saying a lot and I want to hear your thoughts as well, but I think all those policies and all those initiatives right now are backed up by things like the Colorado River Compact that is back in the 1920s. And you have a lot of these policies and initiatives that when they were put in place, they had really good initiative impetus and they were put in for the right reasons. But if we're still using those policies to manage and Govern Our water 100 years later, that invites a whole firestorm bucket of issues that you and I think have talked about often as well. And so I'll kind of stop there in deference, wanting to dig into any piece of that. But those are some of the things that I think about when coming to the table like this.
• 4:59
  Speaker B: No, it's so true. And, you know, I always think that the middle is usually right, kind of where the truth is, and it's the hardest place to find, you know, and keeping that balance on both side is so vital. And I think that's why for so many years here in our culture, people have been reluctant to be part of anything that would be considered environmental is because environmentalism kind of, you know, was started off way, way one way. It's. And I'm seeing it swing more towards the middle. Recently I heard, oh, someone from the Environmental Defense Fund say something in a meeting about farm economics that was actually correct. And I went up to him and said, I'm really confused. You're from the Environmental Defense Fund. And he said, no, I'm an, I'm an ag economist. Like an A&M ag economist and hired by them. And, you know, later on had a conversation with one of the Environmental Defense Funds upper staff about just how shocked I was. And they said, we've made a lot of mistakes. We've made a lot of mistakes, you know, because when you harm your current stakeholders, you're really not going to get anywhere. And, you know, I'm wearing today the shirt, you know, Mike's quote that says nobody, you know, he prefaces nobody understands what sustainability is. But stewardship is, you know, makes us responsible. It's a verb. It makes us responsible. And I, I was digging into that. Like, why does no one know what Stuart, what that means? Sustainability. I mean, I understood, you know, quickly, you know, in this space that if, if someone, if a company was asking a farmer to do something that was sustainable for the company, if it wasn't economically sustainable for the farm, it's worthless. It can't be sustained. And so you probably already aware, but that whole concept of sustainability started out of an economic method in the 90s that looked at that Venn diagram of where people planet and profit overlap. And that overlap is sustainability. And that, I think, is what you're getting to, which is we have to consider the present and the future.
• 7:20
  Speaker A: Absolutely. You know, I think when you say that, some of the things that percolate to the top of mind for me are, you know, we still live in a country where we are incentivizing large, large swaths of acreage that's owned and operated by farmers not to farm, not to plant crop, because there's political ramifications of that. But there's also, you need to, you know, regenerate the soil. And there's things, as an example, there's, I think there's a lot more alfalfa being planted out in the country right now because that, that plant takes the nitrogen out of the air and puts it back in the soil. But when you're doing that, if that, if that land has been cotton or corn in the past, you're not producing those, those other, you know, those other crops.
• 8:02
  Speaker B: Right.
• 8:02
  Speaker A: And so, you know, then you start to talk about, you know, the availability of the crop, but also going back to water. Alfalfa is substantively uses substantively less water than something, you know, something else that may take its place. And so I think again, going back to the water, you, when you talk about a state by state issue, Texas is a, is a right to capture state. You have Colorado, that's a riparian right state. And so you have all these other how are we managing the water? How are we allocating the water? And again, going back to the Colorado River Compact, which I think is a defining document in the water management in this country, how today are we defining reasonable use and how is the reasonable use definition we're using today, in practical terms, different than it was when that, when those words were written into the compact 100 years ago? And I think exactly, that's sort of an easy thing to say. But when you talk about the water management, you talk about water scarcity issues and you talk about stewardship, you really have to start at the basics. You really have to start with those definitions. Because if those definitions have fundamentally changed over the last hundred years, but they're still governing the water body the exact same way, you automatically have a divergence, right? Whether it be input, impetus or incentives, et cetera. And something I think about a lot, again, going back to the stewardship is all the stakeholders that what we're talking about. Unless there's aligned incentives across all of those stakeholders, you're really never going to get anywhere. You might get some iterative improvements, but you're really never going to take those quantum lease forward that we need.
• 9:28
  Speaker B: Right. And you may know that we helped milestone Environmental Services recently, just bringing awareness to how our energy waste regulations in Texas haven't been updated since the 80s, you know, and that's another example, you know, of how. But it is another example of also saying, how do you do this without hurting stakeholders? And apparently there were a few stakeholders that were like, this is going to be too harmful to us. So then surely there's a solution, you know, and there. There is. Which would be probably to just give them an out on some of those things. You know, you used a word earlier, nuance, and I think it was before we started recording, because we were discussing the. The recent Texas Monthly article on PFOS and chemicals and how often those articles don't get into the nuance of those issues. And it's difficult. People want there to be clearly defined black and white. And so often our issues are gray. And that makes people really uncomfortable because that gray means that there's truth on both sides. And that creates an ambivalence that makes people really uncomfortable. You know, how do we address that? You have any ideas on, like, how do we begin to, like, make that information available in a way that people want to listen? Because it seems like now if you aren't. If you're not writing something or presenting something in a way that emotionally upsets people, People. There's so many other things that are louder.
