Data to Estimate Water Use Associated with Oil and Gas Development within the Bureau of Land Management Carlsbad Field Office Area, New Mexico

The purpose of this data release is to provide data in support of the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Reasonably Foreseeable Development (RFD) Scenario by estimating water-use associated with oil and gas extraction methods within the BLM Carlsbad Field Office (CFO) planning area, located in Eddy and Lea Counties as well as part of Chaves County, New Mexico. Three comma separated value files and two python scripts are included in this data release. It was determined that all reported oil and gas wells within Chaves County from the FracFocus and New Mexico Oil Conservation Division (NM OCD) databases were outside of the CFO administration area and were excluded from well_records.csv and modeled_estimates.csv. Data from Chaves County are included in the produced_water.csv file to be consistent with the BLM’s water support document. Data were synthesized into comma separated values which include, produced_water.csv (volume) from NM OCD, well_records.csv (including location and completion) from NM OCD and FracFocus, and modeled_estimates.csv (using FracFocus as well as Ball and others (2020) as input data). The results from modeled_estimates.csv were obtained using a previously published regression model (McShane and McDowell, 2021) to estimate water use associated with unconventional oil and gas activities in the Permian Basin (Valder and others, 2021) for the period of interest (2010-2021). Additionally, python scripts to process, clean, and categorize FracFocus data are provided in this data release.