Comments: Texas Explores Beneficial Reuse as Produced-Water Flows Top 24 Million B/D

_ Produced water management remains an ongoing challenge facing operators in the heart of the US shale sector as they also deal with tightening inventories of new well locations and a more muted oil price outlook. The pressure is greatest in the Permian Basin where produced-water volumes dwarf the record volumes of oil being produced there each day. Since the beginning of 2017, tight-oil production in the region has expanded from about 1.5 million B/D to nearly 5.8 million B/D by the end of 2025. Over that same period, produced-water volumes more than doubled, rising from about 11.2 million B/D to nearly 24 million B/D in 2025, according to data from the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), which regulates the state’s oil and gas sector. Since only a fraction of this water is needed for recycling for hydraulic fracturing operations, the majority is simply returned to the subsurface through saltwater disposal wells, an almost century-old practice that has drawn increasing scrutiny as induced seismic activity has intensified. In the Delaware Basin, which makes up half of the broader Permian region, more than 8,000 earthquakes exceeding a magnitude level of 2.0 have been recorded since 2017, including 10 events above magnitude 4.5. Earthquakes of that size are not only felt on the surface but can also cause damage to structures and infrastructure. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin said in a 2025 paper that they used satellites to find that the injections also led to as much as 20 in. (53 cm) surface uplift across an area of almost 2 sq mile (5 km2) in one part of the Permian that was followed by a gradual subsidence of almost 4 in. (10 cm) after a blowout event relieved some of the pent-up pressure. In response to induced seismicity, operators and disposal companies began adjusting injection strategies around 2022, moving volumes away from deep basement formations where quake-prone faults are more common and toward shallower layers of reservoir rock. While this approach appears to have reduced seismic risk in some areas, it has introduced a new set of problems. Primarily, the shallow injection zones have been blamed for watering out some producing wells and, in more severe cases, to uncontrolled flows of produced water reaching the surface through long-dormant orphan wells with poor to nonexisting zonal isolation. Texas has seen some high-profile incidents in recent years due to this issue. In one 2022 case, an orphaned well released an estimated 25,000 bbl of produced water to the surface over a 2-week period before it was successfully plugged. The UT at Austin research team, which included geoscience and geology experts, concluded that elevated pressure and fluid migration from that event may have been redirected to a nearby well only a few hundred meters away, which experienced a blowout roughly a year later and remained unplugged for 6 weeks.