For more than 100 years, the Permian Basin has been an important source of oil and gas produced from conventional reservoirs; directional drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing has greatly increased production in the past 10 years to the extent that the Permian Basin is becoming one of the world’s largest continuous oil and gas (COG) producing fields (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2020). These recent techniques extract oil and gas by directionally drilling and hydraulically fracturing the surrounding reservoir rock. The extraction of COG by using these techniques requires large volumes of water and estimates of the total water volume used in COG require a comprehensive assessment to determine the amount of water needed to extract reservoir resources. This data release contains the R scripts used to process input data (Ball and others, 2020) and the results (output data) produced by those scripts. Linear and quantile regression models of water use in relation to the number of oil and gas wells developed were fitted to the direct, indirect, and ancillary water-use categories for the Permian Basin. Confidence intervals for each parameter estimate (regression model coefficient) obtained from the linear regression models were computed as a measure of uncertainty. Together, these scripts and output data can be used to model water use associated with COG development in the Permian Basin, with estimates by individual well and by county.
In March, 2022, U.S. Geological Survey staff noticed an incorrect version of a file that was not part of the Bureau approved data release was included within this data release by mistake. The data release has been updated by replacing the incorrect version of the file with the original Bureau approved version of the file. The file in question is located within the top-level "Model.zip" directory and is the "mungeDataRelease.R" script. The incorrect file had the same name as the correct file. First release: August 2021; revised April 2022 (version 2.0). The previous version can be obtained by contacting the USGS Oklahoma-Texas Water Science Center using the "Point of Contact" link on the landing page on ScienceBase.
