Produced Water as an Industrial Water Resource in the Permian Basin: Forecasting, Water-Quality Constraints, and Reuse Screening for West Texas

Abstract

Produced-water management in the Permian Basin is increasingly shaped by three linked pressures: growing unconventional-water volumes, tightening saltwater-disposal constraints, and severe regional water scarcity in West Texas. The herein-used approach shows that these issues cannot be discussed separately. Historical and forecasted PW availability determines how much water exists, spatial chemistry determines how difficult that water is to treat, and reuse planning determines whether that water can arguably relieve local shortages. The added framing emphasizes the manuscript as a basin-scale decision-support study. It integrates historical production, scenario-based forecasting through 2070, hydraulic-fracturing reuse accounting, a locked water-quality atlas, and a bounded screening interpretation of constituent recovery. The resulting argument is that Permian produced water should be evaluated first as a persistent but spatially constrained water-management resource, and only secondarily as a source of dissolved-value offsets. This distinction strengthens the manuscript for submission because it avoids overclaiming reuse feasibility or mineral-recovery economics while still showing where treatment-oriented reuse is most defensible.