Water Management

Water Management is the practice of planning, developing, distributing and optimum utilization of water resources under defined water policies and regulations.  Fountain Quail works with industry and the community to create a sustainable industrial water cycle.  The best available technology and practices are used to transform liabilities into assets by recycling wastewater into re-useable fresh water.  This reduces costs to industry while protecting water resources for both the community and the environment.

The greatest challenge associated with water management is reducing or eliminating the distance between the source of water and the demand for water.  This is equally true for both the distance between fresh water sources and the needed location as well as wastewater sources and disposal locations.  Fountain Quail addresses this problem by utilizing mobile, decentralized facilities and innovative transportation strategies.

An Unconventional Shift

The shift to unconventional energy production has created an enormous demand for fresh water supply and the consequential requirement for a disposal of contaminated wastewater unsuitable for environmental discharge.

Water resources worldwide are already approaching capacity for human consumption alone, creating a strong incentive for exploring alternatives in water management. Throughout history the rise and fall of many civilizations can be linked to how well they managed their water. In order to meet future industrial demand and not over deplete or contaminate our existing resources, the world needs new approaches to water management. The world’s energy sources are also dramatically shifting. Depletion of conventional resources coupled with uncertainty in global energy security has caused producers to shift to unconventional energy sources such as heavy oil, coal bed methane, and shale gas. This shift to unconventional energy production has created an enormous demand for fresh water supply and the consequential requirement for disposal of contaminated wastewater unsuitable for environmental discharge. In unconventional energy production, supplies of fresh water are often scarce and the wastewater produced is almost always very hard to treat, requiring some form of disposal.

Shale gas well completions require a “massive hydraulic fracture” treatment (known as “fracing”) where a water/chemical blend (average 60,000 to 120,000 barrels per Shale well) is injected into the rock formation to create millions of micro fractures that allow the trapped gas to flow freely to the well bore. A significant portion of the injected fluid comes back to the surface as contaminated “flowback” water, full of sand, clay, polymers, oil, salt, and a variety of dissolved subsurface formation solids. Throughout the life of shale gas wells contaminated “produced water” continues to flow to the surface with the gas. The traditional method of dealing with flowback and produced water is to truck the wastewater to deep-well disposal facilities for injection. This practice requires expensive trucking and permanently removes water from the environment’s hydrological cycle.