Contamination of water resources with hazardous chemicals is one of the main concerns of all private and public sectors involved in the water production for drinking, irrigation and domestic use. The conventional disinfection process using chlorination adds to the complexity of the problem as some of these chemicals are precursors for disinfection by products such as trihalomethanes. This paper describes the work done to study the efficiency of two types of processes in removing a model hydrocarbon, namely, benzene, which was added to water at a concentration of 100 ppm. The two processes investigated were RO and UV/TiO2. The RO process was based on a FilmTec SW30 spiral wound membrane, which was operated at pressures of 20, 40 and 60 bar. The UV/TiO2 employed was PhotoCat, manufactured by Purifics, Canada. The heart of the PhotoCat unit was 32 low pressure, low intensity mercury vapor lamps connected in series. Gas chromatography was used to analyze the results. The results showed that the UV/TiO2 resulted in a removal of 99.28%. However, the RO performance was less impressive with a maximum separation of 813%. At 40 bar, a negative permeability was observed, as the concentration of benzene in the permeate was higher than the feed. This latter result shows that care has to be taken with hydrocarbons polluting the feed water to RO units, since in certain cases the product water will more polluted than the feed.