HOUSTON -- Fears of water shortages in the Texas oil patch are giving rise to a new generation of technologies to conserve and clean up the water used in hydraulic fracturing.

Thus far companies are finding enough fresh water to drill and fracture thousands of wells, activity that is leading to a substantial increase in U.S. oil production. But industry insiders are getting concerned as drilling spreads in some drier parts of the state, namely in the Eagle Ford Shale and in the shale and tight liquids-rich zones of the Permian Basin in arid west Texas.

As a whole, the industry consumes far less water than cities or agriculture -- by some estimates, Texas' golf courses use much more water than enhanced oil and gas extraction. But company officials are voicing concern that a recurrence of drought in parts of the state would lead not only to higher costs for procuring the water they need, but also a hit to the industry's public image as the state's farms and residents are forced to conserve while oil and gas companies face no other restrictions.

So demand is growing strong for systems and technologies that consume less water in the process, create less waste in moving water, and help companies clean and reuse water for fracturing multiple wells at a time. Supply is swiftly coming to meet that demand, and these new technologies emerging in the Texas oil and gas industry will inevitably make their way to other parts of the country.

"I've got parents that live in central Texas who for two years were under strict water rationing, couldn't even water their yard," said Steve Hardwick, president of Swire Oilfield Services, a company in the midst of marketing a water-saving option for drillers. "In many cases, we're pumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of water down to frack wells."

"This doesn't really make a lot of sense," Hardwick said.

Permitting and oil and liquids production are booming in the Eagle Ford Shale, but rigs are also being moved to west Texas' Permian Basin, where far more crude oil could be had but groundwater is scarcer. Anticipating the coming demand, Swire has just helped Apache Corp. fracture a couple dozen wells using an improved water management process called HydroDrive.

Currently, the dominant practice copies agriculture, moving water through aluminum piping that is cumbersome to deal with and constantly prone to leaking. When a job moves to another location and pipes are disassembled, the water left in them after well completion is usually simply dumped on the ground.

Hardwick's company is now offering a different approach, and it is attracting interest from several major companies aside from Apache across the state. The system uses flexible, lay-flat hoses similar in appearance to fire hoses that are leak-proof and require less time and fewer workers to deploy. At a 144-barrel-per-minute flow rate, the system also delivers water to operations faster than the current standard method.

The more efficient water capture and management system saves 5 to 15 percent of total water consumed per well, water that would have otherwise been wasted by leaks and spills, Hardwick estimates. The company is also developing a suite of technologies for blending hydraulic fracturing fluid and for recycling contaminated produced and flowback water, which could be redeployed to enhance hydrocarbon production or fracture more wells.

Perhaps most promising, the company says its system allows drillers to safely use nonpotable, brackish water in their operations. The Texas Railroad Commission, the body that oversees oil and gas activity in the state, is trying to encourage the industry to use more brackish water for freeing up hydrocarbons in wells, as it is equally concerned about a conflict over groundwater resources should the state suffer another severe dry spell as it did in 2011.

"Now we're having customers come to us who have access to a nonpotable aquifer, and they're using that water, so they are no longer having to use water that the citizens of the world would look at and say 'Hey, this is good, fresh water.' So it's given them that option," Hardwick said.

More water treatment

Most companies entering the space, including Swire, are introducing technologies that help firms increase the volumes of water that can be treated, recycled and reused in hydraulic fracturing operations. Some of these innovations are even coming from unlikely sources.

Last week, OriginOil, a California company exploring ways to produce liquid fuel from algae, began licensing a technology it developed to west Texas water services provider Pearl H2O.

Through an existing relationship between OriginOil and Pacific Advanced Civil Engineering (PACE), Pearl H2O's parent company, researchers discovered that a process OriginOil uses to separate algae from water can also be used to clean oil and other contaminants from water used in fracturing wells that otherwise would have been disposed of.

The technology involves using electricity pulses to suspend oil droplets and other particles in water, allowing for easier separation. The process saves water but also money -- company officials who are working to sell the system estimate that companies can recover 98 percent of hydrocarbons mixed in with the wastewater, netting additional barrels of oil to sell.

OriginOil CEO Riggs Eckelberry said the process solves a key problem for firms -- the first stage of cleaning up flowback or water mixed with oil pulled from marginal wells, a mixture that can run at ratios as high as 50 barrels of water for every 1 barrel of oil. Existing technologies can then be used to clean the water fluid, possibly even to a point where it can be deemed potable and safely returned to underground reservoirs, he said.

Demonstration projects are scheduled to occur before the end of the year, and Pearl H2O expects business to grow quickly from 2013 on.

"They have identified some very big customers, and I think there's going to be some great news in 2013 about that," Eckelberry said. "We're delighted that Pearl H2O can get this to as many end-users as possible, but this is also an opportunity to get our technology in front of other OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] for the duration."

More from less

Technologies that employ less water in the fracturing process itself are also rapidly spreading in the industry, particularly in the booming Eagle Ford Shale regions.

Wavefront Technology Solutions offers a "pulsed injection" system that it says is superior to traditional hydraulic fracturing methods, increasing production while decreasing water use.

Two of its proprietary methods, Primawave and Powerwave, enhance hydrocarbon production by generating "a fluid pulse that momentarily expands the pore structure of rock and soil," the company says in an overview. Officials there liken the method to a heart pumping blood.

Oilfield services provider Schlumberger Ltd. is also reporting success with its similar "channel fracturing" technology. It involves pumping proppant into fractures in pulses, as well, increasing production while reducing water and proppant use by big margins, the company claims.

Academia is also lining up to develop and license technology for reducing and recycling frack water.

Hydro Enviro Clean, a business startup out of Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, hopes to introduce technology that dissolves or captures heavy metal contaminants from oil and gas wastewater. Meanwhile, a team at the University of Minnesota is experimenting with using bacteria to clean water, a method that originated out of a process used to remove pesticides and other agricultural chemicals from polluted water.

More companies and research teams are expected to rush into this segment of the oil and gas industry as producers seem increasingly keen on reducing their use and improving their management of water.

"If we're going to do this and we're going to need water, then let's handle each barrel in the most careful or responsible way so that we are being the best stewards we can of the resource that we're using here," Hardwick said.