Subtitle: How much water does it take to start being scary?

As Colorado endures the lowest snowpack in its history, and begins to enter the 2026 summer fire season, water has become a prime concern for many. And now that the future of the Colorado River itself is in doubt, and the seven Western states that are part of the Colorado River Compact apparently unable to reach an agreement by its own deadline, there is ever more impetus for the states water leaders to look seriously at their water use policies.

Having been involved in anti-fracking activism since 2012, I have come to learn about the prodigious amounts of fresh water that is consumed by fracking. Although I can tell you that one frack job on a typical well can consume 5 to 8 millions gallons of water — and now that statistic has climbed to 15 to 20 millions of gallons of water per well in current use — such numbers may simply go in one ear and come out the other. The human mind is not made to have a feel for what such large numbers mean.

The human mind, in fact, is much better at processing images than numbers. Which is why I began a project that would attempt to visualize the amount of water used in fracking for the state.

With the help of several activist colleagues with technical skills, I was able to progress in this project this year…and create this visualization with their help:

What this graph shows is that statewide use of water in fracking is comparable — and can even exceed — the amount of water consumed by Denver residents in a given year. And, if you were not aware, this water is taken forever out of the hydrologic cycle, never to return….never. As in, forever.

The regulation of water use in fracking has not received the same attention as the other negative environmental effects of fracking, such as the noise, air and water pollution and truck traffic. As such, the data itself has only recently begun to be available, from organizations such as FracFocus (see fracfocus.org). Among the Colorado environmental activist community, the specious data reporting  by the industry is a well known and obvious fact of life. The industry needs to be reporting its data more reliably and with greater transparency.

What Colorado’s policy setters need to consider is if allowing this industry to continue throwing away billions of gallons of water every year is in its own environmental best interests. To my mind, this is simply an insane use of water in a climate that is going to become more and more dry with each passing year, which is what the climate science predicts.  Water is life — and we should be guarding it with our own lives.

DATA TABLES

The numerical data tables for the above graphs are shown here: