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Transforming Produced Water: A New Frontier in Water Sustainability with Mike Hightower · Conservation Stories

• 0:13
  Speaker A: Hello, friends, and welcome back to another edition of Conservation Stories. This is your host, Tillery Timmins Sims. And I'm here again introducing, wanting to introduce you to a friend of mine. His name is Mike Hightower. And Mike, I thank you for joining us. We are connecting. You are in New Mexico and people may be wondering why are we interviewing someone from New Mexico? And so I would love for you to give people a little bit of background about yourself and what you do and why you do it.
• 0:42
  Speaker B: I am the director of the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium. It's a consortium of NGOs, industry, academia and public organizations looking at the treatment and reuse of produced water in the state of New Mexico. And produced water is the water that's associated with the development of oil and gas, and currently it's considered a waste. And most of the ways that they handle produced water is to inject it into deep wells. And as maybe a lot of people on your podcast know, that approach has been leading to a number of issues around seismicity and earthquakes in West Texas. In New Mexico, we have two major oil and gas basins, the Permian Basin in southeast New Mexico and the San Juan Basin in northwest New Mexico. And, and so for some of your listeners probably understand that the Permian Basin is just not in New Mexico. It also is a large portion of it is two thirds of it is in Texas. So the work that we're doing in New Mexico, we have a lot of companies from Texas and groups from Texas that are following our work, our research on how to safely treat, produce, water and reuse it, Texas Railroad Commission is involved in following our work as well as tceq. We have, as everybody knows, west Texas and eastern New Mexico. If you were plopped down in the middle of it, you couldn't tell New Mexico from Texas.
• 2:22
  Speaker A: We're one of the same. We're one in the same.
• 2:24
  Speaker B: Yeah. That barbed wire fence that makes the difference between the two states generally doesn't exist, or most of the strands of the barbed wire are down. So I grew up in Hobbs, and so I know kind of the West Texas, eastern New Mexico in the oil oil issues very, very well. But my background is I have engineering degrees from New Mexico State in civil and environmental engineering. I worked for 40 years for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, where I did a lot of work on energy and water security, both for the New Mexico, both for the United States and worldwide. And one of the issues that I worked on was something called the energy water nexus, which is the the intersection of energy development and Water development and water issues. And since produced water is a big element of energy production, if we can't handle the produced water generated appropriately, it has impacts on energy supplies. And the interesting thing about the oil and gas sector is it's the one sector in the United States that's water positive. In other words, we create more, more water with oil and gas than we use for drilling and fracking. So from a water stewardship perspective and an energy stewardship perspective for the United States, handling produced water in a appropriate manner, in an environmental friendly and ecologically friendly manner is going to one, create new additional water resources for areas like West Texas, eastern New Mexico that definitely need additional water supplies, as well as allow energy development to move forward and be able to provide reliable sources of energy for the future. So it's a big issue as we get into more and more droughts and longer and longer arid cycles. Looking at these non traditional water resources like produced water, brackish water, industrial wastewaters is something that the United States understands. And currently there's a program within the US EPA called the Water Reuse Action Plan that is focused directly on treatment and reuse for purpose applications of all these industrial waters, including produced water. So the role of our consortium is actually working with EPA to develop strategies for treating produced water to a level that is safe, but also can be used for agriculture, industrial applications and municipal applications, commercial or even public supply augmentation if needed in the future. So that's the work that we're doing. But it has a lot of, lot of impact on West Texas also. And application in West Texas and Southwest Texas also.
• 5:20
  Speaker A: Oh yes, absolutely. And so just so people will understand, let's talk about the amount of water for. First of all, people need to understand that we are, we're producing a lot, a lot of oil, historical levels of oil. And that's happening now partly because we're just, the innovation is just exploding and they can get more, more efficiently, but that means there's more water. So there is how many barrels of water to barrels of oil?
• 5:55
  Speaker B: For every barrel of oil that's produced in the Permian, West Texas, eastern New Mexico, we get anywhere from three to five barrels of water. And so we're producing something on the order of about 200 million barrels of water a day in the Permian Basin. That includes both New Mexico and Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, at 42 gallons per barrel, that's close to a billion gallons of water a day in West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. So you can imagine what a billion gallons of additional water would mean to economic development, agricultural applications and opportunities, community water supply support in, in that arid region of eastern New Mexico and West Texas. So that's divided. About a third of that is in New Mexico. So about 6 million barrels a day in New Mexico and about 12 or 13 million barrels a day in Texas.
• 7:07
  Speaker A: It is really hard to really fathom how much water that is, how much water that is. And, and when we, every time we have an earthquake, I see it, people are like, it's fracking. And I'm like, it's actually not fracking. It's actually, it's not fracking.
• 7:23
  Speaker B: It's, it's the, the deep disposal or the shallow disposal of produced water is what's causing those earthquakes. Not, not fracking. That's been well identified over the last several years.
• 7:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So there's big caverns down under the ground. They found those big old caverns and then they're putting that water down into those caverns. And part of it. Now, correct me if I am wrong on this, but isn't New Mexico sending water back into Texas? And so we're storing actually water that's being produced in New Mexico and water that's being produced in Texas. Is that correct?
• 7:57
  Speaker B: Yes, you are. There's about 2 million barrels of water a day that is sent from southeast New Mexico into Texas, which is, works out to be, you know, almost 100 million gallons of water a day. And just to put that in perspective, the city of Albuquerque, which is the biggest city in New Mexico, which is almost a million people, metropolitan area, uses about 50 million gallons of water a day, consumes about 50 million gallons of water. So we're sending out of eastern New Mexico to Texas about two Albuquerques worth of water a day. So that's enough water to support all of west Texas. I mean there's, if we added all the small towns in west Texas and eastern New Mexico, we have enough water, more than enough water to support all those small communities. That's just what we're sending to Texas. This doesn't include the water that we're reusing within New Mexico, which is another 4 million barrels of water a day. So it's a lot of water that we're exporting. It's people within New Mexico understand that and are trying to say, man, one thing we don't want to do is give all of our water to Texas.
• 9:14
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 9:15
  Speaker B: We talk about that all the time. So we need to figure out how to use that water, how to use it safely and how to use it for economic Development within the state of New Mexico. And on the Texas side, Texas is following us. And there's a Texas produced water consortium out of Texas Tech that's trying to do the same thing for West Texas. Trying to figure out ways to help utilize and treat that water and reuse it in West Texas. You guys are in the same kind of drought situation that we are in eastern New Mexico.
• 9:47
  Speaker A: Yeah, there's the thing about New Mexico is like you guys have kind of are the leaders in the research and you know, several years ahead of everybody and you guys kind of. Can you walk me through like there's identification that we need to do something about this water. What is the first step? What did you, what's the first thing that you've done in the process of identifying. Okay, we need to figure out how to use this. What was the first thing that you guys have done as far as research wise to start moving in that direction?
• 10:18
  Speaker B: So there's three things that we really did in together. We don't do these in series, we do it in parallel. One was making sure that we know where the water is so that people can identify where they want to build their treatment plants. So that required us to put together a data portal that has both quantity and quality data. And so if people want to go to our website and look at what that might look at like is they can go and Google NMPWRC for the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium.
• 10:52
  Speaker A: And we'll have that available too in the show notes. We'll put all that link directly to there so people can go and cause that's a really fascinating map.
• 10:59
  Speaker B: And so you can go to that and you go to our website directly in the top right hand corner, it's corner it says data portal. Just hit that and you'll the data portal will come up in a GUI that shows you by color where in quarter townships where all of the water's being produced in New Mexico today. That's always a good overview of for people as they're looking at developing technologies and for communities to see where their potential water supplies are that they could use for their applications. The second thing that we had to do is make sure that we could do cost effective treatment of the produced water. So we started a testing program, a pilot testing program where we could test water at scale on sites.
• 11:45
  Speaker A: And that's about like 2 to 500 barrels. How many barrels is.