• 11:05
  Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think it's a really difficult challenge because, you know, we live in a world of what I like to kind of think of like goldfish attention. You know, we have fleeting. We have fleeting attention on things that are very important and the important issues. And until it's in our backyard, until we can see it, touch it, feel it, I don't think that people really realize it's an issue. And to compound that, I think the oil and gas industry is even worse at that. I think we have a tendency to, unless there's a problem, that we can see the fire and the fire is hot and the fire is growing, we can put it off till tomorrow. And I think we are waking up to a world where that we have to act because we are now at the place where unless we act, we're going to fundamentally see things start to break at the seams. And we really have already seen that if you look at the water levels in Lake Powell, if you look at the, you know, Arizona, in wide swaths of Arizona, they have. They have started to tell developers, real estate developers, you cannot build that subdivision because that's A subdivision will not have enough water to it. You know, in Texas, I don't know the number at current, but in years, you know, in recent years, there has been over 30% less water flow to the Rio Grande from places like the Pecos river and the Colorado river and things of that nature that are, you know, in the short term, okay, we have some stop gaps. We can figure it out on the iterative basis, we might be able to get through this year. But. But if those trends continue to happen and compound each other, you wake up with, again, you wake up with a problem that, that you're now way behind the eight ball.
• 12:32
  Speaker B: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And. And I've been reading through a book called Cadillac Desert. Have you read this book?
• 12:39
  Speaker A: I have not yet.
• 12:40
  Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. It is. I mean, it's kind of scathing in some ways. You know what I mean? And, but just, you know, his basic thesis is, you know, hey, now, here, here. We've been trying to desert, you know, to like, green a desert. And we were kind of reaching the limits of, of what we can do. He talks about these regulations that you're talking about, like all the things that were put in place to make water available to the west side of the country where it wasn't necessarily available. The cost, the corruption that went into all of that, and some of it, you know, we're just paying the price for now. It takes a lot of leadership. And I feel like that's not something necessarily that we see a lot. I know I'm super impressed with New Mexico's water plan. That is like, it's answering the immediate need. And what they're doing now will get them 40 years down the road, and then they have something coming. Even by that time something else is coming in. And it is a deep solution. Does that make sense? Like, you know, it's not just thinking like, we're going to provide for tomorrow or we're going to skip 40 years and then we'll have a solution.
• 13:52
  Speaker A: Absolutely. I think it's really critically important to have that roadmap, because with the roadmap, you can have the check and balance of where are we on the roadmap? And you can make pivots, you know, as needed. You know, I think there are some states, Texas being one of them, that are sort of adopting the hair on fire method, as I like to call it, of, okay, well, you know, we're going to fix today's problem and we'll fix tomorrow's problem tomorrow. And I think that that's a potentially Disastrous way to approach this because one of the cases that I think about that I don't think it's nearly enough attention and I'm going to mess up the exact case, but it was the case between Texas, New Mexico and the Fed related to the Elephant Butte Reservoir. And this was back, I think, I think this was 2016, 2017, give or take. And very long story short, Texas asked New Mexico to withhold a significant portion of their allocation of water because their reservoirs at the time were overflowing. They needed, they needed some, some diversion. They made a deal, and part of this flowed through some federal waters. And so the federal government was involved as well. They, they made a deal. Long. Again, long story short, Texas ended up calling on that water years down the road. And there had been so much, much evaporation from that water that New Mexico said, okay, well here's the water you have left. And again, without going too much in the details, there was about 65 to 70% of the water that Texas was expecting in that resource. And Texas going to Mexico is like, hey, where's the rest of it? Well, it evaporated.
• 15:14
  Speaker B: Evaporated.
• 15:14
  Speaker A: Who, who, who is responsible for that water? And I know that that seems like such a minutia detail and something that, oh, well, you know, that doesn't happen often enough for it to be. But I think it paints the picture of again, sort of the management on the regulation side of this. You really have to think years and years and years in advance because if you're not, you're going to wake up one day. And, and I mean, I remember going to California as a kid and I'm mid-30s, and when I was a kid, they were having times where you had to shut off water, you couldn't use the water, and they were having restrictions on lawn use for water, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We're now 25 years in the future. I know California is still doing that, but what other states are doing that? And the last thing I'll say before handing it back off to you is I think at the backbone, a lot of the things that we're talking about is I think we live in a world and we live in a, certainly in this country, we live in a society where water is treated as this ubiquitous, ubiquitous resource that will be there at any time I want, wherever I need it, at any, you know, at any level I need it, etc, and, and that's just not reality. We don't live in that world. And the people that are on like the Water side of the industry understand that. I think one of the major problems that our country is facing, to put it very simply, is we have enough water point blank in the country for everyone, but we certainly do not have enough water where it needs to be, when it needs to be at the places to be given to the people that need it.
