Water and Proppant to Develop the Rest of the Haynesville Formation

The U.S. Geological Survey has assessed how much water and proppant it would take — and how much formation water would come back up — to produce the undiscovered gas left in the Jurassic Haynesville Formation of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The work builds directly on the USGS assessment of the formation's undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas (Gardner and others, 2025).

The Haynesville Formation's four conventional and two continuous assessment units. Only the Haynesville Sabine Uplift Continuous Gas unit, outlined in yellow, could be assessed for water and proppant. Map: U.S. Geological Survey, from Gardner and others (2025).

Where the water goes

• Drilling: drilling with mud, water is the main ingredient needed to reach the gas-bearing depths.
• Cementing: water is also used to cement the casing and seal the wellbore.
• Hydraulic fracturing uses the most water per well: fluid and proppant are injected at high pressure to fracture the rock and increase gas production.
• Produced water comes back up with the gas: flowback water, returning after drilling and fracturing, and formation water from the reservoir itself. Both are wastewater that must be treated before reuse or disposal. The study assessed formation water; flowback could not be assessed, for lack of monthly wastewater data.

How it was estimated

Only the Haynesville Sabine Uplift Continuous Gas assessment unit was assessed: the method applies only to continuous resources, and it was the only unit with water data. Every input is a probability distribution, and the outputs come from a Monte Carlo simulation:

Mgal: million gallons.

Developing the rest of the unit

F95 is the amount with a 95 percent chance of being reached or exceeded; F5, a 5 percent chance.

By number of wells

Wells drilled in the unit each year: 413 in 2019, 360 in 2020, 486 in 2021, 684 in 2022 and 503 in 2023. Using the mean inputs, a year's drilling would need:

Per unit of gas

Against a mean of 37,643 billion cubic feet of undiscovered gas:

Other water in the same area

For comparison, water produced, withdrawn and used within the assessment unit's area:

Sources

Based on the U.S. Geological Survey fact sheet Assessment of water and proppant quantities associated with hydrocarbon production from the Haynesville Formation (pubs.usgs.gov), by the Haynesville Formation Proppant and Water Assessment Team; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Resource estimates from Gardner and others (2025); water use from Dieter and others (2018); well counts from S&P Global Commodity Insights (2024). An earlier version of this page gave the agriculture, industrial and municipal figures in the wrong rows; they follow the fact sheet's table here.