The problem

Oil wells are really water wells.

Deep rock holds ancient seawater, often several times saltier than the ocean. When a well pumps oil, it pumps that brine too. Nationally, operators reported about 6.3 barrels of water for every barrel of oil, and in some states the ratio runs far higher.

U.S., 2021: 25.86 billion barrels of produced water ÷ 4.09 billion barrels of oil and condensate (GWPC). Statewide inventory ratios, not well-level water cuts: California ~22.5, Wyoming ~16.8, Oklahoma ~11.8, Alaska ~6.5. Average Permian wells run about 3–5 barrels of water per barrel of oil, and parts of the Delaware Basin reach 5–10.

The scale, every day: the top 10 oil states' produced water would fill about 3,500 Olympic swimming pools, or bury a football field (end zones included) about 5,400 feet deep, more than a mile.

Concept rendering of produced-water separation equipment at an oilfield site

Produced water arrives with oil, gas, sand, and dissolved salts. AI-generated equipment concept.

What is in produced water

Salt: Permian water is commonly 70,000–200,000 mg/L dissolved solids, beyond what commercial seawater membranes can desalinate.
Oil and organics: dispersed crude, benzene and other volatiles, and production chemicals.
Natural radioactivity: radium-226 and radium-228 dissolved from the rock.
Hardness and scale: calcium, magnesium, barium, strontium, iron.
Valuable minerals: lithium, bromine, iodine, boron, magnesium, potassium, and, at trace levels, rare earths.

The underground is pushing back

Injection raised the pressure. Now the ground answers with earthquakes.

Disposal wells push brine into porous rock thousands of feet down. Year after year the pressure rises. Where it reaches a stressed fault, the fault can slip. Where it finds an old wellbore, brine can return to the surface. Regulators have answered by shutting in wells, capping volumes, and blocking new permits.

Cross-section of a disposal well injecting brine into deep rock near a fault

Injected water raises pore pressure that can reach a fault. Simplified, AI-generated illustration.

BrineZero's job is to shrink the volume that needs disposal. Any change in seismic risk at a given site remains a separate, site-specific geomechanical question.

Earthquakes linked to wastewater injection

Aug. 22, 2011 · M5.3 near Trinidad, Colorado (Raton Basin)

Sept. 3, 2016 · M5.8 Pawnee, Oklahoma, the state's largest ever

Nov. 16, 2022 · M5.4 Culberson–Reeves, Texas

Dec. 16, 2022 · M5.4 north of Midland, Texas

Sept. 16, 2024 · M5.1 north of Midland, Texas

May 3, 2025 · M5.4 West Texas, felt across southeastern New Mexico

How regulators have clamped down

Texas: 23 deep-disposal permits suspended in Northern Culberson–Reeves (effective Jan. 12, 2024); new Permian disposal guidelines effective June 1, 2025, with pressure and volume limits.
New Mexico: injection cut after M3.0–3.5 events and stopped above M3.5; 3–4 million barrels a day of New Mexico water crosses into Texas for disposal.
Oklahoma: 33 directives cut or shut disposal wells; plugging back deep wells cut quake rates about four-fold.
North Dakota: over-pressured disposal rock forces extra casing on new wells.
Ohio: four Washington County disposal wells stopped in July 2026 after brine reached nearby wells.

Interactive map

The top 10 oil-producing states, and the water that comes with the oil

Click or tap a state, or pick one from the list, to see its oil per day and per year, its produced water in barrels and gallons, its water-to-oil ratio, and how much water its oil and gas industry, its farms and ranches, and its cities and suburbs use. The buttons change what the map colors.

State

#	State	Oil bbl/day	Oil bbl/year	Produced water bbl/day	Produced water bbl/year	Produced water gal/year	Water : oil	Fracking water†	Farms & ranches*	Cities & suburbs*	Brine vs. cities	Disposal

Oil, produced water, ratios, fracking water, and 2015 sector withdrawals for all ten states, with years and sources.

*Withdrawals in million gallons per day, USGS Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2015 (the latest complete state breakdown by sector). Farms & ranches = irrigation + livestock. Cities & suburbs = public supply (homes and businesses) + self-supplied domestic wells. Withdrawn is not the same as consumed: much irrigation and public-supply water returns to the environment. †Fracking water = reported hydraulic-fracturing water use, in million gallons per day, from the latest official source for each state (year in each panel); for Alaska, Wyoming, California, and Utah only 2011–2012 EPA FracFocus figures exist and reporting was incomplete. Fracking water includes recycled and brackish supply, so it is not net freshwater consumption. Oil: EIA crude oil production by state, 2025 annual. Produced water: latest state or GWPC figure (year in each panel). Water-to-oil compares water and oil from the same year and includes water from gas wells. The Federal Gulf of America offshore area is not a state and is not shown. 1 million gallons per day ≈ 23,810 barrels per day.

