Let Me Move You - The Bakken's Still-Growing Water Midstream Sector
The Permian is a beehive of activity on the burgeoning water midstream front — the pipelines, saltwater disposal wells and other assets being built to facilitate the delivery of water to new wells for hydraulic fracturing and the transport of “produced water” from the lease to disposal or treatment sites. But the Bakken — arguably the birthplace of the water midstream sector nearly a decade ago — is no slouch, and a model of sorts for the infrastructure build-out now under way in the Permian. The volume of water needed for Bakken well completions is up sharply in recent years; more important still, the region is generating more than 1 MMb/d of produced water, and producers and water midstreamers alike are building new takeaway pipelines and drilling new SWDs to more efficiently deal with it. Today, we discuss water- and produced-water-related infrastructure in one of the U.S.’s largest production regions.