• 11:48
  Speaker B: It's anywhere from. Yeah from 100 to 500 barrels a day. So those are large scale plants. Those are not, you know, bench scale or Laboratory scale. These are full scale type systems that are made with industrial scales, industrial scale valves and piping. So easy to scale up to 1,000 barrels or 5,000 barrels a day. The third thing that we had to do was be able to collect data on the quality of the treated produced water. And so in many cases under the NPDS program within EPA they look for 90 constituents. But we, we came up with a process, working with EPA and the New Mexico Environment Department to look for over 400 chemicals in, in the treated produced water and the raw produced water. And then knowing both the data from the produced raw produced water and the treated produced water, we can compare the and see if we didn't miss anything. And then also then with that testing we can go through and make sure through either pre treatment, post treatment and treatment that we get to a quality that will pass a whole effluent toxicity test. So what we've done is develop a sampling protocol that approved by EPA that allows us to sample, treat, look at non target analysis, targeted analysis and wet testing to show that we can treat the water safely. So that was a big effort because some of the pieces of instrumentation that we use, there's only 10 or 15 of them in the country. We have some of that at New Mexico State that we could use to do that. The last thing that you have to do is make sure that it's cost effective. And so what we've done is to try and make sure, working with groups, that we get cost and performance data on the technologies. And we're seeing that these technologies are coming in at around a dollar a barrel, which is about the cost of what the oil companies are disposing of this water with for. So essentially what we can do is we're close to the point where we can treat the water for about the same cost of disposal and create new supplies for communities in West Texas, eastern New Mexico. The last thing that we did is we needed to put up a data portal where people could get access to our data. And so that data portal, I just mentioned it, it has information on the testing that's going on, the quality of the data, the papers that we've developed and all of our papers go through a peer review process and are published and then we put them on our website. But over the last five years we've created about 30 or 35 peer reviewed technical papers on the quality of the produced water, raw produced water in the Permian, how it compares to the Pecos river to wastewater treatment plants. And I'll tell you that the Produced water is not that much different than some other industrial and municipal wastewaters, same kinds of constituents. So kind of the technologies that we use for, for treating municipal wastewater and brackish water and saline water can be used for the produced water. And we're getting comparable results as far as quality and in some cases even better because in some cases we're using thermal technologies which is distillation. And you can imagine how clean you can get water when you distill it. So those are the things that we did. Mostly we have our annual meetings, which are always in December. We have mid year meetings. They're open to the public. If anyone wants to get involved and see what we're doing and come in and visit us, you can go onto our website and find out where the meetings are and the data that we're collecting is there. A lot of regulatory agencies, not only in New Mexico, but in Texas and in other states are using our data to try and help set up standards for discharge for these different fit for purpose uses. And so as a consortium, our effort is to try and make sure that people understand the ins and outs of treating produced water, how to do it safely, and then the benefits that you can get from increasing those water supplies in your local community and the economic development and resiliency of water supplies that you can develop by using this produced water. That's, that's kind of our focus and what we've been working on and, and how we've done it.
• 16:28
  Speaker C: Out here on the Texas plains, water is everything. And there's a resource that's as vital as it is fragile. Our Playa 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 Playa 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 on the SARA website. Let's keep Texas water flowing strong for the future. Visit sara-conservation.com.
• 17:39
  Speaker A: I think that most people just are not aware of it and just the scope of what you're, you know, the undertaking of dealing with this and the amount of money that's being spent storing it, you know. And so I'm curious that you talk about the treatments. Have y'all identified more than one type of treatment that that is working and cost effective?
