Pipeline Data – Understanding Full Cycle Movement of Water

Permanent water pipelines are a crucial piece of oil and gas infrastructure, enabling the efficient transfer of water between points of production, use, and/or disposal. Despite high up-front costs, properly sized and utilized water pipelines offer significant cost savings per barrel of water moved versus traditional trucking (often by a factor of ten or more). Additionally, pipeline utilization generally reduces truck traffic, offering benefits such as less wear-and-tear on roads, fewer vehicle accidents, decreased tailpipe emissions, and less truck noise for communities. Providing a means for high volume water transportation also allows for dissociation of points of production from use and disposal, therefore broadening water management options.

To incur many of the noted benefits, optimal utilization of fixed pipeline capacity is necessary. Underutilization increases breakeven costs and propagates inefficient use of resources, such as disposing water that could instead be reused or drilling additional disposal wells when disposal capacity is available elsewhere. Unfortunately, there is no centralized source of water pipeline data in Texas to broadcast pipeline presence and availability. At best, pipeline owners and operators provide descriptions on their websites or within investor presentations, but this is often only an approximation of actual infrastructure.