Watching OUR Water

Another good Letter to the Editor in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  Where is YOUR water going?  And is YOUR water bill increasing?

Recycling drilling water

Almost every day there are media ads urging us to conserve water as our supply is not unlimited and we'll eventually run out. We've even negotiated to import water from Oklahoma.

Several area cities have enacted some very strict yard watering rules and some even require rain meters on automatic sprinkler systems. This is good.

What isn't good is that these same cities allow the gas drillers to use all the water they need for drilling and fracking their wells.

These operations require several million gallons or fresh water per well. After fracking, the contaminated water is, in most cases, injected back into the ground in disposal wells that are about 2 miles deep. This is bad and a waste of water.

I understand that a small percentage of this contaminated water is being purified and reused on other wells. Apparently the technology to recycle the used, contaminated water is available, although it's probably more expensive than the disposal well method.

A deadline should be set to require that all drillers recycle their waste water. Drillers are making tremendous profits and have the monetary resources to build recycling plants. The extracted chemical residue could also be recycled. This would be a "green" solution for some of our potential water problems. This would be good.

-- Larry McGuire, Crowley