• 18:08
  Speaker B: So yes, there's, there's three different types of technologies that you can use for treating produced water. So one is a thermal technology and there are five or six different thermal technologies and we've evaluated several of those and all of them are providing us with very high quality water. So the thermal technologies are working pretty well. And those that includes thermal membrane distillation, which is a distillation membrane. There's mechanical vapor recompression, which is a process that has been used for 30 or 40 years, multi stage effects distillation, which uses multi stages to distill the water. So all of, all of those technologies work very, very well on the membrane side. For some of the waters in northwestern New Mexico that have lower salt volumes less than or around seawater. We found that membrane technologies, RO membranes, saltwater membranes, brackish water membranes, work very, very well. Now we're applying some new membrane systems in the Permian basin to look at if we can support desalination with these new membrane systems. And so what we, what you really do is you kind of tie two membrane systems together. You get a very high TDS water membrane that you can use and get it down to a seawater quality and then you use this seawater RO membrane to get it down to fresh water. And we're beginning to have some luck with that. So it's looking promising for both brackish waters or produce waters that aren't too saline and some very saline waters to use membranes. And then of course the thermal technologies have been developed and have been used in the Mideast and other places and we're applying them to be used in the Permian and they're working very well also now we are having to do some type of post treatment because in the thermal side you do get some carryover things, volatilize. But the fact is if you put it use a treatment train, which is what we're talking about, where you pre treat the water, treat it and then post treat it. We've had very good luck with that treatment train approach and have been able to get some very, very high quality waters, a lot of waters that are less than a thousand tds total dissolved solids. And I use a thousand tds because that's the kind of the primary standard for drinking water. Most drinking Water supplies are less than that. But we're getting down to a point where with a little bit of treatment, small additional treatment, it could be made available for drinking water. And so what I'm seeing from some communities is they're taking that water at what I would call a wholesale value and then doing a little additional post treatment or treatment locally to make sure that that water's down to a little bit higher quality level that you could use in a community.
• 21:17
  Speaker A: So is it being used in some communities?
• 21:20
  Speaker B: It's not being used in any communities yet, but we're doing testing on it to show that it has the opportunity to be. There are communities that are looking at it. I'll mention along the eastern edge of New Mexico, people are probably aware of JAL and Eunice and Hobbs and Lovington and Tatum. Several of those cities are in constant interaction with me on looking at how to apply that one for industrial uses so that they can bring industries in and not have to use their fresh water. And second, second is how can they use that for commercial applications inside the cities? And then one city is even looking at how could they use it to supplement their water supplies for their municipal. But right now, they're mostly starting at trying to protect their fresh groundwater and use this for economic development, for industries and commercial applications and things like that.
• 22:15
  Speaker A: Okay, so you're testing for 400 things, and let's just say you found 100.
• 22:24
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 22:24
  Speaker A: Okay. And what's the waste stream of this when you. When you've cleaned it up? What. What's the waste stream and what's happening to that?
• 22:37
  Speaker B: So luckily for us, the oil and gas industry has agreements with the EPA to be able to inject their produced water into formations. So what we're doing is we're essentially taking that produced water, treating it and pulling out all the additional free fresh water, which. Which means we can remove about 50% of the water. And then so all of the concentrates, all the constituents that are left over, go back into the produced water and then we inject that. So what we're doing is we're essentially removing water from the produced water and injecting what's left over back into the saltwater disposal wells. But we're reducing the volume that's injected by a factor of two, two to two and a half. And so that allows. Then that reduces seismicity without really increasing your cost. Because if we can treat it for the same amount of money as a disposal, then we're kind of breaking even on disposal. We're reducing our fracking seismicity issues by cutting our injections by half. And now we're making fresh water or clean water available for communities. So to me, it's kind of a win win. Oil companies win, we're not doing any more damage from seismicity and the communities win because they now have additional water supplies that they can use to postpone the depletion of their freshwater aquifers and stuff.
• 24:13
  Speaker A: Right, right. That's just fascinating. I'm just, you know, I, the more I learn about, about produced water, this, to me this is, yes, it's the waste stream, but also it's super valuable. I mean like, it's like now you have two, you're producing two commodities.
