In New Mexico—one of the largest producers of oil and gas in the country—researchers are trying to grow hemp, sunflowers and trees with purified fracking wastewater. For now, using such “produced water” for anything in the open environment is prohibited in the state.
Each experiment will be completely enclosed, so that no water leaks out to potentially contaminate surrounding areas with toxins, salt and oil residue.
Extracting oil and gas requires swimming pools-worth of water—on average between 1 and 9 million gallons for a single well. Even more water comes out of the earth in the process. In total, around one trillion gallons of produced water are created across the country each year.
“Historically, that produced water is considered a waste product,” said Mike Dyson, chief executive officer at Infinity Water Solutions.
Oil producers are left to figure out what to do with it. “There’s really too much water that’s produced to be able to dispose of it all on site,” said Sydney Lienemann, deputy secretary of administration at the New Mexico Environment Department.
In New Mexico’s case, produced water is often trucked to neighboring Texas, where it’s disposed of underground with injection wells, a practice that’s been linked to earthquakes and can also end up polluting groundwater.
Some produced water is cleaned up and re-used to extract more oil and gas. For years, Infinity has been treating produced water to do just that. But as New Mexico has faced growing concerns about water shortages and drought, state leaders are looking at how to use produced water for other applications beyond the oilfield.
Having enough clean water in the coming decades is a major concern for the state. In the next 50 years, the state will lose 25 percent of its groundwater and surface water due to climate change, Leinemann said.
For that reason, Gov. Michelle Grisham introduced the Strategic Water Supply, a program that recommends tapping into some of the nearly two billion barrels of produced water generated each year in New Mexico that can’t be reused in the oilfield. The plan aims to unlock 100,000 acre-feet of new water for clean energy production, storage and manufacturing by 2028 and develop regulatory frameworks for reusing that water by 2026. Grisham introduced her plan to the legislature in 2023, but it failed to pass.
This January, the legislature will vote on it again, along with a new rule that will decide whether treated produced water can be used for industrial processes, manufacturing and agriculture. Depending on what lawmakers decide, billions of barrels of water that have been considered waste could turn into a new clean resource.
But before then, there are plenty of questions to answer and concerns to assuage. “This waste can be toxic. It could be radioactive, it could be dangerous in other ways,” said Amy Mall, director of fossil fuels at the National Resource Defense Council. Still, “if it was subject to safer standards, the idea of reducing water usage is a positive.”
How New Mexico Got Here
New Mexico wouldn’t be the first state to allow produced water from fracking to be discharged into the environment after treatment. California, Pennsylvania, Wyoming and parts of Texas already permit it.
In California, produced water is even used in agriculture. “Some of the produce we get at the grocery store is probably grown with that water,” said Colin Cox, a staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. But there’s a major distinction: the Golden State only allows the reuse of produced water from conventional oil wells—not fracked ones, which add toxic chemicals to water in order to extract oil. New Mexico, on the other hand, has far more fracking.
Another challenge of treating produced water in New Mexico is that the Permian Basin’s wastewater is extremely saline.
“The water chemistry is different here,” said Zacariah Hildenbrand, chief scientific officer at Infinity. “That’s why there’s more concerns about getting the treatment done right.”
Scientists say it’s clear that produced water can be adequately treated for different purposes. Pilot projects, like Infinity’s, will attempt to prove that further.
Infinity, for example, is looking to grow hemp and sunflowers with treated produced water this spring. To treat their water before using it on plants, Infinity first runs it through pre-treatment to remove oils, kill bacteria, adjust the water’s pH and remove iron, hydrogen sulfides and sands.
Next, the water is desalinated to reduce the salt content. Finally, it goes through post-treatment, where trace chemicals and toxins are removed.
While Infinity has confidence in their process, “we have to get this absolutely right from day one,” said Hildenbrand. “We cannot afford for there to be any residual contaminants in this, because it will accumulate.” If any land or groundwater becomes contaminated, “It’s going to move the whole paradigm back ten years,” he said.
