Produced Water Injections/Generations

Owned by Thushara Gunda (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jun 22, 2021
3 min read

Our team has brainstormed and discussed ways to incorporate produced water-related data into NMWDI. Below are the notes we captured during our discussions.

Overview

  • Three datasets

    • Freshwater for produced water (injections)

    • Produced water injections (disposal)

    • Project water generation

    • FYI, Water quality data is not collected at the state level, but may be available from other federal/academic resources

  • How much water is used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR)?

    • Time/Date

    • Volume

    • Where? (Well/Pad/Site/County - Lat/Long)

    • Source of water? (likely not collected)

  • Field of interest from a generator/generation perspective

    • Time/Date

    • Volumes

    • Where?

    • Injection

      • Time/Date

      • Volumes

      • Relevant wells metadata

      • Connect to relevant water quality datasets?

    • Common QC issues?

    • Water quality considerations

      • Testing conducted? (Cl, TDS) - when are these taken?

Dataset Details

  • Data primarily captured at the recycling facilities

    • scanned pdf documents → in environmental bureau (Forms C147 and C148)

      • doesn’t necessarily capture which wells

      • produced water out of the recycling facility

      • Lead in environmental bureau?

      • Other challenges: Fracking on the fly

      • C148 *filled out on a monthly basis*

        • produced water received

        • other fluid received (usually water used for mixing)

        • volume discharged for recycling/reuse

    • FTP site data: ftp://164.64.106.6/Public/OCD/

      • available online - GIS tab on OCD website

      • Can filter by type of wells (EOR, SWD), pool (Devonian, DE Mtn group), volumes, and well

        • can tabulate how much water goes down for EOR (inject lesser amounts, 500-1000 barrels/day) vs. SWD (20-30K barrels/day)

        • 3000 EOR wells and 800 SWD wells

        • Has a well API (can be joined to other wells)

        • Internal report: non-transported produced water (evaporated, used on site, etc.)

      • Reported by Operator monthly and it’s on the C150 form

    • FracFocus data contains amount of water in use as well as constituents (possible project for anyone)

      • Available on OCD website as Excel table (updates via email)

      • contains lat/long info for wells → Kathleen has a GIS layer on this already

      • Bruce Thomson at UNM has been working with chemistry data from FracFocus (looking at what’s been added); report through WRRI soon.

    • Other datasets in GIS

      • Seismic activity (NMTech site)

      • Recycling facility data (Kathleen has it; year old now)

        • Compiled by Katie’s student (includes design info)

        • Challenges: can query for sites but can’t do a bulk download of search entries

    • An example dataset that was compiled by Jeri for Kathleen at OCD is below

      • The first tab (expanded production injection summary) has a download of a typical data set from the OCD website (not the FTP page). It is an excel sheet that is generated from a request. You will see that there is a lot of information of interest. In particular, folks are interested in the ratio between the amount of oil or gas generated and the amount of water. So there is value in reporting both together. Also the regions and counties are interesting. There are a few coal seam wells also. FYI, there are often discrepancies between the Excel and FTP files.

      • The other tabs of interest ("onsite disposition") were generated by OCD. These give us an idea of where water is disposed. Sometimes it is evaporated in pits, sometimes reinjected. FYI, this data is not often available through the FTP site, so folks would need to contact Kathleen Murphy directly.

Priorities

Resources

  • Key entities to continue these discussions with:

    • Kathleen Murphy (OCD)

    • Luke Martin (NMBGMR)

    • Martha Cather (PRRC)

    • Katie Zemlick (OSE). A presentation Katie did about produced/freshwater data is linked below.

  • FYI, Shaoping Chu (LANL) created a crosswalk for brine water, that might be relevant to these discussions: