Oil and Gas Wastewater Reuse

The Oil and Gas Waters (OGW) project, funded by the Energy Resources Program, aims to provide information on the volume, quality, impacts, and potentially commodity recovery from water co-produced during the generation and development of domestic petroleum resources. The primary goals of this project are to meet the needs of Congress and other stakeholders in the quantification of lithium and...

The AGGER project’s purpose is to advance the understanding of geologic energy sources, generation, composition, movement, and production potential, including resource recovery from energy wastes.

The Subsurface Utilization project focuses on evaluating subsurface geology for use in the energy transition. Our research includes characterizing geologic resources needed to store CO 2 and energy (including hydrogen), identifying methods to identify and produce overlooked hydrocarbon accumulations, and exploring new ways to produce critical minerals while storing carbon dioxide, gaining a...

This task conducts research to characterize or evaluate the economics of developing technologies or markets in geologic resources. Such research can analyze the relative risks, costs, and benefits from the utilization and not just the extraction of underground resource. Economic analysis builds upon the geologic resource assessment work by other tasks in the Utilization of Carbon and other Energy...

In the “Big Data and Data Visualization” task of the Oil and Gas Waters Project, we compile and update the USGS National Produced Waters Geochemical Database and use big data approaches to provide stakeholders with effortless access and modern tools for easier use and interpretation of our data.

In the “Characterization and Reuse of Oil and Gas Waters” task of the Oil and Gas Waters Project, we collect new water samples from conventional and hydraulically fractured unconventional plays in high priority oil and gas basins and use the geochemistry of water produced along with oil and gas (a) as a tool to interpret deep basin fluid flow and to fingerprint brines from specific reservoirs, (b)...

The objective of this research task is to conduct a national assessment of recoverable oil related to CO2 injection. The amount of CO2 stored (utilized) during the hydrocarbon recovery process will also be evaluated.