Data to Estimate Water Use Associated with Continuous Oil and Gas Development, Permian Basin, United States, 1980-2019
Description
One of the largest conventional oil reservoirs in the United States, the Permian Basin, is becoming one of the world’s largest continuous oil and gas producing reservoirs. Continuous, or horizontal well drilling techniques extract oil and gas by directionally drilling and hydraulically fracturing the surrounding reservoir rock. The continuous extraction of oil and gas using hydraulic fracturing requires large volumes of water, and estimates of the total water volume used in the Continuous Oil and Gas (COG) extraction technique, requires a comprehensive assessment to determine the amount of water needed to extract reservoir resources. This data release contains the input and output files utilized for the assessment of water usage associated with continuous oil production in the Permian Basin. All data points that met the filtering criteria as described in the child item Data Processing <procdesc> steps were retained in the data release. Further filtering of data points to remove unrealistic values was done prior to modeling. Model simulations were completed for the years 1980-2019. Results were used in the associated Scientific Investigations Report “Estimates of Water Use Associated with Continuous Oil and Gas Development in the Permian Basin, Texas and New Mexico, 1980–2019” (Valder and others, 2021).