US oil rigs -7 to 425 Baker Hughes

Mike, we are living in a rapidly changing world that is full of negative events, duplicity, and influencers, whatever that is. Lots of people read this and respect its content and flavor, even if it runs counter to their best interests. As best I can tell you've pretty well done it all, had a great work life, and then, lo and behold, you discovered that you also write well. I doubt there's another soul on the planet who had these experiences, combined with passionate feelings, and the ability to express it on paper to the extent that readers feel they're in the moment with you. I hope you're putting this into a book, complete with photos. The stories are terrific, full of adventure and all sorts of emotions and drama. I still see the picture of Chigger's nitroglycerine disaster, so the photos tell a vivid story too. You're one of a kind. Don't half-ass your gift.

Love the bluegill - takes me back to fishing in our farm ponds with my dad. It's a shame that arguing over ownership has taken this long but apparently it's a side effect of still having private property in this country. I prefer that to having "the State" own everything since that just means it ends up with a small group of people and their friends, but it's not an efficient system. Wasn't really meant to be.

Now that is something to be proud of Mike. About time a regulator sees the light. Cheers

Anne, thanks for this. It IS important.

I am a staunch environmentalist that spent 60 years in the Texas oil and gas business, as an operator, successfully protecting both my family's livelihood AND the environment.

I was one of the very first in Texas to render produced water usable, and beneficial to the surface waters of the State and helped draft EPA General Permits that allowed the discharge of this produce water into the creeks and arroyos east of the 98th meridian in Texas, the produced water compliant with Texas Surface Water Standards and that meets or exceeds, waste water discharges for ALL other industrial discharges in Texas on every metric known to mankind, including whole effluent toxicity testing.

Fish live in my produced water and rare Texas River otters live in my discharges and reproduce babies. All of this is well known, has been written about in Texas, including white papers published in various scientific publications. I know the laws in Texas regarding produced water; I helped draft them.

This Supreme Court ruling does NOT mean that nasty, high chloride, high, total dissolved solids produce water from the Wolfcamp will simply be dumped on the ground, or in the Pecos River in West Texas. Fortunately for the people of Texas, the TRRC does not oversee produced water management in Texas, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) does and it must comply with the United States Clean Water Act of 1972. It will, I assure you. The TCEQ is tough.

So, this Supreme Court ruling for the most part reaffirms this opinion I wrote in 2014: https://www.scribd.com/document/211049099/Determination-of-Source-Point-Outfalls-for-Produced-Water-Surface-Discharges.

But it does NOT mean nasty shale oil water is going to be dumped on the ground without permits that meet very high Texas Standards for chlorides, metals, even strict toxicity testing.

I want the record straight. There are far left wackos that will go ape shit over this ruling, and it is because they hate oil and gas. Not all produced water is bad, a lot of it can be fixed and contribute to wildlife, aquatic life, irrigation for crops and livestock purposes in a dry Texas that is fast becoming desert-like, west to east.

I am hopeful, like you, this ruling means produced water in the Permian can be treated now, for reuse, to make a profit. Sadly, that is what it takes these days, not concern for the environment, or conservation of groundwater sources, but money.

My work with rendering produced water usable in Texas is one of the proudest accomplishments I have in my 60 years as a Texas operator. Water is life.

I have fished all over the world, for almost every species of fish there is. Above in a blue gill perch I caught on a 2-weight fly rod in a produced water retention pond on one of my oil and gas leases in Central Texas. I caught many of them that day, and in other retention ponds on other leases and in receiving creeks, on little surface flies ...in 100% produced water associated with oil production.

In my office I have an entire wall dedicated to photographs of fish I've caught, from tarpon and permit in Mexico and West Africa to Brown trout in the Patagonia, Atlantic Salmon in Scotland; fish from Western Australia to the Seychelles... and redfish in the Gulf of Mexico. This little fella is on the wall, proudly. In many ways it is the grandest fish I have ever caught.

This is a water flea, smaller than a gnat but abundant in any healthy aquatic system. This is the bottom of the food chain and there are gazillions of these things in good quality surface water for minnows to feed on, that then get eaten by bigger fish. These little guys require clean water to live and if they are in one's produced water, you've got really clean produced water.

This one, by the way, we were looking at with an electron microscope for stomach content and it happened to pass a little gas while we were watching.

Whole effluent toxicity testing (WET) requires these buggars be introduced into the produced effluent and watched, by accredited EPA labs, to make sure they live. When they do, the water is non-toxic and healthy.