A lot has been written about hydraulic fracturing. Some has been true, but most has been either a distortion of the facts or outright misstatements made intentionally to make fracturing seem like a new process that uses an exorbitant amount of water.

First, fracturing has been a part of the oil and gas exploration and production effort since just after World War II. That's 60-plus years of thousands and thousands of wells being fractured without a single case of groundwater contamination.

The new techniques of fracturing that have been developed in the past 20 years uses more water than previous techniques. Environmental groups have alleged that the use of all this water is inappropriate and should be stopped.

However, after examining the water use data from the Texas Water Development Board, the oil and gas industry uses less water than any other category.

Oil and gas (actually the category is listed as mining that includes oil and gas) used only 1 percent of the water in Texas, according to the 2011 Water Use Survey (the most current data available) that was updated June 3.

Irrigation used the most water, accounting for 61 percent of the water used in Texas.

Irrigation was followed by municipal use at 27 percent, manufacturing at 6 percent, steam electric power at 3 percent, livestock at 2 percent and mining at 1 percent.

The largest user of water is Harris County with 799,504 acre feet (one acre foot is equal to 325,851 gallons). The second largest user is irrigation in Hidalgo County in South Texas, which used 688,667 acre feet.

The largest user of water for mining (oil and gas) was in Wise County, which is just north of Fort Worth. Wise County used 14,010 acre feet for oil and gas operations that included hydraulic fracturing.

The Texas Water Development Board also has reported that 31 percent of the residential water consumed in the state is used outside homes, according to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal by Rusty Todd, who teaches editing and business journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

"In 2010, that amounted to 495 billion gallons," Todd wrote. "In 2011, according to the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, fracking accounted for 26.6 billion gallons statewide. So in Texas (a big state with arid regions) lawns consume roughly 18 times more water than fracking does."

Alex Mills is President of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. The opinions expressed are solely of the author.