The market, November 2026

Big, constrained, and finally opening up

The produced-water business is already a $26-billion-a-year industry built on moving and burying water. Three things are changing at once: disposal is hitting pressure and permit limits, states are writing the first rules for using treated water outside the oilfield, and the first lithium has been pulled from Permian brine. A plant that turns the water into qualified products arrives at the right moment.

21–24 M

barrels of produced water a day in the Permian alone

Texas statewide ~24 million bbl/day (RRC); up more than 350% since 2017. Permian water cuts: ~4:1 Delaware, ~3:1 Midland, 5–10:1 in pockets. Disposal volumes are forecast to grow almost 40% this decade.

$156 B

U.S. oilfield water spending, 2025–2030

More than $26 billion a year, about two-thirds of it ($101.8 billion) in the Permian; transport alone is 43% of operators' water costs (Bluefield Research, Oct. 2025).

~16 M

bbl/day still injected in the Permian

Recycling supplies more than half of the ~8 million bbl/day fracking demand, and is forecast to supply 75% by 2030, but fracking demand is capped while water volumes keep rising. The surplus has nowhere to go but disposal, or a new destination.

$0.65–1.50

per barrel to inject, vs. $2–4 to treat for agriculture and $4–7+ for drinking water

The cost gap is the whole business problem. Avoided disposal alone does not pay for treatment; water sold by grade plus salt and minerals can (Bluefield; Davis Graham, Mar. 2026).

6 + 7

Texas discharge and land-application applications under TCEQ review

No new discharge permit in nearly three years (Aug. 2026 Senate hearing). HB 49 (2025) shields treated-water users from tort liability; SB 1145 moved land application to TCEQ, rules due 2027; voters approved a $20-billion Texas Water Fund (Nov. 2025) that can fund produced-water reuse.

10,000

bbl/day: the first Permian desalination plant, opened Aug. 2026

Texas Pacific Water Resources' freeze-desalination plant at Orla recovers about half of its feed as water; its river-discharge permit is still pending. One plant treats about 0.05% of the basin's water.

Pilots only

New Mexico, Colorado, and the rest of the country

New Mexico bars treated produced water outside the oilfield except NMED pilots; a 2026 petition for industrial, construction, geothermal, livestock, and non-food-crop uses advanced 7–4, decision expected 2027. Colorado mandates recycled water in new wells, rising to 35% by 2038.

1st

lithium carbonate made from Permian produced water (Feb. 2026)

Element3 at a Midland Basin recycling site; commercial plant commissioning. ExxonMobil targets 2027 for Smackover brine lithium. 60 minerals on the 2025 U.S. critical list, including lithium, magnesium, boron, and potash; Project Vault adds a $12-billion reserve.

5 M+

bbl/day of unused permitted disposal capacity at one midstream company

Water midstream is consolidating: WaterBridge IPO (Sept. 2025, 2.4 million bbl/day), Western Midstream's $2-billion purchase of Aris (198 disposal permits). They own the pipes, pads, and water, and they are hitting pressure limits: the natural hosts for a BrineZero plant.

What the market is asking for

A destination the regulator will sign. TCEQ's 450 public comments and the 2026 toxicity studies center on radium, bromide, strontium, barium, and BTEX. BrineZero removes radium first and tests every lot against the destination's panel before its valve opens.
Treatment that pays without a subsidy. One revenue stream cannot beat $1-a-barrel injection; several can: avoided disposal, water by grade, salt, carbonates, lithium, boron, bromine, iodine, and recovered oil, each credited only for what the assay shows.
Desalination of 130,000–150,000 mg/L brine. Seawater membranes stop near 70,000–80,000 mg/L. BrineZero's reference route is evaporation and crystallization, with freezing as an option, so it runs on the water the Permian actually produces.
Plants at the water's doorstep. Disposal hubs already gather millions of barrels a day; a plant beside the injection well turns the well into a backstop and the hub into a refinery.

Who we work with

Operators own the produced water in Texas (Cactus Water v. COG, 2025) and pay for every barrel moved and injected.
Water midstream companies own the gathering systems, disposal permits, and recycling pads where a plant belongs.
Industrial and data-center water users arriving in the Permian: one gigawatt of data-center capacity can need 250,000–350,000 bbl/day of treated water (TETRA).
Mineral buyers and the federal critical-minerals program for lithium, magnesium, boron, and potash streams.
State water funds that now list produced-water reuse as a new-supply strategy.

