With the oil price market slowly recovering in recent months, hydraulic fracturing activity may increase at faster rates than previously expected. However, even with higher oil prices, operators in shale plays still face significant budgetary issues with regards to water management. As demand and usage increase, and saltwater disposal wells (SWDs) fill to capacity, companies looking to stay afloat will have little choice but to find alternative means to store and reuse their produced water. “Costs will go up, and the industry needs to be prepared,” Piers Wells, chief executive officer of Digital H2O, said. “What this drives us toward is the conclusion that increased water reuse will likely be an operational necessity in a recovering oil price environment.” This article examines some of the water management issues facing companies in the Permian Basin and the Bakken, two plays with different geologic features but similar needs to handle rising produced water volumes. Permian Issues The downturn put stress on operators in the Permian Basin, but despite the financial difficulties hydrocarbon and water production remained at high volumes. Digital H2O, a company that specializes in oilfield water resource forecasts, claimed that this was primarily due to the large number of wells completed between 2012 and 2014. Over the same time period, water intensity has gone up. In a company webinar, Wells said that the amount of water used per well completion has increased, and more water has been generated per well and per horizontal foot of wellbore length. While completion activity has led to an increase in water intensity in the Permian, the basin’s SWD capacity is facing heavy constraints in key areas. Wells estimated that the average pressure utilization for SWDs was 65% in 2016, with several wells reporting utilization approaching 100%. Fig. 1 illustrates the average monthly water volume disposed in an SWD compared to the average pressure utilization for SWDs for each county in the Permian Basin. A range of 60% to 80% utilization is considered high, and anything above that is considered full utilization, meaning that the wells in that county cannot accept any additional water for disposal. Wells identified four counties—Gaines, Yoakum, Kent, and Hockley—that are either at high or full utilization, with several other counties nearing the lower bound of the high utilization range.