One of the most frequently mentioned estimates for the amount of water used in a Marcellus well is 3 to 6 million gallons of water per well. This comes from an analysis by the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) of data from
220 Marcellus wells in Pennsylvania. This analysis found an average of 4.3 million gallons used per well, with
a maximum of 6.1 million gallons per well. Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest operators in Pennsylvania, and a company that is expected to be a large operator in New York, determined that they use an average of 5.5 million gallons of water to fracture each of their wells.We use SRBC’s 4.3 million gallon average for calculations in this paper and in Marcellus Shale Issue 8: Water – Out of the Wells