This month has featured horrifying news reports about the West being on fire. At least 14 people are dead, hospitalizations are skyrocketing even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to persist, half a million people had to be evacuated in Oregon, over three million acres have been scorched, and the San Francisco sky turned apocalypse orange. More land burned in Oregon over the course of three days than usually burns in a year and a half, and the consensus from scientists is that this is going to get worse in the coming years, as Earth warms due to climate change and drought becomes more prevalent and more severe.
Each person in the USA uses an estimated 80-100 gallons of water per day, and most get it from a "public supply system" (a water utility). Assuming the average is 90 gallons per day, with a population of about 331.45 million people, people in this country use about 29.83 billion gallons of water per day. And yet, the actual amount of water this country consumes per day is much higher, at an estimated 322 billion gallons per day. This is because most water use in the United States is not devoted to what are called "domestic water uses" such as drinking water, flushing toilets, and taking showers. Given that about 7 in 8 people get their water from public supply systems, the actual amount of water used per day in the United States is substantially less: 26.08 billion gallons, less than 9% of total water usage in the United States. The generation of electrical power consumes more than five times as much water, and power sources such as photovoltaic solar power have a smaller water footprint than power sources like natural gas.
Although nobody asked them to, oil companies have been making the problem quite a bit worse. Not just because of their creation of the drought-worsening climate crisis, but because their use of water is uniquely awful for the environment. Other industries, such as farming, use more water than oil companies for their operations. But that water, once used, returns to the water cycle, where it can at least support either humanity or nature in a different part of the world. By contrast, oil companies use hydraulic fracturing, which does NOT return all of the water used to the water cycle. Instead, once an oil company has drained water from the surrounding areas and used it, the water is then disposed of deep underground, where it is never used again.
Just how much fracking water is permanently removed from the water cycle, depends on which state the fracked well is in. In Pennsylvania, where oil and natural gas companies are limited in how many disposal wells they can have, only about 10-30% of water used in fracking is stored in disposal wells and permanently removed. In Texas, however, no such limitation exists, and as a result 95% of water used in fracking in Texas is permanently removed from the water cycle. In Utah alone, billions of gallons of water are not only used, but outright thrown away, every single year due to fracking.
This process of oil and gas companies permanently displacing local water supplies even happens when communities are facing severe drought. While the state of Utah was under a state of emergency for drought from October 2018 to September 2019, and communities in Duchesne County, Utah were stricken with severe drought, oil companies such as Newfield Exploration still disposed of millions of gallons of water in fracking activities. Fracking a single well in the area can take 19.76 million gallons of water, more than every person in the entire county put together uses in a week. Despite this drainage of local water supply, the Central Utah Water Conservancy District (the main water utility for Duchesne County) continues to focus its conservation efforts on other areas of water consumption, mainly domestic water uses, despite their comprising a mere 8-9% of overall water consumption. This pattern isn't just unique to Utah: even California, long used as a dystopian "liberal anti-business" boogeyman, forced its citizens to cut their water use by 20% during its drought, with no mandated reduction for the agricultural sector, even though agriculture uses four times as much water.
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