• 16:38
  Speaker B: Right, right. And we've, we have not had the forethought to think of, you know, like Arizona saying, no, you can't put housing there. There is always a coordinating weakness to every strength that we have, you know, and part of that, the weakness to, you know, conservative people work. We're conservative, we're going to conserve money in the state of Texas. But the coordinating weakness to that is sometimes we wait too long to spend that money and then, then we have a big problem that we're having to fix where if we had been working on it all along, you know, and you know that also that we have that great strength of, you know, leaning into people and less government. But sometimes people have to be made to do stuff because we won't necessarily always do the right thing, nor will corporations always do the right thing. So there always has to be a balance, you know, and, and really what you're talking about is something that, when you're talking about water regulations that Senator Perry mentioned to me not long ago was that is there not someone, is there not an agency that's looking at every single water policy in every single state affecting every single river that we can go to? Because so the state of Texas goes to Mississippi or I'm sorry, to Louisiana and says, we want your water. Well, so have five other states, you know, and so who's, who's keeping track of who all is going to get, you know, Louisiana might know, but is there someone above them that needs to know as well? So we've gotten like, we are not even talking about produce order yet. I know, but this has been so good. I'm like, I appreciate your perspective because it really, really meshes well with, with what we see.
• 18:13
  Speaker A: And I think the other piece that I'd add to that is again, going back to the regulation and I'm not going to prognosticate about how to fix this or how to backpedal. But I will tell you that we currently live in a market and we live in a world where, let's say landowner Ted wants to sell what, he lives in Texas. He lives in the Texas New Mexico border and he wants to sell water to his farming neighbor on the other side of the, of the state line. He's not able to do that. It's not, it's not like he wants to or you come up with a. You're not able to send water across state lines in most instances and that's across the country. That's not just texting. I mean, in, you pick a state, they really, that water is meant for that state. And I think when you start to talk about moving water to where it needs to be, in the volumes it needs to be, etc. You need a more fleshed out water market. Currently, you know, there are states that have water markets that are actually truly defining water as a resource and have a monetary value, but most of the country is not doing right.
• 19:09
  Speaker B: Right. I think New Mexico, right. They have something that's going to be going to the legislature this year.
• 19:13
  Speaker A: Hopefully.
• 19:13
  Speaker B: So yes, we hope so. But. So produced water is water, but it's a whole different animal. It's a whole different animal. So give us a quick, short little what is produced water.
• 19:27
  Speaker A: So produced water at its very basic definition is the water that is produced alongside the oil and gas in the production process of oil and gas. You know, if you're in the business, you probably have a much better perspective on this. But the, there is a significant amount of water that's needed to drill wells that goes down hole along with the drilling equipment to drill the well. But there's a massive amount of water that comes out of the well during production and through the life of that well. You know, at the, there are places in the Permian basin where at the initial part, you know, steps of production, you're looking at a water cut. So for every barrel of oil and gas, there's three to five barrels of this water. Other places or down the life of a well when it's a little bit older that, you know, that split may be as much as 8 to 12 to 1. And so for every, you know, million barrels of oil produced, you have 12 million barrels of water that, that needs to be something needs to be done with it because it's not at a spec or it's not at a, it's.
• 20:29
  Speaker B: Not clean, it's not ready to be used.
• 20:30
  Speaker A: Right. It's not, it's not a level where you can really do much of anything with it. There are processes in place now where, where there are places that are in their pilot programs where you can use some of that water on non potable ag. And what I mean by that is, you know, it's ag products you're not eating. So that's Cotton, you know, hay, some of those other things. There are billions of gallons of water every year that we currently have no productive use for. And so some of that stuff ends up back down hole into the, the formation of it. So most of it. A lot of it, yeah, a lot of it, absolutely. I would say the vast majority of it ends up down hole either through, you know, a re injection into that well or through a saltwater disposal well and things of that nature. But you're starting to see, I think it goes back to what we were talking about. You're starting to see people wake up to this issue that we have. You know, we've had increased seismicity on the Permian Basin. That has become a larger and larger issue. But at the same time, going back to the stakeholders involved, you know, if you're a farmer and you've been farming cotton on your land for 60 years and you're used and you were used to making, you know, enough money to get by, you know, you weren't wealthy by any means, but, but you weren't wanting for anything in life. And then water came in the picture and you started selling fresh water to oil and gas operators and now you're making, you know, seven or eight figures years a year. If, if the right thing to do, if the responsible thing to do is for you to say, okay, well industry, I'm no longer shelling you any water as the landowner, are you really principled enough to make that decision? That also means that the check, you know, the money spigots being turned off and I think that those are some of the realities of the conversation that may not be getting as much attention that's interesting as they need because again this, this is a. Everybody's at the table here. Everyone has something to gain, but everybody's got something to lose as well. And I think that, you know, there's right something in the middle.
