Author: ICN Staff      Published: 3/31/2025   Inside Climate News

As Texas stares down a water shortfall, its leaders are looking at vast volumes of brown, briney oilfield wastewater as a hopeful source of future supply. They don’t have many other options.

But extracting clean water from this toxic slurry will require enormous amounts of energy, just as Texas fights to keep up with the rapidly growing power demands of a high-tech industrial buildout.

At current efficiency levels, treating all the effluent of the West Texas oilfield would require up to 26 gigawatts of power, more than the total generation capacity of most U.S. states. Even if operators achieved their ambitious target efficiencies, the Permian would still need an additional five gigawatts, enough to power about five million average American homes.

Leaders in Texas are scrambling to head off water shortages predicted by the year 2030 with few new water sources to tap. Meanwhile, wastewater volumes in Texas’ Permian Basin, the nation’s most productive oilfield, have increased sharply in recent years to a staggering 25 million barrels, or about a billion gallons, per day, according to findings that a state-funded research group, the Texas Produced Water Consortium, will present to lawmakers later this month.

In January, the Consortium signed an agreement with Robison’s company, Natura, to develop a wastewater treatment facility powered by the heat of a next-generation molten salt nuclear reactor. Natura is one of two U.S. companies with permits to build such a reactor, and is currently building its first unit at Abilene Christian University—part of Texas’ plan to meet tremendous incoming industrial power demands with widespread deployment of small nuclear reactors.

More of our coverage of the biggest story on the planet:

• Texas lawmakers are considering a bill to resuscitate the state’s nuclear power industry through a taxpayer-funded incentives program.

• Despite staff and budget cuts, NOAA continues to publish critical climate information, including some dire drought warnings in the spring outlook published by the agency’s Climate Prediction Center.

• With a $4.5 trillion fight over tax cuts looming, the oil and gas industry wants to protect billions of dollars in tax benefits it enjoys and get new ones, too.

 

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