Market figures are from the public sources listed below; none are BrineZero forecasts. Some will change quickly, including TCEQ permit decisions and New Mexico's 2027 ruling.

Water-mining calculator

How much clean water and mineral could the brine yield?

Choose how much produced water BrineZero processes, then see the clean water and the salt, carbonates, lithium, boron, bromine, and other minerals it could recover. Every number is a screening estimate from published brine chemistry and stated recovery assumptions, not a measured plant result.

Produced water to draw from

Share of it BrineZero processes10%

Brine chemistry

Clean-water recovery (share of feed volume)75%

Concentrations and recovery assumptions

Concentrations in mg/L of the element (NaCl as salt). Recoveries are prospective design assumptions to be replaced by measured values on the actual water. Choose "Custom" to edit concentrations.

Inputs, concentrations, recoveries, and results, with formulas, for your own spreadsheet.

Recovered product	Feed conc. (mg/L)	Contained in feed (t/yr)	Recovery	Product (metric t/yr)	Product (US tons/yr)	2025 critical mineral

How to read these numbers

Concentration is not yield. Each product is capped at what the feed contains (1 mg/L in a billion barrels is about 159 metric tons), times a stated recovery, and every element is counted once. Product tonnages include the carbonate or hydroxide added in finishing, so they are larger than the element mined.
Chemistry varies by basin and by well. "Matched" uses the Midland Basin median for Texas and the Delaware Basin median for New Mexico; the other eight states use the Delaware median as a stand-in until an assay is on file, so treat those states' mineral figures as placeholders.
Rare earths are tiny. Individual rare earths in Wyoming produced waters are measured at nanograms per liter (Quillinan et al., 2017). The calculator's 1 µg/L total is an upper-end screening value, and no BrineZero route depends on rare-earth revenue.
Water is reported three ways at a plant: gross recovered, net exportable, and net disposal reduction. The calculator shows gross recovered water. Most of it serves oilfield, industrial, and non-food agricultural uses; drinking water requires additional treatment and permits.

How BrineZero works

A refinery for produced water

A petroleum refinery never treats crude as one substance. It assays each crude, protects its catalysts, and separates products at controlled cut points. BrineZero applies the same discipline to brine, with different chemistry: the cut points are pH, solubility, binding chemistry, and phase change. "Hydrocracker for water" describes the staged architecture, not hydrogen cracking of water or salt.

1 · Tag and test

Every delivery is held between valves as a numbered batch, metered, and tested for salts, metals, radium, oil, organics, and minerals. AI can read lab reports and manifests, but every value passes a validation check, and only measured results and fixed safety interlocks can release a batch.

2 · Route only what's needed

The test results choose which steps the batch enters and which it skips. After each step the plant measures what was removed, sends it to its own stream, and updates the rest of the route.

3 · Certify every lot

Water and products leave only on a measured pass. Each lot of water, salt, and mineral is traced back to the metered water it came from, ready for regulators, buyers, and royalty owners.

Concept image of a water droplet holding salts and minerals beside refinery-style equipment

Assay, protect, separate, certify. AI-generated concept; molecular views are schematic.

Concept rendering of an assembled modular produced-water refinery

The assembled water refinery: twelve selectable steps. AI-generated equipment concept, not a vendor-certified design.

The 12 steps, in order. Tap any step.

Steps marked GATE are fixed checkpoints: a batch can skip a step it does not need, but never a gate, and gates close by default if a measurement is lost. Step 10, the magnetic module in step 6, freezing in step 9, and PFAS destruction in step 11 are options chosen only where tests on the actual water justify them; the reference desalination route is evaporation plus thermal crystallization. Images are AI-generated equipment concepts and illustrative molecular mechanisms; they do not depict a vendor-certified design.

Products and off-ramps

Water first. More value within.

A useful product starts with chemistry and ends with a buyer's specification. Water leaves at the first grade its buyer needs; salt and minerals follow their own qualification paths.

The plant makes specified outputs, not one generic thing called "clean water." Four physically separate outlets each have their own valve and test panel, so the costliest polishing is spent only on water sold at a price that pays for it.

CHANNEL A

Oilfield reuse

Fracking makeup and waterflood. Oil, solids, oxygen, and bacteria removed; the salt can stay, so no desalination energy is spent.

CHANNEL B

Industrial and non-potable

Dust control, construction, cooling and data-center makeup, landscape. Tested for salinity, boron, chloride, organics, and radium.

