Why 2 oil states are slow to embrace wastewater recycling

The two biggest oil-producing states are at a crossroads as they try to solve one of the industry’s thorniest problems — getting rid of billions of gallons of salty, oily wastewater that’s produced alongside crude.

Academic researchers in Texas and New Mexico say technology developed in recent years allows companies to clean up the waste, known as produced water, so it can be released into surface water like rivers or diverted for uses such as crop irrigation.

But state regulators are still cautious about the idea.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which regulates water in the state, said it wants to address “knowledge gaps” before it issues disposal permits for oil field waste, and it will take more than a year for companies to reach full capacity once they receive a permit. New Mexico’s Water Quality Control Commission is considering an application from the oil industry and a group of oil states, though the commission has already turned down the idea twice.

A lack of new state regulations is slowing down development at a time when Texas and New Mexico are fighting a drought and looking for long-term sources of water, said Zach Stoll, assistant director of the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium at New Mexico State University.

“Without that, it’s tough to kind of scale up and go up and go out and invest however many hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility,” he said.

The Texas environmental commission is reviewing three active permit applications to dispose of treated produced water in the Pecos River and other surface water. The commission also is preparing to release regulations for surface use of treated water.

In New Mexico, the Water Quality Control Commission could decide in May whether to advance rules that would allow produced water to be reused in 13 of the state’s 33 counties.

“Building a science-based regulatory framework for produced water reuse is critical to safeguarding our state’s freshwater reserves for generations of New Mexicans,” Drew Goretzka, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Environment Department, said in an email. “NMED is committed to ensuring the petition reflects those priorities and can advance successfully before the Water Quality Control Commission.”

The Texas commission known as TCEQ provided slides from Chair Brooke Paup’s recent presentation on produced water showing the timeline for the proposed regulations. But the agency declined an interview request and didn’t answer detailed questions from POLITICO’s E&E News.

Environmentalists are urging oil states to move slowly, arguing that oil field wastewater is both a huge problem and a complicated one. Produced water totals have surged in recent years amid a drilling boom tied to the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that uses a mix of water, sand, chemicals and high pressure to get more oil and gas out of places such as the Permian Basin.