AOGR Article: New Logistics Solutions Reduce Financial, ESG Costs Of Produced Water Disposal

Jeff O’Block, EVP of Commodity Management at W Energy Software, authored a featured article in the American Oil and Gas Reporter Magazine‘s July 2021 digital publication. Titled ‘New Logistics Solutions Reduce Financial, ESG Costs Of Produced Water Disposal’, O’Block discusses how an intermodal, cross-commodity transportation management system is enabling upstream and midstream companies to reduce operating expenses, boost business performance, and gain deeper visibility into the movement of commodities.

HOUSTON–Producers in the Permian Basin shoulder the burden of safely moving produced saltwater from producing wells to injection wells. The burden increases each day, as water-to-oil ratios (WORs) grow with every new well pad and as legacy horizontal wells journey down the decline curve.

While state regulatory reporting data for produced water is not exact, estimates suggest that the average WOR across the basin ranges between 1:1 and 4:1, with the highest ratios topping out at 10:1 in parts of the Delaware Basin. The utility of produced water is constrained by the tight rock from which it is produced, limiting opportunities to repurpose it for enhanced oil recovery and waterflooding. As a result, the bulk of Permian-produced water makes its way to injection wells at varying depths for disposal. Permian water disposal is a multibillion-dollar industry, and it is only getting bigger.

Supporting the movement and disposal of salt water is an extensive and continuously evolving infrastructure, from a labyrinth of polyethylene gathering lines and pumping stations to ever-present fleets of trucks that pack the roads of West Texas and Southeast New Mexico. Increasing production intersects with increasing water disposal costs at a point where the break-even cost for new wells may render some portions of the basin uneconomic unless the region sees a step-change in how efficiently water can be moved, disposed of, recycled, and reused.

For an increasing number of producers, the trend has been to jettison their water management activities and completely outsource dispatch, fleet management, and the associated general and administrative, and technology costs. Instead, they are leveraging the economy of scale of midstream service providers to reduce their infrastructure capital and water management costs.

To read more, click here to visit the featured interview in The American Oil and Gas Reporter’s July 2021 digital publication.

About W Energy Software

Headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, W Energy Software offers the oil & gas industry’s only unified ERP solution built for the cloud that is relied on by more than 130 upstream and midstream companies to accelerate business performance, improve operational efficiency, and drive costs down.  W Energy Software combines precision-built software in one extendable cloud-based workspace with an intimate understanding of the oil & gas business to deliver solutions that offer flexibility, affordability, and continuous upgrades.  Unlike other ERP software that loosely ties together a mix of legacy solutions and fragmented technologies, W Energy Software designed a unified upstream and midstream ERP platform to seamlessly track oil, gas, and NGL from the wellhead through transportation and marketing, eliminating data silos as well as the burden and costs of maintaining multiple systems.  With W Energy Software, oil & gas companies stay lean and agile with the tools they need to adapt to market changes and meet evolving customer needs head-on, all while gaining the confidence that their business is running on the latest technology. For more information, please visit www.wenergysoftware.com.