Encore Green Environmental is an agricultural company that brings two industries together through a common problem.
Two in industries exist, one with too much water and one with too little water.
“They actually share the exact same acreage. That’s because the oil wells often sit on a rancher’s land” shared CEO of Encore Green Environmental, Darlene Nash.
Contaminated water is pulled from the earth during the fracking process and historically, it is not cleaned. To dispose of the by-product water, oil and gas companies inject it back into the ground under high pressure.
Nash explained this creates a variety of problems, “They are running out of places to inject, the regulators are increasingly not wanting to grant injection permits, there’s seismic activity being attributed to these injection wells, and we are burning a lot of fossil fuel to truck water to these injection wells…the bottom line is that they have too much water.”
As a result, Encore Green Environmental has developed a methodology, Conservation By-
Historically these two groups just have not come together. However, Encore Green Environmental has acted as a third unspoken stakeholder of the environmental groups to say, “Look, what we are offering you is a better way. Let us clean up this water right here in proximity to the well. Let us just clean it up and then land-
Nash said that the response to this innovation has been varied; however, they have learned that communication is key.
“The landowners say, “Where do we sign up?” The oil companies and the environmental groups, when we first started, were a little reluctant because you are talking about something new and things that are new take time for people to get used to…we finally received the first permit to actually put the water to land and apply the water in Wyoming.”
Nash shared that once a partnership between the two industries exists, the drilling is able to continue because they are not having to figure out what to do with the water. Environmentalists are happy because water of unknown makeup is no longer injected into the ground, landowners receive water, and the air quality even improves because increased vegetation means more carbon pulled from the air.
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