• 22:15
  Speaker B: So at several of the, the meetings we've been out, we'll see, you know, the usage, you know, who's using the water. And usually, you know, irrigation's way up there like 80%. But it, I've been surprised at how either sometimes it's like we don't really know how much oil is using. And I think how can we not know that? Surely we know that, you know, or it's like so significantly low that I go, I feel like it must be more than that. You know, I don't. But it doesn't like the significance of it seems, I mean, when I see it up on the numbers and then I know enough about oil and gas, I think I feel like we're oil and gas is using more water than that. But is it because so much of our new produced water is being recycled and reused?
• 23:02
  Speaker A: I'm going to try to answer that question succinctly because that's a really detailed question that I could really peel the onion back on. But I think the thing that I focus on the most when I hear that is I'll paint a specific example. Up until about four or five years ago, there had not been a comprehensive study of the Colorado river to understand where that water was actually being sent. There. There. There wasn't a good sense of how much volume there was. There wasn't a good sense on where it was being sent. And one of the things five years ago, four or five years ago, it hadn't been done since I think it was the 40s or 50s. And one of the reasons that I think that that's really important is because one of the things that they found in that study is that roughly 20% of the water that's flowed, flowing through the Colorado river at any one time is actually taken up and eaten, or quote, unquote, eaten by the vegetation that's on the riverbeds of the river. So there's no. So you take this assumption of, okay, well, there's this much water and you immediately have to take off 20% because of the vegetation. But in previous calculations, in previous numbers and previous, you know, ideations about how to manage this, that 20% was, okay, well, we have this available to allocate to where we want it. And I think what the reason I bring that up is because something you said earlier goes back to unless you have good quality data, and you have the good quality data from the right places, you, you are incapable of making decisions based on the data. Because if you're making decisions, decisions based on flawed data.
• 24:26
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 24:26
  Speaker A: They're going to have flawed.
• 24:28
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 24:29
  Speaker A: And so I think what, you know, what you're talking about is you really have to start from square one of what is the resource that we actually have available and then work backwards from there of the allocation and, and how to get to a place where you have all the stakeholders that are, again, going back to this aligned incentives idea. And I don't think it's that sort of pie in the sky as people make it seem. I think it just really takes a, a measured approach of making sure the data that you're getting is good quality data. And so going back to the court case, we Were talking about the cactus waters versus versus cog. I think, you know, for. For the lack, for the sake of brevity, for folks that may not be aware, what that court case is, is essentially on a Supreme Court in the federal level deciding right now who owns not necessarily the produced water, but the pore space where that produced water sits. And without getting too deep into the details, why that is important is because we didn't up until relatively recently realize that not only is there water being produced, but in that water there are critical minerals that now have intrinsic inherent value, like lithium and some other minerals that are being extracted. And so in years past, it wasn't really a contention point. It wasn't really a source. Nobody really wanted around the landowners and operators of this water because it needed to be something needed to be done with it. And so who wants that responsibility now that that conversation has fundamentally shifted over into, okay, well, there's a lot of stuff in that water. Who owns it, who's managing it. You know, when it comes out, it comes out a hole. And that goes, you know, to what we were talking about previously, about the contracts previously, oil and gas contracts may. May not have even addressed these things. The oil and gas contracts that you're signing today and that you're seeing today are explicit, explicitly mentioning things like lithium and these other things. And so again, going back to the aligned incentives and sort of, how do you manage this process? I think it takes a. I think it takes a process of where you really have to start from square zero, get all the data, and then, you know, the things like the New Mexico Produce Water Consortium, Texas Produce Water Consortium, those consortiums, what they're focused on is that sort of that new wave of how do you. How do you manage this resource and bring everyone together with that backdrop of that stewardship and making sure that the resources.
• 26:54
  Speaker B: Out here on the Texas plains, water is everything. And there's a resource that's as vital as it is fragile. Our plains lakes. These lakes are nature's reservoir, catching rainwater to recharge our aquifer and provide lifelines for wildlife. But now they need our help. In collaboration with the Texas Fly Lakes Conservation Initiative and the Cargill Global Water Challenge, Sarah has started the Our Legacy Is Tomorrow's Water initiative to inspire and work with landowners to restore and protect our playa lakes. Each playa we save helps secure a sustainable water future for the generations that will be coming after us. Whether it's improving soil health, restoring habitats, or recharging groundwater, we are committed to making a Difference. Together we can build a legacy that we can all be proud of. To learn how you can join in, visit the Playa Lakes Restoration Initiative page or on the SARAH website. Let's keep Texas water flowing strong for the future. Visit sara-conservation.com you know, so just for our listeners sake, one of the reasons why they're calling this new water is because it was water that was not really accessible until we were able to frack that new technology made oil that is in very small pore surfaces. I mean like Minnesota, you know, like I can remember the first time hearing about fracking and someone saying it's like sucking it out of this table. You know, it's basically that. So that's the reason why there's no place, you can't just say we'll just put it back. Because you don't just put it back in those little tiny places. Right? You know, so that's, that's the reason why it's new water and that's the reason why it can't go back to where it came from.
