| Optimizing water management in unconventional oil and gas fields is essential to minimize the risks and highly publicized concerns, but the uncertainty in oil and gas field development makes it risky to invest, plan, and design water infrastructure in a rapidly changing field. Furthermore, the variability in the quantity of the flowback and produced water creates challenges for water treatment planning and design if these volumes are not correctly modeled. By developing a framework to model water volumes and the impact specific water infrastructure decisions have in a rapidly changing oil and gas field will improve the accuracy and speed of water planning and management.;Water is the single largest operating material by volume and directly impacts the social (i.e. induced seismic activity, risk of fatal accidents), environmental (i.e. risk of spills, greenhouse gas emissions) and economic risks. In the coming years, as an increasing number of ballots include hydraulic featuring restrictions or moratoriums and oil and gas development becomes more concentrated, optimizing water management will become essential to continue operations in populated and semi-arid regions. Water treatment and reuse will be a key part of an optimized water management strategy. A simple brute-force solution using a single centralized treatment facility for a field or a mobile treatment facility at each pad cannot provide an optimized solution. Blending fresh, flowback, and produced waters to achieve the treatment targets developed in Chapter 7 provides a more optimized solution that reduces the social, environmental, and economic impacts of treatment. This solution is much more complicated and requires a spatial and temporal understanding of the water volumes, quantities, and treatment requirements within a field.;The modeling framework developed in this dissertation fills this gap by giving the operator the ability to visualize, model, and quantify water volumes and qualities throughout a field based on flexible development plans. Water management scenarios can be modeled with the development plans to assess the efficiency and impacts of each scenario. The operator can assign a relative specific risks (e.g. environmental, social, etc.) throughout the field to provide a spatial and temporal multi-criteria decision analysis for each development plan and water management scenario.;The objective of this dissertation is to model and quantify the social, environmental, and economic implications that water infrastructure decisions have within an uncertain and rapidly changing oil and gas field. Chapters 4 through 6 show that influent and effluent water volumes for each component shown in Figure 10.1 can be accurately and precisely estimated in the Wattenberg Field. Chapter 6 incorporates water quality estimates for the flowback and produced water as well as several case studies for each component shown in Figure 10.1. The impact water quality has on the development and performance of gelled hydraulic fracturing fluids, which provides water quality treatment targets for designing water treatment facilities, is assessed in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 provides a framework to spatially and temporally model water volumes and quality as well as social, environmental, and economic impacts for a hypothetical field by incorporating the research developed in previous chapters. Chapter 9 provides case-studies that apply the hypothetical model framework to a variety of actual oil and gas development scenarios to compare different water management scenarios. The model framework allows operators to visualize, compare, and quantify several water management scenarios for a variety of oil and gas development plans. Incorporating the research into a spatial and temporal model allows operators to minimize key criteria for a specific area (e.g. environmental impact, truck traffic, etc.) to optimize the size, location, number, and duration of treatment facilities in the field. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
