Every Year, Year After Year

This in Canyon Lake in the Texas Hill Country, halfway between Austin and San Antonio. I watched it being built in the early 1960's. Its 8,230 acres big and at normal water levels it is 134 feet deep. The water is so cold coming out the discharges at the bottom of the lake, down the Guadalupe River, rainbow and brown trout can survive in it.

In 2002 the area received over 30 inches of rain in <30 hours and the earthen spillway around the dam at Canyon Lake cut out, exposing Cretaceous age Glen Rose Reefs and the Upper Trinity limestone. When flood waters receded the ensuing spillway gorge laid forth beautiful secrets that can still be seen today by visiting the new, gorge park.

I've frac'ed wells before, sat Permian Basin frac's, know frac engineers, have buddies working in that stuff and have a good handle on how much fresh to semi-fresh (potable) water is used in the Permian Basin each year to frac over 5,000 wells. It's pretty much all groundwater. From an arid, hot part of Texas that averages 15 inches of rain a year.

Completing over 5,000 HZ wells in the Permian Basin uses close to 126,000,000,000 (billion) gallons of water every year. It's hard to get your head wrapped around that big a number, so try this...

The volume of usable water going IN to the Permian Basin each year for frac'ing purposes equals 386,000 acre feet and would completly DRAIN Canyon Lake (382,000 acre feet) dry as a bone...every year.

Produced water coming OUT of the Permian Basin equals 20.1 MM barrels per day (Enverus, Produced Water Society, Guerrero), or 840,000,000 gallons per day. That produced water would FILL Canyon Lake, to the spill way, every 5 months. And its not the kind of stuff you would want to swim in either.

That's lots of water going in and lots more water coming out and the Permian tight oil sector is OUT of places to put produced water, best not listen to the lies.

Its a race to the bottom as to which they'll run out of first out there; economic oil, frac source water, or new places to stuff the produced water. And to be clear, this mostly all for the sake of oil and LNG exports to foreign countries.