• 28:44
  Speaker A: In addition to that, you know, in the process of extracting it and it coming out of, of out of the ground, what's in that water and the salinity of that water and other things changes. And so you theoretically can put it back into the reservoir. But by doing that, if you're not marrying the exact biochemistry and what's in the water, you're going to fundamentally change the aquifer. And I'm not going to prognosticate good or bad, etc. But you are fundamentally changing it and that's inarguable. And so I think again, if you're looking at the stewardship and then you start to, and then I think that conversation, and we don't necessarily need to go there today, but I think that conversation sort of naturally leads into one of the other sort of hot button and topics, you know, topics of today, of the carbon capture. Because now when you remove that rock and remove that water and remove all the stuff that was in that reservoir in that, in that.
• 29:34
  Speaker B: And when we mean reservoir, we're not talking about like a big old swimming pool under the ground. We are not talking about that just so people understand we're talking about rock.
• 29:43
  Speaker A: Right? You know, the way I like to describe it is if you thought about a, a massive sand, you know, like the sand pit that you see at a playground and in that there was highly dense, very compacted rock in there, you're talking about basically that under, you know, 10, 10000ft under the ground. That has enormous pressures on it. Because one of the things we really, I don't think we've talked about yet is the pressure that you're dealing with as well. And, and that all those, all these things are now again, are now important that, you know, 10 years ago, I don't even know if people were talking about it.
• 30:15
  Speaker B: No, they weren't. Well, and, and what you're talking about, about impacting the aquifer is that these things have been there in the, quote, aquifer, but they're there in a way that they're contained and not contaminating or maybe they're filtered out in such a way, the water's moving in such a way so slowly that it, it's, it's filtering. But when you're getting it out in a concentrated level and then you're putting it back in in a concentrated level, that's the concern. And that injection back into the ground, that's what people, people say it's fracking that's causing. It's actually the water that we're injecting back into the ground that's causing this, the earthquakes and the, the shifting in the seismic. And I know from. We were recently at the Society of Petroleum Engineers, their produce water conference, and they were discussing about how, you know, the. Generally it's been thought that it's that, you know, deep injection that's making the problem, but now they're speculating that actually it's maybe more the shallow that's causing some of this.
• 31:22
  Speaker A: To put it into terms that I think anybody can understand. Think about it this way. There's rock that's pressing on other rock that has enormous pressures on it. And you're introducing what basically boils down to soapy water. There's, there's a ton of other things in it.
• 31:38
  Speaker B: Right.
• 31:38
  Speaker A: But the viscosity of that water generally is like soapy water. And so, you know, what, what would you think would happen if you lubricate two highly pressurized areas that are rock.
• 31:49
  Speaker B: With salt with, with, with soap? Right.
• 31:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. This is not a super complicated equation when you sort of boil it down to those basics. And so I think it's inarguable that there is a linkage between seismicity and oil and gas activity and the water, et cetera. But going back to one of the things that I think people maybe, maybe have been scared off in the past is I remember growing up. Again, to put finer point on it or to orient with timeline, mid-30s. I remember growing up and Hearing about, blaring in my face as a kid, peak oil, and we're going to run out of oil, and oil, we're not going to have oil anymore. And then magic, quickly, a few years later, they found some technological innovation that completely changed that. And then, you know, people started talking about peak oil again. Back around about 10, 15 years ago, it came back. And so I think there is. There's sort of this inherent optimism that, oh, well, it'll figure itself out. Like, I've been hearing about peak oil all these years and like, we figured that one out. I just sort of wonder out loud to you, and I'd love to hear your thoughts, but I wonder out loud if water is maybe the first time that that is not the case. No, I'm going to be able to break the. Oh, well, we found new water and now it's no longer a problem. That's not a, that's not on the docket as far as I'm concerned, is that.
• 33:01
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, no. But I have had, actually people even on the podcast say that like, like they were like, oh, don't worry about it. There'll be another innovation come along. You know what I mean? And so I do think that people kind of see, you know, environmentalism as Chicken Little. The sky's falling, the sky's falling. The sky's never fallen, and so it's never going to fall. You know, and really we're just like, well, maybe the whole sky's not going to fall, but part of the sky might fall.
• 33:26
  Speaker A: And, you know, I think it's up to, you know, folks like you and I to sort of tell the story of. And, you know, if anyone's listening to this and can think about it in this way, we figured out a long time ago how to move, for instance, crude oil really long distances for really cheap. And we figured out that. We figured that one out.
• 33:44
  Speaker B: Right.
