Scaling Treated Produced Water for Data Center Cooling in the Permian

Water is the liquid of life. It cycles endlessly from air, land, and sea, and makes life on planet Earth possible. The average adult human is made up of roughly 60% water and consumes around 50,000 liters of water in a lifetime. However, this miracle solution can pose its fair share of problems—dangerous currents at sea, flooding on land when too much falls from the sky too fast, and crushing pressures at depths that can hinder ocean exploration. Still, water is a commodity, and no one may know that better than the oil and gas business, where millions of gallons of water are used every day to stimulate complex shale wells into giving up their hydrocarbon resource. In some regions, oil and gas wells do not return nearly the water that is pumped into them. But in areas like the crucial Permian Basin in west Texas, a given well can return up to 12 barrels of produced water for every single barrel of oil. While the oil eventually heads to the sales pipeline, the produced water—a briny mix of injected water, oilfield fluids, and chemicals—has no well-defined, single destination. Some will go into saltwater disposal wells, but regulators have been clamping down on disposal well use and have been resistant to permit for new ones given the levels of seismic activity some believe is related to reinjection. Other volumes will go to recycling centers to be filtered and prepared for reuse in future fracturing jobs. And it just keeps coming. In 2024, the Permian Basin produced more than 20 million B/D of water, a figure projected to exceed 26 million by 2030, according to researchers at B3 Insights. A potential answer to the produced water glut could be on the horizon in the form of data centers. A number of these large scale, AI-driven server farms are currently under construction or coming online in west Texas. The facilities consist of multi-building complexes filled with IT infrastructure for use with cloud storage, data distribution, and artificial intelligence (AI). The AI boom has fueled several new, massive data center projects across the globe. Produced water typically contains total dissolved solids (TDS) concentrations of 30,000 to 300,000 mg/L, making it unfit for reuse as is. However, treatment technologies, including ceramic membrane filtration, electrocoagulation, and ion exchange, can bring the water to spec for industrial cooling applications. For the US, the Permian makes a lot of sense: The water resource is available there for cooling, and the natural gas resource is available for off-grid power. The land is available that these sprawling campuses require. Low population density means fewer neighbors are adversely affected during the construction phase and beyond. If you’ve ever done any home computing that is memory-intensive—something as simple as upscaling an old photo—you likely heard your computer’s fan kick on. The fan is designed to keep things cool as your system accesses more computing power to accomplish the task. AI needs exponentially more computing power to achieve its end product, thus the size of the current crop of data centers.