It’s no secret that hydraulic fracturing in the production of oil and natural gas uses enormous amounts of water. A single well requires between 2 and 10 million gallons of water — mixed with sand and chemicals — to crack rocks deep underground and release oil or natural gas. As a rule of thumb, it takes 1,000 truck trips to complete one hydraulically fractured well. Since shortly after World War II, hydraulic fracturing — known as fracking — has been used in the drilling of more than 1 million wells across the United States, and with the surge in oil and gas production in recent years, that has added up to a lot of water. Fracking is being done in places — such as Texas, Colorado, Kansas and Pennsylvania — where water resources are stretched thin due to drought. In a recently published report on water scarcity, Ceres, a […]