Colorado drillers must recycle frac water starting in 2026 under first-in-the-nation rule

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To reduce the need for fresh fracking water, the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission, on April 8 issued first-in-the-nation regulations requiring 4% of the water from oil and gas production to be recycled starting in 2026 and rising to as much as 35% by 2038.

The amount of water used for fracking — or hydrofracturing — in Colorado is minor, averaging 1.7% of the state’s total water consumption between 2011 and 2020.

“Conservation in the oil and gas industry doesn’t have as big an impact as a similar amount of conservation from the agricultural community,” ECMC Commissioner John Messner told The Colorado Sun. “That’s your biggest water user in the state.”

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The water that comes back out of a well, known as produced water, is a mixture of the water that went down and water that was in the rock formation — often saltwater from prehistoric seas. It is also mixed with oil, mud and sand.

Industry executives say one challenge is the scale of infrastructure that will be needed to cope with recycling produced water. A second problem is the fact that on the Front Range only a fraction of the water that goes down the hole comes back up.

“This makes it difficult to source sufficient volumes of produced water to recycle for the completion of a new well,” Seth Gordon, an engineer for Chevron U.S.A. Inc., said in commission testimony.

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The regulations provide that when recycling begins in 2026, operators only have to use 2% recycled water the first year and then 4% during the next three years. In 2030, the target will be raised to 10%.

The new rules zero in on the Denver-Julesburg or DJ Basin, which consumes 90% of the freshwater used in fracking in Colorado, but recycles less than 1% of its produced water.

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By contrast, the Western Slope’s Piceance Basin uses less than 1% of the freshwater and recycles 92% of its produced water.

There are several reasons there has been so little recycling on the Front Range. One is geology. The amount of water in rock strata varies from basin to basin. In the DJ Basin only 30% to 40% of the fracking water sent down a well comes back up.

“We get about eight barrels of oil for every barrel of water in the DJ,” said Grant Tupper, a business development director for water recycler Select Water Solutions. In Texas’ Permian Basin, he said, there are approximately eight barrels of water for every barrel of oil.

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In other basins, those large amounts of produced water are waste that must be dealt with. In the Piceance, Colorado’s largest water-producing basin, it has led to an extensive network of pipelines and recycling facilities.

“Not having to deal with that produced water certainly creates better economics for operators (in the DJ) than it does in other areas of the country,” Messner said. As a result, there is little recycling infrastructure on the Front Range.

The DJ Basin has the fewest pipelines for carrying produced water and as a result the basin is more dependent on trucks for hauling produced and recycled water, according to a consortium report.

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