Can waste water from the oil and energy industry quench the thirst of data centers? Researchers at The University of Texas in Austin are betting it can.

They suggest that established desalination technologies could allow data centers to use salty or contaminated water to meet their cooling needs, reducing their reliance on freshwater.

Although there are various ways to separate salt from water, researchers said reverse osmosis, which uses pressure to push water through a semipermeable membrane, is more energy-efficient. However, the technology has one drawback: it struggles to treat water saltier than seawater.

Heating water into vapor and then condensing it back into freshwater is another viable solution, but this method requires more energy.

According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day. The waste water generated by certain oil fields in Texas is over thousand fold higher than this amount.

Data centers can become more efficient in their water usage if they reduce stress on local water resources without drastically increasing costs or overall energy demand, according to a recently published study in Water Research.

“We’re not waiting for a futuristic technology to come along and solve this problem for us,” said Vaibhav Bahadur, who is a professor at the University’s Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and is one of the leaders of the research.

Bahudur noted that though the desalinations methods are available but they incur a cost. These costs, however, will be a small fraction of a data center’s total energy footprint when compared even with the most energy-intensive water treatment.

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