Over the next few decades, gas drilling in the Barnett Shale will produce millions of gallons of contaminated water. How best to get rid of it is the subject of a tooth-and-claw fight among the gas industry, city officials and environmental groups.

The city is encouraging gas companies to recycle the water, but gas executives say that approach is impractical and too expensive. Disposal is already a huge cost, and they want to dispose of the wastewater in underground injection wells drilled inside the city.

In a presentation to the city this summer, industry representatives made their point this way: "Lack of available, accessible, affordable saltwater disposal wells is a deal-killer for the Barnett Shale in Fort Worth."

Industry representatives say the injection wells are a safe, effective disposal method. There are more than 53,000 such wells in Texas, they say, and other major U.S. metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles and Oklahoma City have had no problems with the wells.

So far, there’s only one saltwater well in Fort Worth. Gas companies have said that they need as many as 15, connected by a network of pipelines. The only option to injection wells, they say, is to truck the waste out of the city. That would put a huge number of trucks on the road and increase the chance of traffic accidents involving the salt water.

Environmentalists point to the damage caused by the accidents. Salt water has been spilled on the ground in Parker County and has bubbled out of the ground in Wise County. Last summer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chastised the Texas Railroad Commission for its handling of a leaky saltwater well in Panola County, near the Louisiana border.

Brian Boerner, Fort Worth’s environmental director, says that there are better ways to manage the water and that injection wells in the city "should be our very last option."

Hydraulic fracturing

Until the late 1990s, it was virtually impossible to extract the gas trapped in the Barnett Shale, a layer of rock about 7,000 feet beneath Tarrant and more than a dozen other North Texas counties.

But advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing made it possible to get to the gas.

To "frac" a well, gas companies pump a mixture of water, sand and other chemicals into the well under extremely high pressure. The pressure creates microscopic cracks, and the sand particles wedge the cracks open, releasing more gas.

Once the well begins producing gas, the frac water is forced back to the surface, where it is known as flowback water. The flowback typically has picked up salt and other contaminants from the shale, including crude oil, and has to be disposed of.

And fracturing releases more water from the shale, which has the same contaminants as flowback water — and even more salt. That water, known as produced water, also has to be disposed of.

Barnett Shale drilling also stirs up radioactive material, usually radium. The fracturing and flowback processes can concentrate the radiation and bring it above ground, creating another disposal problem.

It’s unclear whether the material, known as naturally occurring radioactive material, or NORM, produces enough radiation to endanger the health of nearby residents. But it’s possible for oilfield workers to become sick if they inhale particles, such as scale that forms on valves and other equipment, Texas Railroad Commission spokeswoman Ramona Nye said.

Other options

The typical method for getting rid of oil and gas waste is to pump it back into the earth through a high-pressure injection well.

City officials have said repeatedly that they’re worried about spills, leaks and other accidents from saltwater injection wells. They have urged the industry to look at other methods, particularly recycling. Boerner, the environmental director, has thrown his weight behind the recycling idea.

Fountain Quail Management, a division of Aqua-Pure Resources, has experimented with distilling salt water from drilling sites. The process produces water pure enough to drink but takes huge amounts of energy.

David Burnett, a professor at Texas A&M’s Global Petroleum Research Institute, believes that Barnett Shale water can be recycled by reverse osmosis, which uses membranes to remove salt and other impurities. Moreover, he said, the process costs less than injection wells — 85 cents a barrel vs. $1 or $2 a barrel for an injection well. **SEE CLARIFICATION**

There are drawbacks. Flowback water, the least salty wastewater, can be recycled into virtually fresh water. But recycling production water, the very salty waste, results in water that is still briny.

Burnett said that’s OK. He said there are plenty of uses for the water, even if it’s not safe to drink.

"It can be used in the oilfield," he said.

Reverse osmosis has been tried on a few Barnett Shale wells in Denton County. Burnett believes the only problems preventing its use on a wider scale are nuts-and-bolts engineering issues — building recycling equipment big enough to handle the demands, and finding the right chemical combinations to fracture wells with the salty water.

Recycling also leaves behind super-concentrated wastewater that still has to be disposed of. Burnett said it’s appropriate to use injection wells for the concentrated waste, as long as they’re tightly regulated.

