Water Solutions
With combined experience in the water business of 100+ years, our team has the industry expertise, leadership, and technology to deliver fit-for-purpose solutions for our industries and communities.
Our Water Solutions
Water scarcity is a growing challenge across Texas and New Mexico. Communities across the Delaware are balancing the demand for freshwater supplies to support potable use and economic growth while managing limited resources. Concurrently, the oil and gas industry is facing a growing challenge: how to handle large volumes of produced water from oil and gas production.
As these problems intensify, we need scalable solutions to reduce freshwater demand, manage produced water responsibly, and protect long-term water security.
Western Midstream is tackling those problems by building comprehensive water infrastructure across the Delaware Basin, and in turn creating a more resilient water future.
With combined experience in the water business of 100+ years, our team has the industry expertise, leadership, and technology to deliver fit-for-purpose solutions for our industries and communities. Our company handles 3 million barrels per day of produced water, as we provide a suite of comprehensive solutions. Our solutions include produced-water gathering, disposal, recycling, beneficial reuse (including desalination and mineral extraction), and long-haul transport via the Pathfinder Pipeline.
Our industrial water solutions:
- Beneficial reuse
- Gathering, transportation and disposal
- Recycling
Industrial water solutions is vital to a range of industries:
Agriculture & Irrigation | Oil & Gas | Power Generation | Mining & Mineral Processing | Industrial Manufacturing | Data Center & Technology | Hydrogen Production & Clean Energy | Infrastructure & Construction | Municipal Water Treatment & Utilities | Textile & Chemical Processing
Beneficial Reuse
Western Midstream wants to recover water from industrial applications for beneficial use across the state of Texas and beyond. Through innovative treatment processes, industry partnerships, and regulatory collaboration, WES is advancing sustainable reuse solutions that conserve freshwater, support energy production, and enable new industrial applications.
Industrial Water Treatment
WES delivers high-recovery membrane technologies engineered for complex industrial water challenges. Our systems support efficient reuse, reduce freshwater intake, and lower operational costs—empowering customers to maximize the value of every drop.
Produced water requires advanced treatment before reuse and WES employs industry-leading technologies to convert produced water into a reusable resource, including:
Pre-Treatment
Removing hydrocarbons, solids, and other impurities.
Desalination
Reducing salinity to make the water suitable for various applications.
Post-Treatment
Refining water quality to meet industry-specific standards and support downstream recovery opportunities.
Joint Industry Project
WES, alongside our partners, is demonstrating how to develop cost effective and scalable methods of treating produced water for reuse for industrial, commercial and non-consumptive agricultural applications.
- In 2023, Western Midstream and its industry partners Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Coterra Energy, created a small-scale pilot site (Joint Industry Project #1) near Red Bluff Reservoir to evaluate and measure technologies needed to commercialize beneficial reuse in the Permian Basin.
- Through the pilot project, we collected over 50,000 data points to confirm and demonstrate our water quality after treatment.
Ultimately, the reclaimed freshwater from our water treatment facility could support local agriculture, industrial cooling, data centers, and manufacturing, and help reduce pressure on Texas’ limited freshwater resources.
Produced Water Gathering, Transportation, and Disposal
Our gathering and disposal systems link producing well sites or nearby collection points with disposal facilities that remove hydrocarbon products and other sediments from the produced water. The produced water we collect can then be re-injected into permitted disposal wells or sold to third parties to be further treated and recycled. We operate more than 130 saltwater disposal wells with more than 3.8 MMBbls/d of disposal capacity.
The Pathfinder Pipeline
Our Pathfinder pipeline will transport up to 800 MBbls/d of produced water to saltwater disposal facilities in eastern Loving County in the Delaware Basin. This will help alleviate local produced water disposal constraints.
Recycling
WES currently has commercial operations in place to recycle produced water back to oil and gas operators to reduce industry groundwater use. Today, WES recycles up to 600,000 barrels per day of produced water.