“Until the science is done and the data satisfies its usage outside of the oil and gas industry, we are prohibited from using the water outside of the oil and gas industry,” Dyson said.
Infinity’s pilot, along with the others launched by the New Mexico Environmental Department beginning in 2019, are gathering that data to determine whether produced water can reach safe levels in a cost-effective way.
The pilots were permitted after the state passed its Produced Water Act, which encouraged gas companies to reuse treated water to preserve freshwater. The law also created the Produced Water Research Consortium, a team of scientists out of New Mexico State University, to analyze the pilots and develop standards for treating produced water. Colorado and Texas followed New Mexico’s lead, creating their own produced water research teams.
“What this, rightly or wrongly, intentionally or not, has signaled to private enterprises is that this challenge can actually be an opportunity,” Dyson said. “We can take full custody of the waste product and introduce the commercial case for it to be a refined commodity.”
Infinity launched in 2020 in Austin, Texas, but soon began working in New Mexico, thanks to the opportunities the Produced Water Act opened up for making a business around cleaning up produced water.
So far, pilot projects are showing that, “the economics of using produced water on the oil patch and off the oil patch are good enough for people to want to move forward,” Lienemann said.
The price of treating produced water is on par, or slightly lower, than the cost of paying to store or dispose of the water, according to Mike Hightower, program director of the Produced Water Research Consortium. Disposal costs can be between $0.75 to $5.00 per barrel, depending on how far you have to truck the water, while treatment comes to around $1.00 to $1.20 per barrel, depending on the makeup of the water in different areas of the state, Hightower said.
Around $1 per barrel “is where we need to get for most produced water to be treated at a reasonably competitive cost,” Hightower said.
That price, however, doesn’t include the cost of testing water to see what it contains, or the cost of disposing of toxic chemicals extracted during the treatment process.
“There’s just so many holes and gaps in the data that to claim treatment for any price right now is premature,” Cox said. “One really big issue is that no company has done this at scale,” making it difficult to guess at an accurate cost.
The price to customers buying treated produced water is also not yet clear. For the average farmer who can access groundwater to irrigate their fields, paying for treated produced water could add unnecessary expenses. But some oil companies Hightower has spoken with are considering not charging for the water. “If you’ve got so much [produced water] and it’s costing you more and more to dispose of it,” then “in some cases, it may be cheaper for industry to give it away,” he said.
Developing Standards for Produced Water
Advocates worry that New Mexico’s clean water rules aren’t sufficient to allow produced water to be used outside of an enclosed environment. Currently, there are no specific rules for what it means to treat produced water to a safe standard in New Mexico, or federally. “When the EPA was established in the 70s, I don’t think that they ever thought that people were going to be treating produced water from the oil field to a drinking water state,” Hildenbrand said.
Even if companies can clean produced water up to drinking water standards, “the question is, do the drinking water standards encompass everything that could potentially be in that water?” Lienemann said.
According to Mike Hightower, adequate rules are—mostly—there. New Mexico’s clean water standards and current water discharge rules cover “99.9 percent” of what’s in produced water after treatment, he said. “What we’re finding is, if we do our pre-treatment right, there’s only two or three things that seem to make it through the treatment process that we need to look at.”
Those things are ammonia and alcohols—including methanol and ethanol, which are part of the antifreeze added to water for fracking. Ammonia is covered and, with more focus in post-treatment, can be properly removed, Hightower said. “The only thing that I can find that’s not in the regulations today, that is different, are the alcohols,” he said. “So we’re trying to work our post treatment to remove the alcohols.”
If they accomplish that, and no alcohols remain after treatment, Hightower said New Mexico’s existing clean water standards could be applied without changes.
“When the EPA was established in the 70s, I don’t think that they ever thought that people were going to be treating produced water from the oil field to a drinking water state.”
