Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Data to Estimate Water Use Associated with Continuous Oil and Gas Development, Permian Basin, United States, 1980-2019

Published by U.S. Geological Survey | Department of the Interior | Catalog Last Checked: August 01, 2026 at 05:26 AM | Dataset Last Updated: September 30, 2020 at 12:00 AM
One of the largest conventional oil reservoirs in the United States, the Permian Basin, is becoming one of the world’s largest continuous oil and gas producing reservoirs. Continuous, or horizontal well drilling techniques extract oil and gas by directionally drilling and hydraulically fracturing the surrounding reservoir rock. The continuous extraction of oil and gas using hydraulic fracturing requires large volumes of water, and estimates of the total water volume used in the Continuous Oil and Gas (COG) extraction technique, requires a comprehensive assessment to determine the amount of water needed to extract reservoir resources. This data release contains the input and output files utilized for the assessment of water usage associated with continuous oil production in the Permian Basin. All data points that met the filtering criteria as described in the child item Data Processing <procdesc> steps were retained in the data release. Further filtering of data points to remove unrealistic values was done prior to modeling. Model simulations were completed for the years 1980-2019. Results were used in the associated Scientific Investigations Report “Estimates of Water Use Associated with Continuous Oil and Gas Development in the Permian Basin, Texas and New Mexico, 1980–2019” (Valder and others, 2021).

Resources

2 resources available

Find Related Datasets

Search by Tags

Click any tag below to search for similar datasets

data.gov

An official website of the GSA's Technology Transformation Services

Looking for U.S. government information and services?
Visit USA.gov