Water management: What will 2025 bring?

Seismicity. By far, the greatest obstacle and threat surrounding produced water management over the past few years has been seismicity. So, I took a look at the Texnet Earthquake Catalog and narrowed my search to earthquakes greater than 3.0. We spent a few consistent years at 55 events, but there were only 28 events when we started monitoring. We jumped to 224 events in the 2021-2022 period.  

We are also seeing larger events, but since then, we are seeing a slight decline every year, but still teetering around 200 events. Thus, 2024-2025 looks like we will drop under 200 to about 190 or less. Obviously a 400% increase or larger is significant, but the actions taken seem to be making some progress, as we are seeing a slight decline. This decline is almost insignificant when compared to the increase, but we stopped increasing, and that’s good news. Expect seismicity to continue to be the top story. 

Blowouts. Another problem we have seen emerging is the increased number of blowouts. As deeper injection is banned, we are moving water back to shallow injection, which in some areas is already way over-pressurized. Now, we’re seeing produced water return to the surface through improperly closed or abandoned wells, or potentially never-closed abandoned wells. We are seeing this taking a more elevated position, and we are seeing more money spent on inspection and closures. 

The current produced water management model. The current produced water management model is broken. We either dispose of produced water or recycle, with the vast majority tied to disposal. This “two legged stool” approach is rather unstable, Seismicity impacts disposal, and recycling is hit and miss. I have yet to see a large-scale recycling operation that operates consistently.  

Instead, we see recycling assets being used intermittently and, as a result, suffering from poor utilization, raising costs. We have seen small scale recycling operate consistently, but in most markets, scaling up reduces costs, but not when demand doesn’t support it. The other problem with relying on recycling, which is primarily reusing produced water as a completion fluid on new well completions, is you need a consistent supply of new well completions. Although we are seeing that materialize, well completion activity moves around, and permanent recycling facilities can’t. 

So where does that leave us? Seismicity is reducing disposal capacity and increasing cost. Redirecting disposal to shallower wells is potentially increasing the number of blowouts and increasing well completion costs in some areas. And our current produced water model is broken. Combine this with potential export bans of produced water from New Mexico to Texas, and things are getting tough. Additionally, we have new regulations, both in New Mexico and federally, asking for volatile organics (VOCs) to be reduced in New Mexico and methane federally, in produced water. We are all looking for options to add legs to the produced water management stool, and desalination and beneficial reuse is an emerging option. So where do we go from here? 

What will 2025 bring? I expect seismicity to continue declining. We are using an approach in New Mexico and Texas that was already successful in Oklahoma, and I don’t expect that to change, but it will take time. We have to add options to produced water management’s ”two legged stool” and possibly change the model altogether. 

Desalination and beneficial reuse. Although promising, desalination does have a cost problem. Compounding that with the many options being considered for desalinated or partially desalinated water is agricultural usage. Agricultural options are typically seasonal, meaning you’re back to using an option that will have poor utilization of equipment. Poor utilization contributes to a higher cost in an area where cost is already a prohibitive factor. Adding further to this already complex problem is opposition in New Mexico to beneficial reuse. Although some progress is being made, the New Mexico issue is still being worked on. 

I think 2025 will see our first discharge permits for beneficial reuse and some progress in New Mexico, but I think it will be a few more years before we can add desalination and beneficial reuse as a permanent leg to the produced water management stool. 

Evaporation. Evaporation has been widely disregarded because of the potential to spread salt form produced water on adjacent land and contaminate it. Today, there are options to control salt dispersion that should be considered, The other concern with evaporation is what do you do with all the salt solids, millions of tons that aren’t pure salt, so it has little market value. Well evaporation doesn’t have to be complete. Set an evaporation target of 30%, and now you have a more concentrated brine, but you reduced disposal volumes by 30%, which is significant. This approach solves many of the problems associated with evaporation.  

Add to this that many desalination options being considered include an evaporation phase and then a condensation phase. Evaporation can be a bridge to desalination. Increase the utilization of equipment by using it part time for evaporation when not desalinating. I expect we will see more evaporation projects emerge in 2025. 

Volatile organics and methane. VOCs will have to be reduced in produced water by 30% in New Mexico during 2025. This adds a new twist to treatment, but we have solved this issue with ozone. The other big issue will be methane. How much will the Trump administration roll back methane rules?  

For the first time, methane emission factors have been added to produced water under the Methane Emission Reduction Program established by the EPA. Will that get rolled back? At the same time, the supermajors are asking Trump to keep methane on the table, as they will need to meet methane targets anyway, to sell natural gas to the EU. We know the New Mexico requirements will proceed, but I think most of the methane requirements will too, so expect 2025 to be the year that treatment requirements for produced water will increase. 

The broken water management model. Adding options fixes this problem, and I believe options will be added. One of these could be the multi-Use facility. Recycling/desalination/beneficial reuse/evaporation combined at one facility. This does help resolve the poor utilization problem with most produced water equipment. Combined with that, I believe this operation should move upstream.  

This reduces emissions closer to the source, improves injectivity at disposal wells with cleaner ware and potentially could reduce seismicity, reduces maintenance costs by supplying cleaner water in distribution systems and reducing the cleaning of those systems, and more importantly improves oil recovery. We know oil theft is an issue, and the further upstream we can move oil recovery, the more we reduce theft, which is occurring downstream.  

So, this is what I envision for the future. Will it all come to pass in 2025? Will we make progress towards some of these initiatives? Only time will tell. Stay tuned, and we will see. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all and see you next year. 

About the Authors

Mark Patton

Hydrozonix

Mark Patton is president of Hydrozonix and has more than 30 years of experience developing water and waste treatment systems for the oil and gas industry. This includes design, permitting and operation of commercial and private treatment systems, both nationally and internationally. He has seven produced water patents and two patents pending. He earned his B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1985.