re: WSJ Article: America’s Biggest Oil Field Is Turning Into a Pressure Cooker

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Maybe the investors of these data centers would be willing to chip in on the costs to clean up that water if it means they then can use it for "free"?

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No indeed not. That water is more expensive to render usable than seawater would be.

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That water is more expensive to render usable than seawater would be.

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So it would be more cost effective to plan, acquire rights, construct, and operate a pipeline from the Pacific Ocean or GOM to West TX/SE NM?

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How about water?

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About 15 years ago we wanted to use river water rather than evaporative cooling for our data center. Similiar to how Waterford 3 worked. We never could get epa approval

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Lived in aforementioned permian basin for much of my life.

This is all bullshite scaremongering.

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You lived there so are an expert on the subterranean happenings..?

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You lived there so are an expert on the subterranean happenings..?

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Yup. Family and friends are geologists.

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So why not use a closed system?

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Ultimately you still need to remove the heat from a closed-loop system somewhere.

The approach temperatures are too low for air-cooled exchangers (think “fin fan” coolers) to really be efficient enough.

Closed loop systems cooled by vapor-compression refrigeration work great, but they have way higher capital, operating, and maintenance costs than evaporative cooling with water.

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other than sending all that water back in the ground,

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It's salty because it has absorbed ions directly from the rock in the area, so essentially all that is happening is that the salts and chemicals present (for the most part) were already in the ground anyway. Right? I don't suppose they're shipping waste water from the Bakken to Texas and vice versa.

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You're an oil person. Can you give a back of the envelope estimate of how many barrels of water have been injected compared to barrels recovered? I know it's kind of in the clips you provided. How did that water go overpressured? So there's that much compression pressure injected into the ground?

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The water isn’t injected into the exact same place.

If you were producing 5 barrels of water for every 1 barrel of oil and you injected that water right back into the same exact well it came out of, then you wouldn’t expect any increase in reservoir pressure over time. However, you’d end up re-extracting the water you just injected instead of the oil you’re trying to extract.

So instead you have to inject it somewhere else. You can go elsewhere in the same formation that you’re producing from, in which case the water (hopefully) helps maintain reservoir pressure over time. That’s called waterflood. But waterflood is tricky, particularly for shale oil production.

In reality, most of the water is being hauled off to dedicated disposal wells. So basically you’ve got producing wells that are depleting reservoir pressure in one place while disposal wells increase reservoir pressure somewhere else.

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It's salty because it has absorbed ions directly from the rock in the area, so essentially all that is happening is that the salts and chemicals present (for the most part) were already in the ground anyway. Right? I don't suppose they're shipping waste water from the Bakken to Texas and vice versa.

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Sort of. There are kind of two separate issues at hand.

One issue is the buildup of reservoir pressure where the injection wells are located. This is what’s happening in cases like the saltwater “geyser” described in the OP. That high reservoir pressure causes the water to migrate elsewhere - either into another part of the formation or possibly to the surface, in the case of shallow disposal wells.

This is where the salinity becomes a problem. The salt itself doesn’t create an issue until it migrates somewhere we don’t want large amounts of saltwater. The biggest concerns being the surface (where it can cause ecological issues) and fresh water aquifers (where it can contaminate fresh water supplies).

ETA: There is a separate issue where the saltwater produced by different wells/reservoirs can be incompatible, leading to scale formation. But this is mainly an issue for the injection wells themselves because it causes things to plug up. Incompatible brine isn’t really an issue for the larger population AFAIK.