• 24:28
  Speaker B: Well, yes, you are, because in some cases you can get some minerals out of that produced water. You're concentrating the minerals up where, where you can get minerals out. But so what we're doing is if you really want to be a good water steward, you want to use water for its best purpose and you want to steward us, be stewards of your fresh water and only use fresh water where you can. And then, so what we're doing is we're making new water available. I call it new water because it's, it's coming from 9,000, 10,000ft deep. It's, it's not in the, it's not in the hydrologic cycle now. So we're creating new water supplies and we're using that to support economic development. That's not water stewardship and community stewardship and environmental stewardship. I don't know what is. I don't know why some of the environmental groups or NGOs are against it. In reality, it's really what we ought to be doing. We need to be stewards of the water. If you live in West Texas or lived in West Texas or eastern New Mexico like you and I do, we understand that water stewardship is so darn important for long term economic development and growth in that area. We need to be better stewards and this is a great way to be a water steward. So.
• 25:44
  Speaker A: Well, we always say that, you know, we are about human flourishing and that, that humans flourish in a safe, clean environment and sure, but they don't flourish without water, can't, you know. And so I think that there are, you know, folks that would lean towards humans should not be consuming anything that is of the earth, you know what I mean? That can't be renewed. And so I don't know if part of that, you know, is, you know, oil and gas, we haven't always done great in the past. But I really. I mean, like, I have been in the industry for a while now, and I personally haven't met anyone that isn't just intentionally wants to do the right thing, you know, and oil and gas is not just vital to our economy, but there's, you know, people all over the world that we don't. We want them to have food and electricity. Yeah. But. So I don't know. I think it's amazing. And it's amazing that this water is basically being pulled out of rock.
• 26:48
  Speaker B: Well, it's, you know, to be honest with you, it's from old seabeds. And so this water that we're pulling up used to be in the water cycle, but has gone out of the water cycle, and now we're putting it back in the water cycle. And so that's actually good. But, yeah, I think people need to understand that, you know, water is life, and if you want to have any kind of life, you have to have water on this planet. And we need to be stewards of that. And fresh water is something that we need to be, you know, careful of, and we shouldn't be using that for things that, you know, washing our cars and stuff. But if we can add to it, we have to grow crops. We need water to grow crops. People are kind of addicted to eating. So we need to look at ways that we can increase our productivity from a food standpoint, from a public health standpoint. And this is a way to do it. And it's being funded by supporting oil and gas guys to create oil and gasoline that people all over the world use. So to me, people all over the world are using our resources. We ought to be able to use part of that money to help us maintain our society within the oil areas that are used to support such a good.
• 28:16
  Speaker A: That's actually a great point. Exactly. And I know, you know, we do quote you, and we say that sustainability is a word that no one can define, but stewardship is a verb, and it makes you responsible. And I just. I really. I just love it. I love that. And I think that. I really think it's amazing, like, you can tell the passion that you've had. And I just am shocked at how much progress that you've got when the first time I heard you say, like, we've just. We started in Covid, and I was like, I can't believe you've made as much progress as you have in the time that you have, You've identified all of these constituents that are in this water. You're figuring out how to make, how to make it drinkable, usable, whatever we need. And I think I vote that we call it Energy Water.
• 29:02
  Speaker B: Well, there is a national initiative on energy and water that I started about 20 years ago, so. But you could call it Energy Water. Sure. Energy Water.
• 29:10
  Speaker A: Energy Water, that's right. It's. It's something that, something else that the energy industry is giving us is they're giving us energy and they're giving us water. And I thank you so much for being here, Mike, and giving us the kind of a 35,000 foot view of produced water. And we will keep people informed. There is actually information on our website, we've got a blog post and some information on produced water because it's something that we have felt like from the beginning that we needed to be involved in stewarding so people can go there. We'll have link to Mike, we'll have a link to all your stuff and information and we generally also put on our calendar your events as well so that people can know when those are happening. So, friends, thank you for joining us again for another episode of Conservation Stories. And just as a reminder, you are very helpful to us if you will. Rate, follow, review. All of those things that they say about podcasts makes a big difference for us and it's a way that you can actually be part of stewarding along with us. And it doesn't cost you anything. Just a second of your time. So we appreciate it and we look forward to another episode with you again, Conservation Stories.
• 30:27
  Speaker B: Bye.