Texas Pacific Water Resources working to provide reusable water

Published: Nov. 16, 2023 at 3:49 PM CST

MIDLAND, Texas (KOSA) - Deep in the oilfields of South Midland County is a facility that is designed to make reusable water.

In just one month the Texas Pacific Water Resources Testing Facility receives around 10,000 gallons of water.

Out of that 10,000 gallons of water, Texas Pacific can reuse around 70 percent of that water.

“So we can do anything from irrigating plants to potentially discharge into water off the US and the end goal is aquifer recharge,” said Adrianne Lopez, Technical Research & Development Manager Texas Pacific Water Resources

But for there to be reusable water, they have to lower the T.D.S of the water they receive. T.D.S stands for total dissolved solids.

And for the water to get to safe levels of T.D.S. it has to go through several stages before it can be used.

Each step of that desalination technology will reduce the salinity and the T.D.S by about 50 percent.

“So when we process that water twice then that water is now decreased from 100,000 to 25,000 and then from there we can go to reverse osmosis and then from there we can get it down to anywhere from 1,500 to I think lowest we got is about 250,” said Lopez

Inside the Texas Pacific Water Resources testing facility, they’re looking at different levels of water and how it’ll react to native plants of West Texas as well as local soil.

“Each box is watered by different water quality from the controlled to 500, 1000 and the 15000. So that’ll give us a better idea of what level of T.D.S is acceptable for the plants and how much water we can put on the ground without seeing accumulation or changes to the soil or the plant health” said Lopez

The ultimate goal for the Texas Pacific Water Resources Testing Facility is to move forward to the next stage which is to be able to treat and discharge up to 20,000 barrels of water per day which will help them on a larger scale.

“Currently we are doing the 500, 1000, and 1500 for the irrigation study and that is what the ultimate goal of doing land application but we are also treating T.D.S lower than that and also analyzing those for the potential for aquifer recharge or surface water discharge,” said, Lopez

Texas Pacific Water Resources hopes to open another facility in Reeves next summer to work on a larger scale.