“We need a Manhattan Project to deal with the produced water.”
— Kirk Edwards, former chairman of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, April 2025[1]
Gabriel Collins, “Small Modular Reactors for Nuclear Desalination and Cogeneration in the Permian Basin,” Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, May 7, 2025, https://doi.org/10.25613/M0CA-RR71.
Nuclear energy can potentially supply baseload, carbon-free electricity and process heat to repurpose and utilize some of the Permian Basin’s roughly 25 million barrels per day of oilfield produced water.[2] Doing so would free up local natural gas supplies for other uses, create a new water resource, and help address increasingly significant challenges with induced seismicity related to injection disposal of produced water.
Furthermore, reactors’ substantial heat output is well-suited for thermal distillation — the most robust process for oilfield waters whose variable quality, including contamination with hydrocarbons and high salinity, can severely challenge reverse osmosis-based treatment systems.[3] If a modern Manhattan Project is needed to handle produced water, the core tools of the original Manhattan Project could potentially be very well suited for the task.
This simple analysis aims to sketch out first cut techno-economic parameters of how water treatment might look. Oilfield applications of distributed power would align well with new Texas policy that explicitly recommends using advanced technology to treat oilfield produced water.[4] Many small modular reactor designs could also likely physically fit onto pad sizes similar to what the water midstream industry already uses for recycling and treatment operations.
This analysis ultimately aims to drive additional conversations with parties including the Texas Produced Water Consortium, Abilene Christian University, Natura Resources, Oklo, NuScale, Blue Energy and many others who are focused on — or who could help address — various challenges invoked by oilfield water management, power, and energy issues.
The small modular reactors currently being developed by NuScale Oklo, Holtec, and other firms are all ultimately fixed assets designed to operate for a licensed lifetime of 40 years in a single location. If mobile reactors came to market, water treatment operators might prefer those given that their mobility would reduce drilling and commodity price risk because they could be moved to follow the action and could be redeployed during oil price swings.
But those are likely at least 5 years further into the future than the first commercially deployable, American-made fixed location SMRs. Russia has deployed mobile barge-based SMRs but such platform types would not be suitable in the major U.S. oil & gas basins, which are located hundreds of miles inland.
There are also additional potential monetization pathways, including: pairing
desalination oriented SMR modules with carbon capture and sequestration projects that need electricity and heat, partnering with firms seeking to extract minerals from concentrated reject brines, and if additional reactors can be added to the pad and negotiated operational footprint, providing dedicated behind the meter power to bitcoin miners and/or high-performance computing clusters handing AI workloads. A new Manhattan Project for handling the ongoing produced water tsunami by bringing low emissions, high density nuclear energy and heat supplies can open a new era of “the nuclear oilfield.”
View the full paper (PDF).
Notes
[1] Benoit Morenne, “The Oil Patch’s ‘Manhattan Project’: How to Fix Its Gargantuan Water Problem,” The Wall Street Journal, 21 April 2025, https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/the-oil-patchs-manhattan-project-how-to-fix-its-gargantuan-water-problem-aebda706.
[2] The qualifier “some” is used because a portion of reported produced water flows are pre-obligated for enhanced oil recovery waterflood projects.
[3] Khamis, Ibrahim. “Overview of Nuclear Desalination Technologies & Costs.” Presentation at the Nuclear Energy Agency Workshop on Nuclear Co-Generation, Paris, France, November 15, 2011. https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations/8_Khamis_Overview-nuclear-desalination.pdf.
[4] “Deploying a World-Renowned Advanced Nuclear Industry in Texas,” Texas Advanced Nuclear Reactor Working Group, November 2024, https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/TANRWG_Advanced_Nuclear_Report_v11.17.24c_.pdf.
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