Texas Pacific Water Resources, subsidiary of Texas Pacific Land Corp., held ribbon-cutting ceremony last week for a new treatment facility near Orla in Reeves County. It’s designed to treat up to 10,000 barrels or 420,000 gallons of produced water a day. A day later, Aug. 11, Senate natural resources committee chaired by Kevin Sparks (R-Midland) held a hearing in Austin to hear testimony from industry representatives and regulators.
Texas Tribune said elected officials and industry leaders warned that Texas is at the “precipice of running out of underground space to dispose of the nearly 1 billion gallons of wastewater that oil and gas production generates every day in the Permian Basin… A lack of disposal space could soon constrain oil production in the Permian Basin.” Michael Lozano of Permian Basin Petroleum Association testified that companies could soon run out of disposal space. He said, “This is a large volume of water that we don’t have avenues for that we’re trying to rapidly create.”
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is developing permitting programs for re-using treated produced water. In 2025 Texas legislators transferred authority to permit land application of treated produced water to TCEQ from Railroad Commission of Texas. Sparks told the Tribune, “Timing is a critical issue at this point.”
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