• 33:45
  Speaker A: To put a very specific fine point on it, Doing that with water is not possible. It flat out is. It's not. It's not a money allocation thing. It's not, oh, we need a new process. It just flat out is not possible to move that large amount of water consistently through pipeline long distances. Just not. It's just not feasibly possible. And so I think this idea that, oh, we can fix it, it's baked in this. Oh, well, we can move the water wherever we need it, but that, that's not, that's not baked in reality.
• 34:14
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 34:14
  Speaker A: And so I think that we need a different way to approach it.
• 34:17
  Speaker B: So, Robert Mace. You know who Robert Mace is? Hilarious. He. We were at a water meeting. He did a talk on the history of water pipelines into Texas. It was so good. And the funny one that he would show the different, like all kinds of different graphics. But the funniest one was a cowboy and a guy that was skiing and a guy in a sombrero. And they all had their straws in this lake. And it was when they were talking about bringing it in from the Great Lakes. And it said on the back of it, back off, suckers. So it was the point being like, we might, you know, even if we could, you still have this whole social aspect of people going, well, you know, you can't have our water, you know.
• 35:10
  Speaker A: You know, and I think it also. One of the other things I wanted to bring up that I think is really important in this conversation is, you know, I think that water has started to become a much more recognized topic of conversation, let's call it on a global scale. And I think that. That one of the things that I think about a lot actually, you know, in sort of what can. Can the United States maybe be doing differently or better is. I don't know how widely this is known, but South Korea had an initiative where they actually now have a. A beer. It's called New, I think it's called New Water Beer that is made with produced water from industries that they have, you know, domestically. And so they have found a way. And like, when I think about if you were to see, you know, a beer on the shelf of H E B and on it, it were to say, you know, made my produce water, made with produce water, I think most people would immediately put it down, go to something else because of that sort of inherent fear of what's in that.
• 36:04
  Speaker B: What am I drinking?
• 36:05
  Speaker A: And I think we, we. We grew up in, you know, in the last couple decades, you've seen all this sort of, you know, the fracking, oh, I'm going to drink frack fluid. And like all the sort of hysteria, those sort of things I think people sort of get lost in. Okay, what, what actually is possible? What can we really do with this? And I bring that up because when you talk about beneficial reuse, when you talk about reintroducing this water into other streams, it's already being done on the globe.
• 36:29
  Speaker B: It's already being scale once again, behind the times, right?
• 36:33
  Speaker A: We just need to. I think we need to, as a. As a people or whatever you want to call it, we need to get to a place where we're More inviting of that sort of new innovation. And that comes from the education, going.
• 36:43
  Speaker B: Back to what we talked about exactly.
• 36:45
  Speaker A: Of what's in the water, how is it produced, etc, And I think you lose people when, you know, for good, bad or indifferent in this industry, you have a lot of companies dealing with chemicals that are large, you know, largely the same, but they have it through. Okay, well, it's private because it's ours and it's this private proprietary blend.
• 37:04
  Speaker B: Right.
• 37:05
  Speaker A: We don't want to give visibility to. And if you have a lot of that people that might be drinking that water, I'm not going to give my kid that because of, you know.
• 37:13
  Speaker B: Right.
• 37:13
  Speaker A: I just, I need to know.
• 37:14
  Speaker B: I need to know what's in it. Right, exactly. Well, and, you know, I've heard, you know, a statement that like, we can clean it. Is it cost effective? No. Does it matter? But at the end of the day, it's the fact that there will be enough salt to fill the AT&T Stadium every 13 days from this produced water. Just, just what we're producing now. Not, not in, you know, 10 years when we're producing five times the amount of what we're producing right now. So that is the problem. What are they doing with the byproduct, with the. What people might think of as the waste stream? I always think of that's got to be another market. That's another market. There's no waste stream. There's a market.
• 38:01
  Speaker A: So I think it's. I think it's actually what you just said. There are markets that have been developed for those different resources, for the stuff that's coming out of the water, for the water itself. I mean, again, we talked about it earlier and we live in a country where water is treated as this ubiquitous, free resource that I don't need to pay for it. You know, it's available whenever I need it. And I think, I think that might be the flip that needs to switch before we really make these quantum leaps that we're talking about. Because if people, if we started to realize that water is a very. It's a, it's a zero sum game in the sense of if I'm using a gallon of water to do X, that gallon of water is not being used to do Y.
• 38:36
  Speaker B: Right.
• 38:36
  Speaker A: And I think that there's a clear sort of delineation there, that, that water. There are certain water streams that can be reused, like we're talking about beneficial reuse, but water does not duplicate in the way that some other, you know.
• 38:49
  Speaker B: Right. Somebody said it's like a Ponzi scheme. You can. Like, you can, but you're. You're taking the same water and moving it over here, you know, but it's. In the end, it's the same water. It's not new water. Right? It's not. You're like, oh, now we have come up with this new water. No, we've just taken it from here and we've moved it here, and it's not back there anymore because we've moved it.
