Water source summary added to state pages

Summary: We have added a summary chart of the sources of water that operators report in their disclosures.

In late 2023, FracFocus added an option for companies to report the type of water source(s) they used in the fracking operation: “Surface water,” “Ground water,” “Produced water,” and “Other”¹. While those reports can be viewed directly on the FracFocus PDF disclosures, it is difficult to get a big picture of the water use in a state from those discrete data points.

For example, we find that while many states use little or no produced water as their fracking fluid (here we show North Dakota),

New Mexico operators report a high percentage of using this waste water. Data from half the fracking operations in that state indicate over 8 billion gallons were used in the 10 months since the beginning of reporting.

These summaries will be updated regularly on the state pages. To navigate to these charts on a state page, scroll down to the chart section and click on the “Recent water source” tab. For example:

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1. They also can report the degree of total dissolved solids that can be viewed in the Open-FF data as well. ↩︎