The energy companies say recycling is impractical for a number of reasons: The water would have to be hauled to a recycling facility and then to a new site; recycling gets less efficient as the salt content in water increases; and only 5 percent of water from natural gas wells is recyclable in the first place.

"Even if it were true, it isn’t here today," said Steve Turk, Chesapeake Energy’s Barnett Shale district manager. "We’ve got salt water we need to get rid of today."

Burnett said recycling could actually simplify the drilling process, if energy companies would recycle water on site and pipe it to another well.

Fort Worth moratorium

Until this year, there were no injection wells in the city.

When the City Council drew up its natural gas drilling ordinance in 2006, it prohibited disposal wells except under tightly controlled conditions. The wells had to be drilled into the Ellenberger Sands formation, a geological layer deeper than the Barnett Shale. They had to be protected by concrete from the surface to the top of the Ellenberger formation. And they could only be used to dispose of wastewater from the same lease where the disposal well is located.

About three months after those rules were passed, the city imposed a moratorium on all new saltwater disposal wells.

During those three months, Dale Energy applied for a permit from the Texas Railroad Commission to drill a disposal well near Oakland Avenue and East First Street. The commission approved the permit, and Chesapeake Energy, which bought many of Dale’s assets, began drilling the well during the summer.

The two sides "have been in fundamental disagreement" over the well for at least a few months, according to documents obtained under the Texas Public Information Act.

"Generally speaking, the city takes the position that its ordinance only allows the salt water well to be used to dispose of water from the lease where the gas wells are located," Assistant City Attorney Denis McElroy wrote in a letter to the attorney general. "Chesapeake, on the other hand, contends that it can dispose of salt water from any of its gas well operations throughout the city. In discussing this matter with an assistant city attorney in July of this year, legal counsel for Chesapeake stated that the company will file suit on this matter if the parties cannot reach an agreement."

Chesapeake Vice President Julie Wilson described the dispute as "a gentleman’s disagreement."

Chesapeake, which paid about $5 million for the well, wants to use it to dispose of salt water from as many as 23 natural gas wells that it operates along the Trinity River in east Fort Worth. The plan calls for connecting the gas wells to the disposal wells with corrosion-proof polyethylene pipe, and equipping the system with sensors that will automatically shut down the pipeline in case of a leak.

The upside, Wilson said, is that it will take hundreds of trucks off the street.

More wells coming?

Trucking is one of the major reasons the gas companies want to expand the number of saltwater wells in the city. A natural gas well can generate 100 barrels of production water a day, and trucking that water is expensive. The trucks also can damage streets, and the energy companies are responsible for street repairs.

The gas companies, in a July 18 meeting with city staffers, pitched a plan to allow 15 new wells in Tarrant County. They also requested "a judicious amount" of piping to move the salt water to disposal wells.

In exchange, they agreed to submit to more regulation than the Railroad Commission requires, and to additional inspections by the city.

Nye, the Railroad Commission spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message that the city "likely" has the ability to impose stiffer restrictions but would have full responsibility for enforcing them.

Wilson and Turk said the agreement would probably work, because the cost of doing business in the Barnett Shale keeps out lowball operators, and the larger companies are motivated to avoid accidents.

"We don’t want other operators to come in and not comply and have it reflect badly on our industry," she said.

Panola County’s problem

A well in Panola County, near the Louisiana border, shows what can happen when things go wrong. Two injection wells began operating in the area in the late 1980s. In 1996, residents complained to the state that their water tasted bad and left stains.

Six years later, in 2002, the Railroad Commission confirmed that the water was contaminated. Tests found barium, toluene, benzene and other dangerous chemicals.

Environmentalists say it is one of the worst injection well leaks in the state, but neither the state nor the Environmental Protection Agency has confirmed definitively that the waste came from the wells.

The Rev. David Hudson and other area residents believe that oil waste and illegally dumped industrial waste seeped from the injection wells into their wells, creeks and springs. The EPA has suggested that some of the waste, including the petroleum-based chemicals, may be coming from septic tanks.

The EPA’s inspector general issued a scathing report in September, faulting the Railroad Commission and the EPA’s Dallas-based regional office for their handling of the matter.

