Texas Researchers Say Permian Wastewater Could Cool AI Data Centers

The artificial intelligence boom is placing a dangerous strain on the world’s water and energy resources. As hyperscalers build up resource-hungry data centers at a breakneck pace, demand projections for these finite resources are skyrocketing faster than policymakers can keep pace. But a new study from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin suggests that there may be a way to sustainably source water for data centers by using wastewater from the oil and gas industry. The water and energy use of AI data centers is enormous and growing rapidly. Large data centers can directly consume as much as 5 million gallons of water per day, according to figures from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. But hard numbers are hard to come by, as the tech sector operates under extreme opacity. And, what is more, new studies suggest that those figures may be greatly underestimating the real water usage of these operations. Recent research from the University of Michigan contends that these water footprints should also account for the water usage of the energy being produced to power those data centers. A new paper calculates that when water used offsite is included in the water accounting of three large AI data centers planned for Michigan, the projects’ water footprint increases by a whopping 14 billion gallons.“There has been much less attention to this indirect water usage, even though that oftentimes is significantly higher than the direct water usage and has impacts on watersheds and regional water resources,” Shaolei Ren, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, recently told Bloomberg.Finding a way to limit the water usage of these projects, or make that usage more sustainable, is paramount. This is where new research from the University of Texas at Austin comes in. In a brand new paper published in the scientific journal Water Research, researchers model different proven ways of desalinating wastewater to gauge their energy efficiency for use in data center cooling processes, with the goal of reducing the sector’s pressure on finite freshwater resources. The scientists find that the most efficient method is reverse osmosis. However, it struggles with water saltier than seawater, which could pose a challenge for some wastewater resources.In applications where reverse osmosis isn’t feasible, heating water into vapor and capturing the resulting freshwater is another viable approach, albeit a more energy-intensive one. Either way, neither approach is new, and that is the appeal. “We’re not waiting for a futuristic technology to come along and solve this problem for us,” Vaibhav Bahadur, who is a professor at the University of Texas’ Cockrell School of Engineering and one of the leaders of the research, was recently quoted by Interesting Engineering. Treatment isn’t free, but Bahadur says the cost would be a small fraction of a data center’s total energy footprint, even with the most energy-intensive option.Using wastewater from the oil and gas sector would shrink data centers’ water footprint, and it would also solve a problem for the fossil fuel sector by closing a problematic resource loop. As big as the AI sector’s water needs are, the oil and gas sector’s water needs – and water waste – are even bigger. By Bahadur’s count, the Permian alone generates roughly 790 million gallons of wastewater a day, more than 150 times the 5 million gallons a large data center can consume.“The Permian (Basin) puts out 1,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools per day, and right now this water is transported over long distances and injected underground. This is problematic in many ways including the risk of seismic activity,” said Bahadur, according to Interesting Engineering. “We’re also running out of space to bury that water, by as early as 2030. We need to find a way to use it, and cleaning it up for data centers is a great way to do that.”By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.comMore Top Reads From Oilprice.comLNG Canada to Double Export Capacity After Shell Approves Phase 2Saudi Arabia Restarts Red Sea Crude Oil LoadingsIndia Looks to Boost Exploration as Hormuz Crisis Threatens Supply