CHANNEL C

Non-food agriculture

Cotton and fiber crops, bioenergy, nursery, forestry, rangeland. Irrigation-quality limits plus compound-specific PFAS and toxicity tests.

CHANNEL D

Food chain, by permit only

Food crops, livestock, or drinking water only for eligible sources with full treatment and authorization. A locked-out source stays locked out through any treatment or blending.

Mine the brine, not just dispose of it

Produced water is a mineral feedstock. Concentrations vary widely by basin and well, which is why BrineZero tests every batch before deciding what to recover.

Lithium Critical

Permian ~10–29 mg/L reported · Bakken ~27 · Marcellus ~84 · East Texas Smackover ~668

Batteries · recovered as lithium carbonate

Magnesium Critical

Midland median 512 mg/L · Delaware 180 · Bakken 305–1,070

Alloys, refractories, flame retardants

Boron Critical

Midland median 50 mg/L · Delaware 45

Glass, fiberglass, magnets, agriculture

Potassium Potash: critical

Midland median 563 mg/L · Delaware 262

Fertilizer and chemicals

Bromine

Midland median 588 mg/L · Arkansas Smackover 4,000–4,600 ppm

Flame retardants, completion brines

Iodine

Oklahoma Woodward-trench brines above 300 ppm, the only U.S. iodine production

Medicine, X-ray contrast

Strontium

Midland median 576 mg/L · Bakken 249–1,317

Magnets, specialty glass · only after radium clearance

Calcium

Midland median 3,066 mg/L · Delaware 1,064

Precipitated carbonate fillers

NaCl

Salt

Midland median 129,000 mg/L total dissolved solids

De-icing, chlor-alkali feed

REE

Rare earths Critical

Typically nanograms per liter per element; assay first

Collected as a concentrate only where assays justify it

"Critical" = on the U.S. Geological Survey's final 2025 List of Critical Minerals (60 minerals, Nov. 6, 2025), which includes lithium, magnesium, boron, potash, barite, and the rare earths.

Why radium comes out first

Boil or crystallize the whole brine as one stream, and its radium spreads through every ton of salt: about 470 tons a day of solids at a 30,000-barrel-a-day plant. BrineZero pulls radium into a small barium-sulfate solid while everything is still liquid, before any evaporator, so it collects in about 4.9 tons a day, roughly 1% of the solids.

Without fractionation: radium spread through all ~470 t/day of solids

BrineZero: radium in a ~4.9 t/day cake (red) for licensed disposal; the rest is qualified product by product

Concept rendering of sulfate precipitation and sealed cake separation for radium

Radium enters growing barite crystals and leaves in a sealed cake: (1−x)Ba²⁺ + xRa²⁺ + SO₄²⁻ → (Ba₁₋ₓRaₓ)SO₄. Illustrative mechanism.

Separation moves radioactivity into a small, controlled stream; it does not destroy it. Removal is measured on each source, the cake (about 480 pCi/g in the design example) goes to licensed disposal, and every product lot is tested on its own before release.

The plant and the path to scale

What a 30,000-barrel-a-day BrineZero plant could produce

Design illustration for a sodium-chloride brine near 100,000 mg/L with calcium near 4,000 mg/L, magnesium near 900, strontium near 500, and barium near 50 (30,000 barrels ≈ 1.26 million gallons ≈ 4,770 m³ a day). These are prospective figures from the BrineZero patent application and white paper, not results from a running plant.

Output	Illustrative amount per day	How it qualifies
Fresh water (condensate + washed ice melt)	~963,000 gallons gross, before losses	Reported three ways: gross recovered, net exportable, and net disposal reduction
Sodium chloride	~407 tonnes (≈610 at 150,000 mg/L)	Each lot tested; about 0.05–0.1 pCi/g averaged at 98–99% radium removal
Calcium carbonate	~47 tonnes	A separately tested guard lot protects the rest from leftover radium
Magnesium hydroxide	~10 tonnes (~15 as carbonate)	Heavy metals withdrawn first for purity
Lithium carbonate	~430–450 kg (~150 t/yr)	At 18–20 mg/L lithium and about 85% recovery, where the measured margin is positive
Radium-bearing sulfate cake	~4.9 tonnes	Licensed disposal: about 1% of the solids

Powered by the oilfield itself

A BrineZero plant can run at the pad or at a disposal-well site on the field's own gas, including gas that would otherwise be flared. One engine or turbine supplies electricity, useful process heat, and metered exhaust CO₂ for mineral carbonation. Heat and electricity are accounted separately, extra fuel burned for a process duty is charged to that duty, and the cost case is made against mechanical vapor recompression and other thermal systems, not just against membranes.

