How much water goes into oil fracking in drought-stricken California?
When California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans to ban hydraulic fracturing, a highly controversial method of oil and gas production more widely known as fracking, he focused primarily on climate change impacts. He may have a water conservation argument to make as well. "Fracking uses a lot of water," said Hollin Kretzmann, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit environmentalist group. "But if you talk to the oil industry, theyll say, 'Its not that big a chunk of water, look at what agriculture uses.' But when were talking about water issues and the drought, its a very localized issue." The practice of fracking entails injecting large amounts of water, sand and chemicals deep underground at high pressures in an attempt to crack open rock layers and release oil or gas trapped inside. In addition to local air and water pollution, fracking has also been linked to climate change as the practice leads to the release of large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Most of the fracking in California is done in the Central Valley. "Were already talking about a region with limited resources to begin with, so to allot any water to the oil industry when we need to move away from fossil fuels anyway is very short sighted," Kretzmann said. According to a 2015 report from the California Council on Science and Technology, fracking requires an estimated 320 million gallons of water in the state annually. The water impact does not stop there. Once fracking is completed in a given area, it enables additional "enhanced oil recovery" methods that include steam flooding and gas injection. The report finds that post-fracking enhanced oil recovery methods use up an additional 4.2 billion gallons of California water per year. In addition, the report finds substantial evidence that fracking and enhanced oil recovery often contaminate groundwater, but it does not estimate how many gallons of water are spoiled. A USGS estimate from 2014 found that the entire state uses 38 billion gallons of water per day, so defenders of fracking will note that statistically speaking, the 4.5 billion gallons of water used annually is a drop in the bucket. Kretzmann warns that in a drought  which has led to water restrictions on some residents  every drop counts. "Even though there isn't an estimate, we know the contamination figures are substantial," he said. "There have been many instances of fracking breaking into groundwater and rendering it unusable. All of that water could have gone to farms or to people in homes, or to irrigation at the very least. Fracking is in direct competition with farmers and residences over this water."