17-4 Challenges of Water Management in the Permian Basin: Past, Present and Future

Session: One Century of Oil and Gas in the Permian Basin

Presenting Author:

Authors:

Abstract:

Current record high production of more than 6 million barrels of oil per day from the Permian Basin region results in the co-production of more than 20 million barrels of water, the management of which is one of the greatest challenges of sustained development of the basin. More than 75% of this co-produced water is injected for permanent disposal into productive and non-productive conventional reservoirs above or below the producing shale reservoirs. This water management strategy is increasingly challenging due to pore and pressure space concerns including induced seismicity, drilling challenges, and surface flows of effluent.

The long history of production and injection in the Permian Basin provides important context for present and future injection activities. Despite declining conventional oil production in the Permian Basin over decades, vast volumes of water continued to be produced – nearly 3 billion barrels per year - greater than that produced from unconventional reservoirs until the late 2010s. However, this produced water was mainly re-injected for enhanced oil recovery, posing little risk of subsurface pressure increases and few challenges to the subsurface or surface environment. More salient to present injection activity is the presence of hundreds of thousands of aging vertical wellbores used for conventional production, which are now subjected to pressure increases from injection associated with unconventional production. In some cases, surface flows of effluent – mainly from orphaned and abandoned wells – have occurred. This risk is increasing as injection reservoirs in the Delaware and Midland Basins begin to “fill up” and injection activities migrate to areas such as the Central Basin Platform where conventional oilfields are even more concentrated.

The reduction in available injection capacity in the presence of legacy operations is a consideration not only for future unconventional oil and gas production; as carbon storage and other subsurface energy storage activities are proposed in depleted oilfields in the Permian Basin. The competition for pore space will only increase. This highlights the importance of understanding the history of production in the Permian Basin, the current challenges,and the implications for future energy development.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-10664

© Copyright 2025 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved.