Insights: Permian produced water, data centers can form symbiotic relationship
Technology around cleaning up produced water is evolving. Companies are looking to the Permian to deploy or prove their systems. That could, in turn, drive produced water as a source for data center use.
Data center building roof with cooling units generating computing power
The rapid expansion of AI data centers in West Texas is creating a major water demand challenge, prompting industry interest in treating and reusing the Permian basin’s vast volumes of produced water as a potential cooling-water source.
In this Insights episode of the Oil & Gas Journal ReEnterprised podcast, Alex Procyk, upstream editor, reviews the potential.
Produced water is extremely saline—often far saltier than seawater—making conventional desalination expensive, but emerging technologies, including systems that use data-center waste heat to drive treatment processes, could improve economics while generating valuable byproducts such as lithium and other minerals.
Large-scale adoption will depend on proving treatment costs at commercial scale, establishing clear permitting pathways, developing new business agreements between energy and data center operators, and effectively managing disposal and seismicity risks associated with concentrated waste streams.
Alex Procyk is Upstream Editor at Oil & Gas Journal. He has also served as a principal technical professional at Halliburton and as a completion engineer at ConocoPhillips. He holds a BS in chemistry (1987) from Kent State University and a PhD in chemistry (1992) from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE).
