Every barrel of oil produced in Texas comes with several barrels of water, and most of that water goes back underground through injection wells. The RRC permits those wells under its Underground Injection Control (UIC) program. The permit records and the volume reports are public, and together they are the best public view of where produced water goes.
Two kinds of permit
- W-14, disposal. Injection into a formation that does not produce oil or gas. This is the saltwater disposal well, or SWD, in everyday use.
- H-1, injection. Injection into a producing formation, usually for waterflood or pressure maintenance.
Both are UIC permits with the same core fields: the API number and lease of the injection well, the permitted injection interval (top and bottom depth), the maximum permitted daily volume in barrels and, for gas, thousand cubic feet, the maximum surface injection pressure, and dates for permit issuance, cancellation, and plugging. A permit is "activated" once the well is actually used for injection.
The permitted volume is a ceiling, not a measurement. A well permitted for 25,000 barrels a day may inject a tenth of that. Reading permitted capacity as throughput is the most common mistake made with this data.
Reported volumes: the H-10
Operators report actual injection on Form H-10, the annual disposal and injection well monitoring report, which gives monthly volumes and pressures for each permitted well. The RRC publishes these as a dataset keyed by UIC permit number. Because the report is annual, the public data runs roughly a year behind: a month's volume becomes public when the report covering that year is filed and processed. Petrora shows H-10 volumes with the month they are reported through, and never extrapolates.
Daily volumes: TexNet reporting
Since 2021, operators of disposal wells in the RRC's Permian seismic response areas, and operators of new Permian disposal permits above 5,000 barrels a day, must report daily injection volumes and pressures to the TexNet injection reporting tool run by the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology. Some operators elsewhere report voluntarily. This data runs about five days behind real time, against roughly thirteen months for the H-10, and it is the freshest public view of disposal activity where it exists. Its coverage is the Permian, not the state.
On a well page
A well with a UIC permit shows an injection section: each permit with its kind, status, permitted volume, pressure, and interval; the volume injected over the last twelve reported months and over all reported months; the month reported through; and, when the well is located, the count of magnitude 2 and larger earthquakes within 10 kilometers over the last two years. See earthquakes and TexNet.