Aqua Renew Program

Founded under the concept of water recovery and reuse, Chesapeake’s Aqua Renew program is utilizing state-of-the-art technology in an effort to recycle produced water. This naturally occurring water is generally laden with various minerals and travels from the producing formation through the wellbore to the surface with natural gas during completion and production operations.

The quality of produced water differs greatly with varying amounts of salt, sand or silt, depending on the formation in which it is found. Due to its normally high salt content, reuse in completion operations has been considered impossible by the industry for a long time.

We began to intently focus on water reclamation and conservation after a 2006 - 2007 Barnett Shale drought started to affect drilling and completion activities. That experience, along with our involvement in the Barnett Shale Water Conservation and Management Committee, evolved into an agreement with the City of Fort Worth to study water evaporation systems as a potential way to reduce the amount of produced water being injected into saltwater disposal wells. Using an Evaporative Reduction and Solidification System (EVRAS) to capture heat generated by natural gas compressor stations, an energy source that would typically be wasted, a portion of the produced water is filtered and reduced to water vapor. The resulting clean vapor is then released into the atmosphere where it eventually returns to the earth as rain. For more information on this technology, visit www.intevras.com/evras.html.

Since this preliminary reclamation project, our focus on reuse and water conservation has become a company-wide endeavor, stretching from the Barnett Shale of North-central Texas to northern Pennsylvania.

The Aqua Renew program has yet to find a limit to how much recycled water could be used without compromising well production. In fact, the company’s northern and central districts of our Eastern Division operations are treating and recycling 100% of the initial produced water from the flowback process.

At each wellsite, produced water is collected and stored in on-site holding tanks where it is pumped through a 20-micron filter designed to remove any suspended solids or particles. The filtered water is then either stored in on-site tanks or transported to the next well scheduled for hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as fracing. The water is tested for salt content and total hardness to determine the rate at which it can be blended with freshwater to ensure proper quality and quantity for reuse.

While we still have to mix the recycled produced water with freshwater in order to ensure the proper mixture for fracing, every gallon of produced water we filter and reuse is one less gallon of water that has to be trucked to a disposal and one less gallon of freshwater we have to purchase and use.

On average, this process is able to filter and reuse almost 4 million gallons of produced water a month in Marcellus Shale fracing operations. With such large volumes of recycled water, the company is seeing more than just environmental advantages. Our accounting department has estimated that this aspect of the process is saving an average of $6 million a year in the Eastern Division alone. The program is garnering results like these throughout our shale plays: in the Fayetteville Shale of Arkansas, 30% of the water being used during the completion process comes from recycled produced water.

The Aqua Renew program is expected to continue to grow, thanks to recent regulatory changes in the state of Louisiana allowing for easier usage of recycled produced water and continued technological advances. In addition, we are always evaluating new technology both on our own and through partnership with a number of environmental organizations in an effort to expand the program.