Terraforming West Texas (at a profit)
You cannot conserve your way to an abundance of anything, water is no different. To bring everyone to an American standard of living we need to triple the fresh water consumed on Earth. To power a truly abundant future, one where we mold Earth into a verdant paradise, we'll likely need to increase supply by 10-20X.
This means we must produce net-new fresh water, and the only way forward is desalination.
The Economics of Water Today
The cost of water varies wildly depending on use and location. Agricultural water can range from $10-$200 per acre-foot while residential or commercial use ranges from $500-$3,000. This spread tells you something important: water is already expensive in many contexts, but the infrastructure to deliver it in those places is costly.
Desalination can be profitable in the right locations. Israeli desalination plants, among the most efficient in the world, currently produce water at $500-$750 per acre-foot. That's competitive with residential water in many places, but still too expensive for agriculture in almost any circumstance. If we want to green deserts and grow food in new places, we need to get costs down significantly.
Reverse Osmosis Isn’t It (yet)
Reverse osmosis (RO) is the process of pushing saltwater through a membrane filter and the salty parts get left behind. RO has become the gold standard for desalination because it's reliable, well-understood, and scalable. But there's a problem: the main cost isn't energy anymore, it's the plant itself.
Energy accounts for only one-third to one-half of the levelized cost of water in modern RO plants. We've gotten very good at energy efficiency. Even if energy were completely free we'd still be looking at $250 per acre-foot just for the capital and operational costs of the facility.
The standard answer for bringing costs down for a product is to modularize and mass-manufacture them. It's worked for solar panels and batteries, why not desalination?
RO desalination plants benefit enormously from economies of scale, the membrane, pumps, etc all benefit from being large. The bigger the plant, the more efficient it becomes per unit of water produced. Scaling them down to make them manufacturable makes them less effective.
Heat-Based Desalination: the brute force option
Heat-based desalination takes a completely different approach. Instead of forcing water through membranes under pressure, you simply evaporate the water and then distill it from vapor. Evaporating salt water is incredibly energy-intensive, it's thermodynamically expensive to boil water on the best day, but the saltier the water, the more heat required. This is why reverse osmosis won the efficiency war decades ago.
But here's the thing: while the energy requirement is high, the machinery to do it is inexpensive. You're essentially building industrial-scale stills with basic materials. No high-tech membranes, no ultra-precise engineering tolerances. There’s a lower cost floor for heat-based desalination than RO, the main cost is the energy.
Now consider this (real) situation with heat-based desalination: What if the heat input wasn't only free, but someone was paying you to take it? What if the salt water input wasn't only free, but someone was paying you to get rid of it? What if the desalination process produced useful minerals that could also be sold? And what if creating those minerals also scrubbed CO2 from the atmosphere?
Suddenly the economics flip entirely. The energy intensity stops being a cost and becomes a revenue stream.
That's what we're doing.
Turning Waste Into Revenue
When oil comes out of the ground, it doesn't come out pure. When you crack open a reservoir you get oil, associated natural gas, as well as “produced water”. This water is very salty and dirty, far saltier than seawater, often containing dissolved minerals, hydrocarbons, and other contaminants. This water is toxic enough that oil companies are required to dispose of it safely, which typically means pumping it back underground into disposal wells.
They pay significant money to do this. In areas without easy saltwater pipeline access, they pay even more to truck it to disposal sites. They will pay you to take this water off their hands.
Meanwhile, data center build-outs are accelerating every year, and they all face the same problem: heat disposal.
Modern data centers generate enormous amounts of waste heat that must be removed to keep servers running. In turn, they spend enormous sums on cooling systems: chillers, cooling towers, sophisticated HVAC systems, etc. It’s up to 25% the cost of building an AI data center and up to 50% of the cost of operating one.
Heat-based desalination offers a way to offer a cheaper waste heat disposal system. Instead of creating a system whose entire goal is to expel waste heat, they could pay less and have that heat be productive.
The process gets even better when you consider the salt. You can mineralize some of the salts using hot CO2. This would be from the CO2 produced while burning natural gas on-site for additional power (a common practice on these sites). This reduces total dissolved solids in the brine, making the desalination process less energy intensive, while creating useful byproducts: materials for cement, soil amendments, battery materials, and more.
