Data centers need millions of gallons of water a day. Oil and gas industries produce more wastewater than that. Connecting them using today’s desalination technologies makes sense.
October 15, 2026
Data centers have become a major flashpoint as midterm elections near in the United States. Besides their intensive energy use, they are drawing public ire for use of freshwater for to cool data centers.
But researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have an idea that could alleviate the stress on local freshwater resources. They propose using waste water from the oil and gas industry. Today’s desalination technologies could clean up dirty and salty water to produce clean-enough water for data center cooling needs, the team shows in a paper published in the journal Water Research.
“We’re not waiting for a futuristic technology to come along and solve this problem for us,” said mechanical engineering professor Vaibhav Bahadur in a press release. “We can solve parts of this problem with the technology we already have; there’s just a cost to it.”
Data centers underpin our modern digital economy. But they are highly energy-intensive. Their power needs are “equivalent to the electrical power draw of 1000 US households going into a computing unit the size of a bookshelf,” the team writes in the paper.
The heat this generates requires immense amounts of water for cooling. Data centers can consume millions of gallons of water a day. Meanwhile, the Permian Basin in West Texas produces about 8 billion gallons of waste water per day during oil and gas extraction. And “right now this water is transported over long distances and injected underground,” Bahadur said.
So why not put this water to cooling use at data centers? Besides the quantity, the quality of the water is also important. Freshwater needs to have less than 500 parts per million of dissolved solids.
The UT Austin team looked at how data centers could produce such relatively clean water using desalination. And they analyzed how desalination treatment choice influences cost and environmental impact.
They modeled the cost and energy trade-offs of treating various saline water sources, from mildly brackish groundwater to the much saltier water produced during oil and gas drilling. And they focused on two leading desalination technologies. One, called reverse osmosis, pushes water through membranes that block salt and impurities. The other is a heat-driven process, where water is evaporated, leaving impurities behind, and then the clean vapor is condensed and collected.
The team evaluated three data center deployment case studies. The model captured the “combined effect of cooling technique, local saline water conditions, geographic water stress, and brine disposal strategy on water availability,” they write.
Their results show that a project in Longview, Texas, which uses brackish groundwater treated via reverse osmosis came out with the lowest local water-stress score of the three. But the finding is much more general. Even the most energy-intensive desalination option consumed a fraction of a data center’s total energy demand.
Source: Vishnu Sree Shanthanu Katakam et al. System-scale design and analysis of desalination systems for meeting water needs of data centers. Water Research, 2026.
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