Water is the liquid of life. It cycles endlessly from air, land, and sea, and makes life on planet Earth possible. The average adult human is made up of roughly 60% water and consumes around 50,000 liters of water in a lifetime.
However, this miracle solution can pose its fair share of problems—dangerous currents at sea, flooding on land when too much falls from the sky too fast, and crushing pressures at depths that can hinder ocean exploration. Still, water is a commodity, and no one may know that better than the oil and gas business, where millions of gallons of water are used every day to stimulate complex shale wells into giving up their hydrocarbon resource.
In some regions, oil and gas wells do not return nearly the water that is pumped into them.
