Or, the march to the first billion gallon frac pad in Colorado
To understand the massive quantities of water that may be consumed to hydraulically fracture the 26 extreme reach wellbores at Draco, let’s look at the water used by the 394 hydraulic fracturing treatments logged thus far in 2024 to FracFocus, courtesy of the data wizards at Open FF who have made extensive inroads to sanitize and extend the FracFocus data.
Actual Water Use is Twice Estimated for Extreme Reach Wellbores
Let’s start with the upper extremes, as shown in the graph above. From the Cumulative Impacts analysis for the Blue Pad in Adams County, Crestone estimated they would consume between 102.9 and 147 million gallons of water to frac the 7 wells at Blue.
Crestone Peak Resources used a median of 47.7 million gallons of water per well and permanently poisoned 304 million gallons of water, more than twice their upper estimate!
Continue reading “Extreme Reach Wellbores Require Extreme Water Use”