H2O Midstream – Midland Basin water midstream operations

Midland Basin
Delaware Basin
HSER
Case Study

Pipeline		250 miles (permanent, buried, and contiguous)
Storage		Owned Storage: 3.2 million barrels Third-Party Storage: 0.75 million barrels (existing and under construction) All storage is connected to pipelines and co-located next to treatment facilities and disposal wells
Recycling		100,000 barrels per day of deliverability (existing and under construction)
Disposal		13 owned Salt Water Disposal wells (SWDs) totaling 260,000 barrels per day of capacity 13 third-party interconnects provide access to 500,000 barrels per day of takeaway capacity 12 permits totaling 430,000 barrels per day of additional capacity
All facilities are 100% interconnected via permanent pipeline.

Gathering

By interconnecting multiple producers across our 250-mile gathering system, H₂O Midstream’s pipeline network provides the safest most reliable, method of gathering and transporting produced water in the Northern Midland Basin. We have continuously expanded our system to provide produced water take-away, redelivery, and transportation services to our customers, handling simultaneous flowbacks from multiple customers while maintaining 100% uptime over the past three and half years.

Our footprint and interconnectivity with multiple third parties provides us with tremendous optionality and allows produced water to be transported (or “wheeled”) to the highest value market, overcoming bottlenecks which might necessitate disposal in a constrained area. We have also facilitated “transportation swaps” on behalf of our customers, where they have the ability to deliver water in one location on our system and receive it back in another. Transportation swaps can be combined with storage to provide re-delivery at a later date when the water can be more efficiently used for hydraulically fracturing operations. By giving producers access to all of these options, we are able to maximize capacity utilization across our system and pass the cost savings on to our customers.

In addition to enabling safe, reliable and cost-effective operations, our pipeline system has eliminated over 1.3 million truckloads of produced water, preventing over 100,000 metric tons (MT) of CO₂ emissions.

[...]

Storage

H₂O Midstream’s pipeline system is interconnected with over 2.2 million barrels of owned produced water storage, and access to an additional 1.75 million barrels of third-party storage. We have been recognized by our customers, stakeholders, and peers on multiple occasions for our innovative use of storage as an alternative to disposal. The H₂O Midstream “Newton Hub” located in the northern Midland Basin, for example, was the first commercial storage facility in Texas to be connected to multiple producers entirely via pipeline. Our unique approach to utilizing storage for multiple purposes ensures our customers best in class reliability, optionality for recycling, and a cost-effective alternative to disposal.

Benefits of integrated storage across the system includes:

Peak Flow Management – during the early stages of well flowback when volumes are materially higher than long term average production rates, avoiding the need for additional disposal capacity or trucking
System Reliability – in the event a disposal well or recycling facility is down due to planned maintenance or an unforeseen event such as a power outage, or unplanned maintenance
Hydraulic Relief – in the event volumes are gathered or re-delivered to locations across the system that would be otherwise hydraulically constrained, eliminating the need for additional disposal, larger size pipe, or trucking
Recycling – to be used as a staging area to facilitate recycling rates of up to 100%
Banking – where producers are able to store or “bank” their produced water for use in a hydraulic fracturing operation at a later date

[...]

Recycling

We are uniquely positioned to increase volumes of recycled water across the basin by using our scale (pipe and storage) to aggregate volumes and balance supply/demand needs of our customers, giving them access to their own and other third party produced water for use in their fracking operations at rates in excess of 100,000 barrels per day.

We offer two primary recycled water qualities to our customers:

Raw water skimmed and free of hydrocarbons,
A clean brine treated to the producer’s specification.

Our customers can access treated produced water at our storage hubs or off our pipeline via mobile treatment (treatment on the fly) options across our network. Our logistics capability plus flexibility in treatment options gives us the ability to find the best solution for each of customer.

H₂O Midstream is targeting to deliver >40% of its total gathered volume back to customers for oilfield fracking operations over the next 24 months.

[...]

Disposal

H₂O Midstream’s integrated pipeline network connects over 260,000 barrels per day of owned disposal capacity and over 16 separate third party disposal wells, representing access an additional 500,000 barrels per day of disposal. We operate a combination of deep (Ellenburger) and shallow disposal wells and preserve the ability to wheel water across the county and between disposal zones in response to local constraints. To manage costs, we manage our disposal assets by prioritizing them as “baseload”, “intermediate” and/or “peaking” units and strategically dispatching them to minimize operating costs and providing competitive, reliable take away services to our customers.

Long-Term Beneficial Use

Prone to prolonged periods of drought, the Permian Basin continues to generate nearly 2-6 barrels of water for ever barrel of crude produced. Basin-wide, a larger proportion of this water is sent to disposal, with a smaller proportion being reused in fracking operations. We believe disposal should be an option of last report. We are committed to identifying and promoting the advancement of other beneficial use markets outside the oilfield over time, whether that’s for use in industrial, non-food agriculture, or carbon sequestration, markets that we believe will develop and become more economically feasible over time.

The oilfield water industry stands uniquely poised to be water positive thru investment in the right infrastructure that aggregates and allocates water to its highest and best value use cases. We are actively involved with industry organizations to advance these and other sustainable use cases, thru participation in industry organizations, and supporting those seeking to reduce the barriers to entry for these new markets through research and advocacy.

H₂O Midstream Memberships to Advance Sustainable and Beneficial Use:

Texas Produced Water Consortium
Oilfield Water Stewardship Council (B3)
UTPB (University of Texas Permian Basin) Texas Water Energy Institute Board Member

[...]