"Although it has been three years since official notification that the community’s groundwater was contaminated, the affected residents are still without a permanent source of safe drinking water," the report says.

Hudson has seen the changes caused by the contamination. He grew up in DeBerry, a tiny community in Panola County. He was baptized in a spring behind Antioch Baptist Church and used to fish in the creeks.

When he moved home in 2002 after a hitch in the Army and a career on the West Coast, the springs and creeks were fouled, and the fish and tadpoles were gone.

"You don’t hear the frogs," Hudson said by telephone. "We had some of the clearest, sparkling-cold spring water. We will never enjoy that anymore."

In the July 18 meeting, the gas companies called the Panola well a shallow, poorly constructed well that didn’t get proper maintenance or inspections.

Wilson, with Chesapeake, said there’s no comparison between the Panola County wells and the proposed Fort Worth wells. The Panola County well was drilled as an oil well, she said, and it’s unclear whether it was cemented the same way as Fort Worth requires.

"There are over 50,000 wells in Texas, many of which are in other municipalities," Wilson said. "Some acknowledgment needs to be given that this has been done before."

Barnett Shale incidents

The Railroad Commission has reports of several accidents and close calls in the Barnett Shale. It has also ordered disposal well operators to reduce the injection pressure in some locations.

In 2004, inspectors found a 30- by 80-foot pit of oil and production water at an injection well site in Parker County. "Usable groundwater in the area is likely to be contaminated by migrations or discharges of saltwater and other oil and gas wastes from the subject well," the order says.

In 2005, a well accident allowed salt water to bubble out of the ground near Chico, in Wise County. No fines were issued.

In 2006, the Railroad Commission fined another Wise County injection well operator $4,000. Investigators said the operator dumped water from a firefighting operation and "25 barrels of an unknown chemical" into an injection well.

In October 2006, Devon Energy had to clean up 105 barrels of salt water and radioactive waste from a disposal well in far north Tarrant County in October 2006. David Templet, an environmental manager with Devon, said most of the material was still contained inside a storage tank, which was in turn inside a plastic-lined pit, so there was no danger.

In January, the Railroad Commission shut down an injection well near Boyd after high pressure was detected in four natural gas wells nearby, an indication that the well could be leaking underground, a commission spokeswoman said.

Source: Texas Railroad Commission

Saltwater disposal

Key terms in the saltwater disposal debate:

Frac water: A mixture of fresh water, sand, surfactants (similar to soap or detergent) and other chemicals that is forced into a gas well under high pressure to fracture, or "frac," the rock. The sand particles remain wedged in tiny cracks in the rock, allowing more natural gas to escape. It can take 1.5 million to 5 million gallons to fracture a single Barnett Shale well, and each well has to be refractured periodically to stay productive.

Flowback water: The first few million gallons of water that comes out of a well after it has been fractured. This is typically frac water mixed with salt from the shale. It can be 1.5 times as salty as seawater and contains the chemicals used in the frac water, along with other chemicals that come from the gas-bearing shale. Flowback water is simple to recycle, and is often cleaned up and used to frac another well.

Production water: Naturally occurring water that is trapped inside the shale and released by drilling and fracturing. This can be five times as salty as seawater and often has natural gas dissolved in it, along with traces of crude oil and other chemicals. It is normally stored in separators, where the oil is allowed to rise to the top. The "drip oil" is sold to refiners, and the water then must be disposed of. Each well in the Barnett Shale can generate as much as 100 barrels of production water a day.

By the numbers

Natural gas companies predict that there will be a big increase in the wastewater produced by drilling in Tarrant County. Here’s a breakdown of the projections:

2007

550 natural gas wells

55,000 barrels of production water a day (one barrel equals 42 gallons)

458 trucks a day to haul off salt water

2011

2,000 gas wells

200,000 barrels of production water a day

1,667 trucks a day

Source: City of Fort Worth, presentation by gas producers to city staffers

mikelee@star-telegram.com MIKE LEE, 817-390-7539

image: Illus.: Dealing with wastewater

STAR-TELEGRAM/W. MATT PINKNEY

image: A saltwater disposal pipe on the Walsh Ranch property, west of Fort Worth. The piping used on the ranch eliminates the need for disposal trucks.

SPECIAL TO THE S-T/AARON LAMBERT