Why Your Next Role Could Be a Water Job

Water careers are everywhere, even in places you wouldn't expect. The demand for water expertise is growing across numerous sectors as they confront significant water-related challenges. Here are three examples of water challenges create unexpected career opportunities:

• Oil & Gas: Embracing the Produced Water Opportunity

For every barrel of oil extracted, companies must manage 3 to 5 barrels of contaminated produced water. Traditionally, this was just a waste stream. Now, it's being seen as an untapped resource. Innovators are developing advanced treatment systems to reuse this water or, even more excitingly, to extract valuable minerals like lithium from the brines.

The people tackling this aren’t just engineers; they’re mineralogists, process chemists, and business development specialists creating a new circular economy.

Oman has built the world’s largest wetland treatment plant for produced water

• Data Centres: Balancing AI Growth with Water Efficiency

When we talk about the AI boom, we often focus on energy consumption. But data centres are also incredibly thirsty. The annual water consumption of a medium-sized data centre can be equivalent to the daily water use of 300,000 people. This is creating a huge demand for talent to develop new cooling systems.

Think closed-loop systems, air-cooling, or even liquid immersion, which reduces water consumption to almost zero. These jobs go to mechanical engineers, AI specialists modelling water usage, and sustainability managers pioneering water-efficient tech.

Amazon’s AWS More than Halfway to Achieving 2030 Water Positive Goal

• Carbon Capture: Resolving the Water-Energy Conundrum

Carbon capture systems are the centrepiece of many climate strategies, but they have a hidden water problem. The most common systems use chemical solvents to absorb CO2. However, regenerating these solvents requires a huge amount of energy to heat the water in the solution - a major pain point for scaling up.

This creates a big opportunity for chemical engineers and materials scientists to develop more efficient, water-lean regeneration processes that make the technology economically viable.

What I'm trying to highlight is this: if you're looking for a career that's impactful and offers a huge variety of paths, maybe it's time to see where your skills can shape the future of water. The beauty of cultivating expertise in water is that it becomes a skill as indispensable and adaptable as water itself, able to permeate and shape solutions in any sector.