El Paso Water is moving ahead with a plan to recover close to 3 million gallons of drinking water a day from the concentrated brine produced by its Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant, in a deal that puts a price tag on one of the industry’s most persistent problems.
The utility is working with Upwell Critical Materials Corporation on a facility that would be built next to the plant, process part of its brine, recover minerals that can be sold and return potable water to El Paso Water. The Public Service Board approved an updated agreement in July, according to KFOX14/CBS4 reporting.
The numbers
- Volume: About 2.8 million gallons per day, or roughly 1 billion gallons a year, according to Gilbert Trejo, the utility’s vice president of engineering, operations and technical services.
- Cost: A financial analysis presented to the board put the cost at about $5.2 million a year, which would cover the water El Paso Water must buy from Upwell. Under the agreement, the utility purchases all the potable water produced from the brine it sends.
- Timeline: No firm start date. Trejo said the additional supply is not expected to be needed until around 2030.
Dividing the two figures gives roughly $5 per thousand gallons. That is our own back-of-the-envelope arithmetic, not a price the utility has published, and it does not account for any revenue from the minerals Upwell would sell.
Why brine is the bottleneck
The Kay Bailey Hutchison plant treats brackish groundwater and can produce up to 27.5 million gallons of drinking water a day, making it what El Paso Water calls the world’s largest inland desalination facility. About 80% of the water entering treatment is recovered; the remaining 20% becomes highly concentrated brine. Today the utility pumps that brine more than 20 miles east and injects it roughly 4,000 feet underground. Inland plants cannot simply discharge to the ocean, so disposal is a major cost and constraint. Trejo called it a big issue for any desalination operation.
Upwell would process only part of the brine, and the rest would continue to go to the injection site.
What it means for ratepayers
Asked whether customers’ bills would rise, Trejo said the project alone would not trigger a rate increase, but its cost would be folded in with other construction, expansion and wastewater projects when future rates are calculated. That is a useful reminder that brine valorisation is as much a utility finance question as a technology one, a theme we explored in Can Brine Mining Actually Pay for Itself?.
The El Paso model is notable because it treats brine as a source of both water and minerals under a fixed-purchase contract, rather than as a pure disposal cost. Related work is happening on the membrane side, where low salt rejection RO could make brine concentration cheaper, and in research labs, where a University of Rochester team has built a solar desalination system that leaves solid salt instead of liquid brine.
Source: KFOX14/CBS4 (El Paso), 21 July 2026.