Texas: from shale boom to water revolution

Texas is famous the world over for two things on a massive scale: oil and droughts. Now the slick but dry state is becoming famous for water: that precious element that both resolves the drought problem and also makes it possible to pump more oil out of the ground.

Not only does Texas have the Permian Basin and the Eagle Ford shale, but it also has the Gulf of Mexico and its massive oil deposits and endless gallons of seawater that are now economically treatable thanks to next generation water processing technology.

As NASA predicts a decades-long 'mega drought' later this century, next generation water processing technology coming from within the oil industry promises not only to help solve Texas' drought problem by accessing and desalinating brackish and slightly salty water sources deep under the dry Texan surface, but to go one step further by desalinating ocean water and turning dirty water into potable water.

While conventional desalination technologies only recover about 35% of fresh water from a gallon of seawater, new Dutch technology brought to Texas by a local company recovers approximately 97% of the fresh water at an economical cost. At the same time, the new technology uses no chemicals, rendering it quite possibly the 'greenest' water processing technology in operation today.

This ushers in the ability to add new water sources to our current ecological system by desalinating brackish and ocean water that previously was not considered in the amount of fresh water available for human consumption.

A Water Revolution Takes Root

Texas barely survived a seven-year drought in the 1950s, when 100,000 farms and ranches were lost, and a recent study by a NASA scientist says there is a good chance Texas may see something much worse than this as global warming leads to long-term drying in the west. This time it could be a mega drought, the worst in 1000 years, that could last for decades.

For the oil and gas industry, water-starved Texas is a highly competitive playing field and the competition between oil companies and other heavy users of water is intense. The shale boom and the hydraulic fracturing revolution have exponentially raised the stakes in this competition as demand for water has soared. Texas is where the fracking revolution began; and now it is where the water revolution is taking root.

Producers are surrounded in a pincher movement, both by critics of how much water they use and by internal pressure to ensure enough supplies of water to keep drilling and fracking.

The answer to Texas' drought, concerns about future supplies of potable water, and oil industry fears of fracking drying up, is next generation technology that hits out at the water dilemma on three fronts simultaneously.

Salttech DyVaR Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) water processing technology was developed in the Netherlands by Salttech and was launched first by Texas-based STW Resources in July last year in Mentone, Texas, in the Permian Basin. The Salttech desalination system is now providing the residents of Mentone with more drinking water than they could have ever hoped for.

This is a win-win situation for all water end users, and environmentally, there are no snags: It's a green process all the way, with absolutely no chemicals or filtration involved. And not only is the new technology providing all of Mentone's drinking water, its entire operations are run on solar power energy.