EID-Ohio's Shawn Bennett dives in the subject of water sale and usage in the Muskingum County Watershed Conservancy District:

"As the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District (MWCD) is awaiting the results on an independent water availability study, it’s important we share a better understanding of the history, facts and science on water availability in the MWCD.  There have been a lot of folks going around the state drumming up fear in regards to Utica Shale development, and they are using water usage as one of their main talking points.  The problem is they are using uninformed opinions to persuade people with fear and innuendo.

The MWCD was created in 1933 for flood control and conservation.  Throughout the years, the MWCD has built 14 dams for the purpose of flood control, conservation and recreation.  The reason being – our area of the state has plenty of water.

It takes 5 million gallons of water to hydraulic fracture a well. In the Susquehanna River Basin. That is a minuscule amount of water considering Ohioan’s uses 11,700 million gallons of water per day (MGD) for various purposes.

But this serves as a good example as the Susquehanna River Basin is where almost all of Marcellus development has taken place in Pennsylvania.  Since 2008 the natural gas industry has used a total of 5.6 billion gallons of water.  The total average daily flow of the Susquehanna River, by comparison, is 20 billion gallons.

5 million gallons sounds like a lot, but the truth is it’s a rather small amount of water in the Muskingum River watershed.  If we look at the flow rate of the Muskingum River, it produces 1,500 cubic feet of water a second or almost a billion gallons per day (per USGS).

That is after we service all of our agricultural, recreation, public water supply and power generation needs.  So in 6 days, the Muskingum River produces more water than the total amount of water used in the hydraulic fracturing process over the past 5 years in Pennsylvania.

But let’s extrapolate on that further.  If, over the next five years, we develop over 2,500 wells in the conservancy district, at an average of 5 million gallons, and we take the flow rate of the Muskingum River over 5 years at 1.7 trillion gallons, we can assume Utica Shale development will use roughly .007 percent of excess water in the MWCD."

 

READ MORE: http://www.eidohio.org/plenty-of-water-for-shale-development-in-the...

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