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Michigan’s 21 Million Gallon Frack Job: A National Record? 02-05-2013

The destruction of the world’s fresh water due to fracking is at the uppermost of our minds, as we live and drink the water in the Great Lakes state. How much water is being used for Michigan’s frack industry is now proven to be obscenely underestimated. Michigan may have set a national record for allowing Encana Oil & Gas USA to frack a natural gas well with more than 21 million gallons of water.

A second nearby well is set to be fracked with more than 16 million gallons, according to a permit granted Encana late last year by Michigan regulators.
These big numbers are a big surprise. Most industry and government claims of water usage go by Marcellus shale figures, but here in Michigan, the frackers are using more water than perhaps anywhere else in the nation.


The truth is now coming out
FracFocus says the first well, State Excelsior 3-25 HD1, was fracked on Oct. 30, and Encana used 21,112,194 gallons of water. Combined with two other horizontal wells on the same pad, FracFocus says more than 42 million gallons went permanently downhole. The Excelsior pad [[named after the township) is on Sunset Trail between Kalkaska and Grayling in the Mackinaw State Forest in Kalkaska County.

http://ecowatch.com/2013/mi-frack-jo...addtoany%22%7D
Some of the 42 million gallons of fresh water being poured into the drilling pit at the State Excelsior frack well can be seen in this video by Respect My Planet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=C0vXPEm-J_Q

Published on Dec 8, 2012
Frack pit filling from multiple fresh water wells simultaneously. The two large diameter tubes going into the water will extract the fresh water and mix it into a toxic 'slick water'. It will then be pumped at pressures of roughly 8,000 to 9,000 psi to break apart the Collingwood Shale deep below the ground's surface. According to FracFocus.org, over 42.1 million gallons of fresh water were consumed to frack the three wells here on Encana's South Sunset pad in Kalkaska county. 1-25HD1 used 8.4 million gallons, 2-25HD1 used 12.6 million gallons, and 3-25HD1 used over 21.1 million gallons of water.

This fresh water consumed in this video was for the 3-25 frack which, at the time, was the biggest water consumption ever to complete a single well in the State of Michigan. This record will fall, however, as Encana has plans to drill more than 1,700 wells in Michigan's Collingwood shale according to their January 2013 corporate presentation. [[http://www.encana.com/pdf/investors/p...) Encana plans to continue to use 10,000 foot laterals which is the length of the 3-25 lateral [[10,131 ft). Water consumption for fracking is generally a function of the length of well bore that gets fracked, so that will most likely continue to be 20 million gallons of water per well. Water is easier to come by for drillers in Michigan because they're able to drill water wells in close proximity to the frack site at high volume quantities. This makes drilling in Michigan attractive to drillers as it helps to cut transportation costs because water does not need to be trucked to the well pad. The downside is that citizens of Michigan will see more of their valuable public water resources consumed and removed from the hydro-logic cycle as drilling proliferates.