Veracruz is among the regions of the country with potential for fracking or hydraulic fracturing to extract hydrocarbons and that present water stress.
In four of the five regions with potential to extract non-conventional oil resources through fracking in Mexico there are critical levels of water availability, so if hydraulic fracturing projects were launched they would not have water to operate and would affect the supply for human consumption, revealed an investigation by CartoCrítica.
The four regions are: Sabinas and Burro-Picachos, located in Coahuila and Nuevo León; Burgos, located between Nuevo León and Tamaulipas; Tampico-Misantla, located in Tamaulipas, Veracruz and San Luis Potosí.
The fifth region is Veracruz, located between the south of Veracruz and Oaxaca, which has greater water availability, according to the work developed by CartoCrítica and published by Conahcyt.
The inhabitants of the first four regions face significant limitations in the supply of water on a daily basis, so if hydrocarbon extraction projects through fracking were approved, they would not have water, since demand would exceed availability levels.
In the document “Estimation of the required water consumption for the exploitation of non-conventional oil resources through hydraulic fracturing in Mexico”, CartoCrítica estimates the volume of water required to exploit a fraction of the estimated volumes of non-conventional gas and oil in the country, taking as a reference the use of water in other oil basins in the world.
To recover 10% of the non-conventional resources identified in Mexico, it would be necessary to drill and fracture more than 14 thousand new wells, which would require up to 470 thousand 973 million liters of water.
To give an idea of what this means, Manuel Llano, coordinator of the research and director of CartoCrítica, explained that: “In Mexico there are 47 million cars, this is the number of water pipes that Pemex would need to do fracking. Each new well could require up to 40 thousand water pipes.”
The LXVI legislature, which began its legislative work last September, has the possibility and the responsibility to do what the previous legislature did not do: prohibit fracking through the initiative for constitutional reform of the environment that was already approved in committees last August, or to prohibit the use of water for fracking through the General Water Law, which was also not approved previously and must also be legislated as soon as possible.
Source: horacero