• 39:14
  Speaker A: And again, going back to it, and it sounds like such a minute detail and a small issue, but. But at scale, it's a massive problem when you look purely at the amount of water that evaporates in the Permian Basin Basin alone. Just take the Permian Basin. Forget the rest of the country for a second. Just the evaporation power out of. Out of just that basin wastes or uses whatever. Whatever word you want to use. Billions of gallons of water every single year. Billions of gallons. And so, I mean, it's a massive issue at scale because again, unless you have industry or unless you have a stakeholder at the table that wants to solve that problem's not going away.
• 39:49
  Speaker B: Well, I, you know, one of the projects we've been working on is Playa Lake restoration. And I think that's part of, you know, another issue here. You know, that when it rains, we don't. They're not functioning. About 85% of them don't function like they should, so they don't recharge. And that is, again, another, you know, balancing act of present and the future. How do we incentivize the people in the present to preserve and to restore those? And that's one of the things that we're looking at. We want to. The Global Water Challenge from Cargill, which always tell people, if you win a Global Water Challenge, that is not necessarily good, bad. I mean, it's a, you know, something that Cargill is interested in is like, hey, if. If you. If we pay for the restoration of this, would you participate? You know, and we were at the Emerald Farm show because I really wanted to get it. I mean, I know I could get 50 playas from just family members. You know what I mean? Like, just fast, because there's so many. But I wanted a good sense of, like, how would people respond to that? And of course, very positive, positively, you know, and so it does show, you know, that there are ways to incentivize people. If you ask people, will you spend your own money to do this? It'll be A different story because some people would seriously want to do that and just don't have the ability to do it, or people just, it's not valuable enough to them to spend the money to do it.
• 41:10
  Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm, you know, I'm cautiously optimistic that some of the things that we're seeing at the federal and state levels are going to fundamentally change that. You know, in the Inflation reduction act of 2021 or 2022, there was $4 billion that was allocated to, to essentially studying the Rio Grande water system and making improvements is the short version. And there's other initiatives that, you know, that are along those lines. You also, like we talked about, you have these state consortiums that are working really diligently on creating that roadmap that we're talking about here. And you know, it's been really encouraging that the EPA has been what I qualify as a, as a active participant in those conversations. And it had, is, has at least to date been really supportive of those changes being sort of driven by the other stakeholders rather than just putting out a roadmap of here's the blueprint, follow it. There's been some, some really what I call, qualify as sort of back and forth conversation.
• 42:06
  Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen that too. And I know EPA was even, you know, not long ago saying, hey, we want, we want this to be used for ag. So come on, y'all, give us, tell us how it needs to be regulated. I mean, that's pretty unusual.
• 42:19
  Speaker A: Very. And, and I think it points to the complexity of the issue.
• 42:22
  Speaker B: Yes, it does.
• 42:22
  Speaker A: I don't know, but between the folks in this room, I don't know how many things we could point to that the government has said, hey, industry or people that know this help us find the, find the regulations that work. And, and we're giving, we're being given that opportunity as, as, as a industry. And I think it's really important that we take that full force because that again, goes back to the, the PR of this and sort of how it's being managed, that if we're getting, if we're being given a voice of, you know, what we can do. I argue that the folks in our industry that are focused on this issue are probably the smartest in the world at that. And so if they have a good quality, if they have a seat at the table, that's a net benefit.
• 42:58
  Speaker B: Well, and that's, that's one of, one of the benefits of capitalism is that, that, that you're bringing together the people that will benefit from that they have vested interest in making sure it works and that, you know, the more we can lean into that, the better. But so before we go, I'd like for you to tell us some about the Produced Water Society and what, what y'all do. I know you're the president of that organization, vice president of the organization. So tell us. It's. It's an international organization. What all, what all do you do and who's involved and.
• 43:30
  Speaker A: Absolutely. Yeah. So the Produce Water Society is a 501C3 based out of Austin, Texas. We are focused on really bringing a lot of the conversation that we're having today to the forefront, but mostly focused on or more focused on the technical process side of the business. And so that's, you know, most of the conferences and meetings that we have are, you are attended by engineers and folks on the ground that are actually doing the work and the scientists and researchers and the people sort of behind the, the, the technical side of the processes that are getting us to where we, you know, where we need to be. Domestically. We have two events every year. We have one in August in the Permian Basin in Midland. This focus just on the Permian, and we have one in February that's in Houston, Texas, that's much more global. We have an offshore and an onshore track, and that's. I don't know when this podcast is coming out, but that conference is going to be coming up soon. Actually. Actually, it's February 10th to 13th, 2025 in Houston. And so we'd love to see some folks there. You know, I think it's an interesting blend of people that, you know, it is highly technical and highly focused on the process side, but there is, I don't know if there's a better place to sort of learn what's being done in the field and what's, what's working, what's not working than that conference. And then internationally we have, right now we have two on the calendar, but, you know, in a few months that number may balloon up to four or five. We're working with a couple under other regions to bring some conferences or some attention there. But we currently have two in the Middle east this year. I believe we had one in Qatar and one in Saudi Arabia. And that's, you know, generally we have two in that region, but we're also looking to expand into Southeast Asia. We're actually going to be having a conference in February, at the end of February in Nigeria, alongside the Nigeria International Energy Summit that we're gonna have a Produce water track there as well. And so I think that also points to. That this is not only a domestic issue, this is a global issue. And I don't know if there's a point. I don't know if there's a corner on the globe that's not dealing with this and, or hasn't woken up to this already, which, you know. Interesting.