— Zacariah Hildenbrand, Infinity Water Solutions chief scientific officer
Last summer, New Mexico lawmakers voted against allowing treated produced water to be used in processes where it is released into the environment, rather than contained within oil and gas extraction.
The Environmental Department is prioritizing caution. “We only just recently got drinking water standards for [Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)] that are being put into effect over the next five years. But a year ago, you could say this is safe for drinking water, and it could have high levels of PFAS,” Lienemann said.
To avoid a similar situation, they’re being “as careful as possible with where and how this produced water is discharged,” Leinemann said. “But we do think that the science will support that we can get it clean enough to be safe for surface or groundwater discharge at some point in the future.”
In January, lawmakers will re-evaluate the discharge ruling. Environmental and community groups remain opposed. In a joint testimony from the Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians and others, the groups argued that science supporting using treated produced water in open environments “isn’t there yet.” The groups wrote in favor of small-scale pilot projects, like Infinity’s, but not for full-scale use in industrial processes or manufacturing.
“More research is needed to know if produced water reuse can ever be safe,” the testimony reads.
Produced Water for Clean Energy
Another major ruling on the table in January is the state’s Strategic Water Supply. If the measure moves forward this session, it would open up funding to treat more produced water on a wider scale and allow its use in industrial processes, like hydrogen production, and in industrial greenhouses, cooling towers and other manufacturing without release to the surrounding environment.
“We absolutely want to move forward with using produced water to support diversifying our economy. That decision, I think, really has been made, and it was made by the legislature in 2019 when they passed the Produced Water Act unanimously,” Lienemann said.
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Lienemann is particularly interested in using treated produced water to make materials for renewable energy sources, which she says will help attract more clean energy to the state. Produced water could be used to make solar panels, cement for wind turbines and components for electric vehicles and charging infrastructure.
A $942 million solar panel factory was approved for the state in August and will require two million barrels of water a day to make solar panels, Lieneman said. “If we want to be part of that [clean energy] economy, we need to figure out how to use, squeeze, every drop of value out of every drop of water.”
The Big Question: Agriculture
Currently, the New Mexico Environmental Department is not interested in using produced water for agriculture, according to Lienemann. Nevertheless, Infinity and Kanalis Energy Group will both use treated water on plants as a part of their pilots.
Kanalis will grow trees in an enclosed greenhouse—some with produced water and some with regular groundwater. The plantings are elevated, so none of the water will go on the ground at any point. If the health of the trees is maintained, Nyle Khan, general manager at Kanalis, hopes they could be approved to help reforest parts of New Mexico that have been ravaged by wildfires. Until then, Kanalis plans to sell the seedlings grown in the greenhouse with freshwater.
For now, “we’re not allowed to sell treated produced water tree seedlings,” Khan said. Instead, they have to dispose of them as if they were hazardous waste. Findings from the upcoming greenhouse pilot could change that.
The greenhouse has been built and the first small pilot will begin in February or March of 2025. Their research team will evaluate growth height, root system height, mineral content, and soil health.
In 2023, Kanalis completed a demonstration project in collaboration with New Mexico Highlands University to grow tree seedlings in a lab, some using produced water and some with freshwater. From 2021-2022, Kanalis ran another pilot project to grow high-density forage grasses indoors with produced water. Both experiments showed that the plants watered with produced water grew just as well as those receiving freshwater, Khan said.
Khan is going a step further to use produced water as a geothermal heating source for the greenhouse. Oil wells go about a mile into the ground. At that depth, water is naturally warm—around 160 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. To use it for heat, Kanalis plans to transport produced water through a pipe into a heat exchanger. There, a pipe filled with freshwater would absorb the heat from the adjacent produced water pipe. The warm freshwater would be piped into the nearby greenhouse and used in a hot water-to-air heater, where fans blow over the pipes to distribute warm air.
In addition to using treated produced water to grow the plants inside, Khan hopes to demonstrate geothermal heating as another “path for reuse of oil fields that produce a lot of water.”