Energy, emissions, and carbon use are site-specific. Recovered carbon use is distinct from net lifecycle carbon removal.

Concept rendering of a gas engine generator supplying power, heat, and CO2 to the plant

One utility system: power, process heat, and captured CO₂. AI-generated equipment concept.

The next milestone is measured proof.

Characterize the real feed

Measure oil, solids, dissolved ions, organics, scaling potential, and radium across wells and over time. Pilot oil removal and qualified oilfield reuse at the pad, earning from avoided disposal, trucking, and recovered oil.

Run the integrated pilot

Add the radium gate, softening, and proven thermal water recovery. Close the mass, water, energy, radioactivity, and fluorine balances across every outlet, and measure fouling, reagent demand, and uptime.

Qualify water and offtake, then scale

Test each water destination and product lot against its acceptance criteria, permits, and buyer specifications. Scale when the independent tests pass, adding lithium, boron, iodine, bromine, freezing, PFAS destruction, or on-site reagents only where the actual water shows they pay.

Concept rendering of engineers reviewing a pilot skid with sample jars of oil, salt, and minerals

Measured performance defines the path to scale. AI-generated concept.

What is proven, and what is not yet

Each BrineZero step uses established science and commercially manufactured equipment: centrifuges, precipitation reactors, selective media, evaporators, crystallizers, analyzers, and valves. The complete integrated plant has not yet been built or demonstrated, and all plant figures on this site are prospective design illustrations. Results depend on each source's water, and every feed-dependent number (radium removal, mineral yields, freezing performance, PFAS destruction) is measured on that water before it is relied on. No water is represented as drinkable or suitable for food crops except where the required tests and permits establish it.

National priorities

Domestic water and domestic critical minerals from one stream

Critical minerals on the 2025 U.S. list

USGS final List of Critical Minerals, Nov. 6, 2025, including lithium, magnesium, boron, potash, barite, and the rare earths, all present in some produced waters.

>15,500 t

Lithium per year the Permian could yield

DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management fact sheet (2024), from USGS Produced Waters Database samples, about five times U.S. annual lithium consumption cited there.

$12 B

Project Vault

U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve announced February 2026: up to $12 billion, including up to $10 billion of EXIM financing, with an initial emphasis on rare earths (IEA policy database).

Intellectual property

Larry M. Shultz invented BrineZero™ to turn oilfield produced water and frack (flowback) water from a disposal liability into a higher value resource: desalination without high-pressure membranes on raw brine, water recycling by grade, recovery of salt and critical minerals (including rare earth elements), and a residual small enough for a zero-liquid-discharge route or authorized disposal.

PATENT PENDING

BrineZero™ produced-water refinery

Batch-identified produced-water treatment with intake assay, radium segregation ahead of thermal recovery, measured release gates, destination-specific water channels, and source-attributed mineral products.

ISSUED

U.S. Patent No. 12,042,763 B2

Earlier patent of Larry M. Shultz with joint inventors Snider and Diorio, issued July 23, 2024: brine injected with carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, heated, pressurized, and sprayed into a vacuum phase chamber with condensation and heat recovery toward a carbonate product.

Every barrel of oil brings up salt water. Every barrel of that water has a second life.

Oil wells are really water wells.

What is in produced water

Injection raised the pressure. Now the ground answers with earthquakes.

Earthquakes linked to wastewater injection

How regulators have clamped down

The top 10 oil-producing states, and the water that comes with the oil

Big, constrained, and finally opening up

What the market is asking for

Who we work with

How much clean water and mineral could the brine yield?

How to read these numbers

A refinery for produced water

1 · Tag and test

2 · Route only what's needed

3 · Certify every lot

The 12 steps, in order. Tap any step.

Water first. More value within.

Oilfield reuse

Industrial and non-potable

Non-food agriculture

Food chain, by permit only

Mine the brine, not just dispose of it

Why radium comes out first

What a 30,000-barrel-a-day BrineZero plant could produce

Powered by the oilfield itself

The next milestone is measured proof.

Characterize the real feed

Run the integrated pilot

Qualify water and offtake, then scale

What is proven, and what is not yet

Domestic water and domestic critical minerals from one stream

Critical minerals on the 2025 U.S. list

Lithium per year the Permian could yield

Project Vault

BrineZero™ produced-water refinery

U.S. Patent No. 12,042,763 B2

Where the numbers come from

Bring the water. Let's see what's inside.