CHICKASHA - The City of Chickasha could receive as much as $200,000 for selling up to one million barrels of water from Lake Chickasha to a drilling company for “fracking” operations on three wells.
Select Water will pay 20 cents per barrel for the water. One barrel contains 42 gallons.
City officials have no specific plans for appropriating the funds from the water sales, but “the majority” of the money “may be used to address our drainage issues,” Mayor Zach Grayson told Southwest Ledger.
Camino independent oil and natural-gas company will operate three wells from one pad, city records indicate, and the water lines will extend out “about five miles,” the council was told.
The hydraulic fracturing operations “should take about 20 to 30 days to complete,” Community Development Director Jessica Green wrote.
The City Council approved the water sale during their Sept. 8 meeting.
Questions were raised about the water sale because of the scorching summer temperatures that are evaporating water from the reservoir and the city’s plan to raise the level of Lake Chickasha.
The city intends to raise the lake’s elevation by 10 feet to ensure that Lake Chickasha will continue to be a recreational attraction as well as a viable source of drinking water, City Manager Jim Crosby announced in December 2024.
When the city’s new water treatment plant becomes operational, raw water from Lake Chickasha, which is unfit for human consumption, will be mixed with water pumped from Fort Cobb Reservoir, Chickasha’s currently sole source of drinking water, and purified in the new treatment facility.
“It will probably take several years,” perhaps a decade, to elevate the lake level by 10 feet, Crosby said at that time. Grayson also noted that construction on the lake dam has not started yet.
Lake Chickasha encompasses 1,400 surface acres near Verden, in Caddo County, and contains more than five billion gallons of water, according to the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, so Camino’s potential 42 million-gallon withdrawal will have little effect on the lake volume.
Also, this is not the first time city officials have sold Lake Chickasha water to an energy company.
Oilman Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources received permission from the council in July 2025 to pump “around half a million barrels of water” from the lake. That water, approximately 21 million gallons, was used for “fracking,” the council was told.
Continental paid 20 cents for each barrel of water, or about $100,000, city records reflect. The funds were credited to the Chickasha Municipal Authority, Crosby told Southwest Ledger.
Fracking, shorthand for hydraulic fracturing, is a technique used to extract natural gas and oil from deep underground rock formations, particularly shale. It involves injecting a high-pressure mixture of water, sand, and chemicals into the well to fracture the rock and release the trapped hydrocarbons.