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Western Chemicals

Turning oilfield wastewater into the world's cheapest fuels.

MaterialsEnergyMining
What they build

The product

Western Chemicals is building a chemistry stack that converts produced water and other industrial wastewater streams into low-cost fuel and chemical feedstocks. The company is targeting the enormous volumes of contaminated brine generated by US oil and gas production (3-5 barrels per barrel of crude in the Permian alone) — water that today is trucked off and injected underground at significant cost — and reframing it as a domestic, near-free feedstock for hydrocarbon and hydrogen-derived fuels.

Why it matters

The thesis

Produced water is one of the largest waste streams in the American economy and one of the largest constraints on continued Permian growth. Turning that liability into a fuel feedstock would simultaneously lower the cost of domestic energy, reduce freshwater pressure on West Texas and New Mexico aquifers, and create a new American chemicals primitive that the legacy refining majors do not own. It sits squarely in the reindustrialization thesis: domestic feedstocks, domestic process chemistry, and onshored fuel supply.

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