For every barrel of Bakken oil comes salty water from deep in the earth, and managing that brine has become one of the oil patch's quietest and costliest challenges.
Oil is not the only thing a Bakken well produces. Rising with it is a stream of ancient, intensely salty water — far saltier than the sea — trapped in the rock for eons. For every barrel of oil, several barrels of this brine may come up, and what to do with the flood is one of the oil patch's least glamorous and most important problems.
The Brine That Comes Up with the Crude
The water cannot simply be released; its salt would poison any soil or stream it touched. Instead it is trucked or piped to disposal wells and injected back deep underground, into porous rock far below the aquifers that farms and towns depend on. A leak of the brine can sterilize a patch of ground for years.
From the almanac's reckoning:
- Bakken wells produce several barrels of brine for each barrel of oil.
- The salty produced water is injected deep underground for disposal.
- A brine spill can sterilize soil for years if it reaches the surface.
Handling produced water safely is a matter of pipes, trucks, wells and vigilance, and the industry has steadily built the network to do it. The almanac notes that the oil patch's hardest labor is often not bringing the oil up but managing everything that comes up with it.
Elsewhere in the Almanac
The Roughneck's Trade on the Bakken Rig
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Carbon Capture Comes to the Lignite Country
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