• 45:26
  Speaker B: Yes, Right, right.
• 45:27
  Speaker A: It's good to see.
• 45:28
  Speaker B: Yeah, it is. It really is. Well, that's important work and it's, it's great that it's getting started here in Texas, you know, and think the, like, we lead the way sometimes. Sometimes we're not the leaders and issues of environmental importance, though. And I think it's. I'm happy to see, you know, the people that were kind of leading the way in this whole, you know, upgrading, updating our oil and gas energy. The energy waste laws are like, there are people in that space, you know, producers in that space. And when the, the regulations are so low, then, you know, people think you're falling to that level. You know, when a lot of, a lot of companies, and I know, I've heard people say before, you know, those oil and gas companies, hey, we. Nobody made us start doing this. You know, we're looking at the future. We're looking forward. We know how that there has to be a lot of energy and it's going to need to come from all kinds of sources and any source that, you know, is viable.
• 46:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, I know. I think it's the classic issue with something at this scale. You know, when something breaks and something breaks disasterly, disastrously, everyone on the planet hears about it. When, when you, when you go, you know, however many millions of operations or thousands of operations, you know, in a row with, with it working perfectly, nobody hears about that. And, and so again, that kind of goes back to the, the PR of. Of the process. And I think it's really challenging because when you start to talk about, and even today I stopped myself a couple of times, you know, before going down into sort of what would be really technical speak and sort of down the rabbit hole, because I think the problem of the industry, and when I say industry, I'm not just talking about oil and gas. I think industry at large. When you talk about water management, the average person doesn't understand that, doesn't have any idea what that takes, what that means. And that can be as simple as if you were to ask the average American, you know, how their municipal water is treated when it goes to the treatment plant. Very few are going to have Any clue at all. Much less. Much less a cogent answer to that. And I think that that just goes back to. It's a, It's a boring topic at the end of the day, but it's so important that we need, we need to find ways to bring this to the forefront so that the average person can understand this. Because if we leave it to the. To sort of, you know, the wills that be, there's a lot of scare tactics and a lot of bad information. There's a lot of things you can talk about that aren't accurate, et cetera. That if you have those stakeholders, you know, they want to be involved, they want to feel like they have the, you know, the ability to be a part of the conversation. And we as an industry, I think, need to take the brunt of getting those folks to the top.
• 48:00
  Speaker B: I totally agree. I totally agree. And I think that people, you know, we need to continue to encourage just, you know, people like us, average citizens to be educated, you know, educate yourself on these things and make certain that, that that's available and accessible to people. And there, unfortunately, there's so many avenues of getting information to people that is so hard to know, like which avenue is the best avenue. And it costs money to produce things and to get things out there, you know, and so it's, it's. That's why it's. It takes a lot of collaboration across industries and stakeholders to get things like this moving. And I, I'm really grateful that you would drive to Lubbock early in the morning and come and visit with us.
• 48:46
  Speaker A: I really appreciate the time. And the last thing I'll say to that specifically is, you know, if you're listening to this and you happen to live in Texas, you're in an incredibly advantageous position that I would imagine probably right in your backyard is the water district that your area is managed by. And that can be a really good place to just start this conversation and start the. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of learning a little bit more, you know, go to some of those meetings, there's a lot of hearing and there's a lot of open public record things that you can, you can start to get the firsthand knowledge, whereas other, other states don't necessarily have that set up. And so I think that, you know, we're in a place where, yeah, if you want to be involved, you can really sort of become involved, as involved as you want to be.
• 49:25
  Speaker B: Well, that's really true. And to that point, we'll add in our notes that our local water districts link to their website because there's some great information there. And they're they also, you know, will come and do, you know, education events and all kinds of things to help people. So, Ben, thanks again.
• 49:43
  Speaker A: Thank you for the time. Really, really appreciate the conversation.
• 49:45
  Speaker B: It was great. It was great. And friends, thanks for joining us again. I hope you enjoyed this. I don't know how you couldn't. It was really super interesting. And I hope that you will utilize this information to do to do what's right for us right now and for in the future, too. And as always, helpful to us, if you will like and share the podcast. That's like almost the same as making a financial contribution. It's really helpful. So we look forward to being with you again. Next time on CONSERVATION stories.