As seedlings start to grow in Kanalis’ greenhouse this spring, Infinity will begin planting their hemp and sunflowers. The team has designed its facilities and plans to start planting in March, when the growing season begins.
Infinity will use a novel form of medicinal hemp called cattail grape, which has a shortened growth cycle—instead of growing over 20 to 24 weeks, it matures in just 10. Hemp is “really good at bioremediation, which basically means it accumulates a lot of metals in its roots,” said Hildenbrand. That means it will be easy to see if the plant takes up any potentially harmful chemicals.
The company will closely monitor any changes to soil health, plant yield and impact on the surrounding environment.
Researchers will screen for around 60 metals, including arsenic, selenium and lead—all of which can be toxic if consumed. They’ll also examine the salt content and microbial diversity in the soil, which is a key indicator of plant health.
If all goes well, geneticists Adam Jacques and Christian West, who work in medicinal hemp and provided Infinity with the strain for the pilot, are interested in using the water to grow their hemp in Oregon, where water resources can also be sporadic. Infinity would plan to expand its operations to California and transport treated water to Oregon.
Produced water might be useful as more than a replacement for ordinary freshwater, since its unique makeup could potentially be beneficial to plants, Hildenbrand said. During the process of extracting oil and gas from the ground, water picks up metals along the way. Ammonia, for example, can be used to produce nitrogen—a natural fertilizer. Iodine is used as a disinfectant. Pyridine can be used to make feedstock and in pharmaceutical drugs.
Infinity has spoken with farmers who have responded favorably to the idea of using treated produced water, particularly In the panhandle of Texas, where the Ogallala Aquifer has been depleted over the past few decades. “Produced water could come in as a kind of a white knight scenario,” Hildenbrand said.
Yet for years, cattlemen and ranchers have complained about water leaking up through abandoned oil and gas wells on their land—some suspect that produced water injected underground finds its way into those wells, causing dangerous contamination.
Hildenbrand has spoken with the Cattle Growers’ Association, which is interested in using treated produced water, if it can be proved safe. That practice would not only free up water supplies for cattle and their feed, but would also help reduce the amount of water injected into the ground that escapes into unplugged wells.
The answer to the question of how clean the produced water can get is clear to Hildenbrand. During his research with Aris Water Solutions at the University of Texas at El Paso, he compared treated produced water to the water students in the chemistry department were drinking from the tap on a daily basis.
“The treated oil field waste was literally cleaner and less toxic than that water,” he said. “I would characterize this water as non-potable fresh water that is every bit as good as anything you can find out in an agricultural setting. So I mean, we can put this on textile crops, cotton, hemp,”
Some, however, see the treating of produced water as greenwashing—making oil and gas operations seem more environmentally friendly by putting their wastewater to use.
“Produced water is a happy, greenwashed term for oil and gas liquid waste,” Cox, with the Center for Biological Diversity, said. “The industry wants us to solve their waste problem with our money,” he said.
New Mexico aims to power its state with 50 percent renewables by 2030 and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 45 percent by the same year. The state has made strides in recent years. In 2023, renewable energy was the largest source of in-state electricity generation, with wind power alone making up 38 percent. But natural gas still supplied 34 percent of the state’s generation and coal powered another 19 percent.
“If we could quit oil and gas tomorrow, then let’s have that conversation,” Dyson said. “But the truth of the matter is, practically, we absolutely cannot. Should we not, in the interim, try to make the process better?”
“If what we can do is take a waste product from one source and turn it into a level of resilience for or even a boon for other aspects of this energy transition, that seems like a pretty good endeavor,” he said.
Infinity hopes their data will push regulators to provide them with the requirements for allowing treated produced water to be used beyond oil and gas operations.
Once their pilot is complete, they’ll hand over their findings to regulators in New Mexico and Texas, with the goal of showing “we can do this responsibly,” Hildenbrand said.
“This can be good for the environment. This can benefit farmers, certainly benefit the energy sector,” he said. “And then just let them make an informed decision.”
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