A municipal panel in Texas recently voted to require some oil and gas drillers to recycle the fracking wastewater that they produce.

Fracking - more formally known as hydraulic fracturing - involves pumping millions of gallons of water laced with sand and chemicals into shale rock thousands of feet below the earth's surface. This water cracks the shale and forces up hydrocarbons. However, it also produces a lot of wastewater and municipalities all over the country have been trying to figure out the best way to cope with this issue.

One of the steps taken by Denton, Texas, is to require certain operators to recycle this wastewater, according to the Denton Record-Chronicle.

This wasn't the only move by the city's official gas drilling task force in recent weeks. The panel also recently endorsed an expansion of its ban on wastewater disposal wells to the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction, reports the news provider.

Denton's location in the northern part of the state will allow operators to better recycle wastewater, as the geology of the southern portion's Eagle Ford shale makes recycling this water difficult.

Ed Ireland, executive director of the industry-funded Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, said that regulations were sufficient to protect the city from water contamination.

"There are seven layers of protection in terms of casings and cements," he told the news source. "In order for an actual contamination problem to occur, there would have to be a simultaneous failure of all of those layers. That’s why the probability of that happening is low."

Regulating the disposal of wastewater from fracking sites has become an increasingly important question for municipalities over the past decade. Shale gas accounted for just 2 percent of natural gas production in the U.S. in 2001, but its now closer to 30 percent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Posted on February 7th, 2012 under Industrial Uses, Wastewater News