Bromine and Iodine as Contracted Co-Products of Produced-Water Treatment: Ambient-Temperature Vacuum Separation in the Permian Basin

World bromine supply is concentrated in two lines on a balance sheet: 200,000t from Israel and 110,000t from Jordan, both drawn from a single evaporating body of water, the Dead Sea, whose level falls by 1.0–1.2m every year. Together with China (90,000t) and Japan (20,000t), these four sources cover essentially all of the 430,000t the world produces annually, worth about USD 1.3bln at USD 3.00/kg. Classical bromine recovery — steam stripping of the whole brine volume — is economical only on rich feedstock, so it is confined to a handful of hypersaline basins. Meanwhile, the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico lifts more than 20 million barrels of produced water a day alongside its oil, water 3 to 6 times poorer in bromine than Dead Sea brine and therefore invisible to classical recovery, and injects most of it back underground at a cost of USD 0.75–1.25 per barrel. This paper presents the technical and economic case for recovering bromine and iodine as contracted co-products of an ambient-temperature, deep-vacuum separation process applied directly to Permian produced water ahead of disposal. The process separates water, dry salts, bromine and iodine in a single pass with no reagents, membranes, or moving parts, at 99.98% water recovery and 0.72kWh/m³ net specific energy. At a conservative planning value of 300mg/L, the Permian stream alone contains an estimated 348,000t of bromine a year — 80% of current world output — a figure that demonstrates the scale of the underlying resource rather than a claim on world demand. A representative 10,000 barrel-per-day site is modeled at USD 13–16.4mln in annual revenue across avoided injection cost, water, salt, iodine and bromine, with payback of 5–7 years, in which bromine and iodine together contribute a modest single-digit share and function as a co-product, not the basis of the project.