You're simultaneously making the water cleaner and producing more saleable commodities.As a bonus, you're sequestering CO2 in stable mineral form.
Our system turns every input into something people pay us to take, produces saleable byproducts, and uses cheap machinery that can be manufactured at scale. The business model writes itself.
Why West Texas Is Perfect
West Texas is home to the Permian Basin, one of the most productive oil basins in the world. But the Permian is vast, an area roughly the size of South Carolina, too vast to build all the infrastructure to fully utilize all the energy produced in the basin.The further you get from the local hubs, the more acute these infrastructure problems become.
Oil companies in remote areas often can't access cheap saltwater disposal pipelines. They have to truck their produced water to disposal sites at significant cost. Sometimes they can't get their associated natural gas to a pipeline either, so they have to flare it: literally burn it off as waste. Even when the gas does get to market there’s so much of it that the prices are the lowest in the country. There are well-established markets for gas and produced water, and a better mousetrap will easily be able to tap in.
For entirely different reasons, West Texas is also becoming the epicenter of data center construction in the United States. The combination of cheap land, available power, and favorable regulations is drawing massive investment. Some estimates have it that 75% of new data centers being built will be in Texas.
You could not have designed a more perfect opportunity to start terraforming West Texas (at a profit). There are motivated customers who want us to dispose of their heat (data centers) located right next to companies that will pay us to take their salt water (oil producers), in a region where we can get cheap CO2 (from onsite natural gas power generation). The pieces have never been aligned like this before.
For the first time in history, all the right elements are in place to do cheap, heat-based desalination at a meaningful scale.
Improving the land
Let's talk about scale. The Permian Basin produces 22 million barrels of produced water every day. If you desalinated all of that, you'd have about roughly the flow rate of the Colorado River.
Imagine what that volume of fresh water would do to the landscape of a hot, arid environment like West Texas. We're not talking about incremental greening or small oasis projects. We're talking about transforming the fundamental character of the region.
Acreage in West Texas currently goes for $500 to several thousand dollars per acre, depending on location and characteristics. Most of it is marginal land, useful for ranching at low density, but not much else. But if that land becomes more fertile through reliable water access, it becomes far more valuable. Cropland commands premium prices. Improved pasture supports more cattle per acre. Even recreational and residential values increase.
Once we can quantify the cost to raise land fertility through water infrastructure, we can pitch municipalities, counties, states, and daring private investors on genuine megaprojects. (as explored in Casey Handmer’s blog)
This isn't about altruism or environmental initiatives that need subsidy. The math is straightforward: they invest in water infrastructure, land values increase, property tax revenues increase, and the value of their land increases. It pays for itself.
This will be how we get political buy-in for projects at the scale necessary to truly change the Texas landscape.
Beyond West Texas & Beyond Heat-Based Desal
We need to produce more fresh water, and we should start with whatever actually works at scale and turns a profit. Right now that’s RO in some places, and heat-based in West Texas.
As the Permian starts to green and people see what's possible when we commit to expansion rather than conservation, the next frontiers become obvious. The next natural target regions are Nevada, Southern California, South Texas, each with their own available sources of salt water, industrial activity, water infrastructure, and vast underutilized land.
Meanwhile, the cost curves for everything continue to bend downward. It’s not just energy, but with cheap energy, cheap AI, and cheap robotics naturally self-reinforce leading to radical price collapse…of everything. At that point, desalinating water with reverse osmosis, heat, whatever, will be profitable.
When that happens, we’ll be able to do reverse osmosis in many more places, including South Texas. We'll build the Great Texas Aqueduct to ferry water across this state, emanating from coastal desalination plants and linking to the data center desal operations in West Texas eliminating water scarcity anywhere in the region.
Thinking even more ambitiously: we'll be able to refill the Great Salt Lake by ferrying water all the way from the coast. Right now, the lake is experiencing catastrophic decline that threatens to create an environmental and public health disaster. Dried lakebed becomes toxic dust. Ecosystems collapse. This is preventable with sufficient water supply.
We’ll be able to terraform Nevada and Southern California (also explored in Casey Handmer’s blog) because they’re natural places to create enormous reservoirs filled by water desalinated via reverse osmosis and ferried by existing water infrastructure.
Where water goes, life can flourish. We are about to rapidly expand the volume and availability of fresh water through sustainable abundance.
Let's start making Earth more habitable.