History Lesson 
Boone Pickens Wants To Sell You His Water
And you’re going to need it, eventually, since Texas’ most precious natural resource is being depleted at an alarming rate. His plan is to pump vast amounts from his land in the Panhandle and pipe it to parched cities like El Paso and San Antonio—for a hefty price, of course. But other powerful interests have the same idea. Let the battle begin.
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“That’s about four hundred thousand acres in water rights that could be exported from Roberts County,” says Roberts County judge Vernon Cook. “Under current law, you can export one acre-foot per year for every acre of land you own. [An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land to the depth of one foot—326,000 gallons.] If all those acres are worked, in fifty years they will have pumped twenty-one million acre-feet of water. Roberts County has a total of twenty-seven million acre-feet of inventory. I’m not a rocket scientist, but that’s not fifty percent of what’s in reserve.” And these groups are not the only ones in a rush to move water out of Roberts County. “I’ve got landowners standing in line wanting to sell their water too,” Judge Cook says.
What scares Cook most are the entrepreneurs like his old acquaintance Boone Pickens. “I used to be in the oil and gas business,” he says. “I know the oil and gas mentality. And that scares the phooey out of me. With the Canadian River Authority group, it’s in their best interest to conserve resources. The same with the City of Amarillo, which says they won’t tap into their supply for at least twenty-five years. My concern is the oil and gas mentality applied to water—pump it as quick as they can get it, make their money, and go away. I’m concerned about that kind of attitude on a finite resource, especially the Ogallala. When it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s no alternative.”
There are plenty of people who believe that, given the chance, Panhandle residents will pump their wells dry by choice, in part because they know irrigation farming there can’t last forever. They need only look at what happened in counties like Dallam, Carson, and Hartley to see that it’s true. “In a lot of rural areas, the best hope is to put that water asset together, harvest it, and ship it off,” says C. E. Williams, the district manager of the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District. “If the infrastructure was in place, we’d turn the Panhandle from ag production to water supply for the whole state, with a common-carrier pipeline involved. Landowners would get a higher value and a higher price [for water] than other commodities.” As Williams sees it, water mining is a last chance to pull value out of the land, a found opportunity. At least this way, the land will provide a livelihood for another generation or two, a much brighter scenario than what faces the rest of the Panhandle. But there’s another even more ominous implication from the drawdown—the Canadian River going dry, since a major source is the Ogallala Aquifer. And if that happens, Texas would face a federal intervention because the state would not only be harming a threatened species of minnow but also violating the Canadian River Compact, which mandates a certain river flow downstream into Oklahoma and Arkansas.
The inability to see more than fifty years beyond the horizon is practically a regional trait. The Ogallala has provided sustenance since the arrival of agrarian society in the late nineteenth century. The introduction of the right-angle pump in the fifties turned the plains green and productive. But by the seventies, portions of the aquifer began to run low. Extraction of water from the Ogallala has been so profound that parts of the vast reservoir beneath Texas have lost more than 50 percent of their capacity over the past half-century—enough that farming in some areas is no longer economically viable. Once the “good” Ogallala water is gone (the bottom water is brackish), it’s dryland farming or nothing. Boone Pickens is just following local tradition.
But first he needs to find a buyer for his water. Right now, none of the three pipeline destinations sketched into Mesa Water, Incorporated’s PowerPoint presentation are in dire need. The Metroplex has abundant surface-water supplies; San Antonio just wrapped up long-term deals with the Lower Colorado River Authority, the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, and Alcoa to buy water; and the $1,775-per-acre-foot estimated tab to deliver Roberts County water to El Paso makes desalinating brackish freshwater from the bottom of the local aquifer cost-effective.
Still, since it’s Pickens who’s talking, you can’t help but believe that somehow, some way, he’s going to make some money out of this, even if he’s already invested a couple million. In the meantime he makes a first-class poster boy. Back at Love Field after a day at the ranch, Pickens graciously offers to sign a copy of his book Boone In front of his signature, he writes, “Call me if you know someone who wants to buy some water.”
Tom beard, a rancher and an attorney from Alpine, isn’t sure jumping on the phone to Pickens is such a good idea just yet. “Mr. Pickens’ proposal is predicated on the assumptions that water mining is okay, with some limitations, and that water is a commodity like any other,” Beard says, standing beside a running spring hidden in the folds of a barren slope in the Barrillas Mountains. “There are many people involved with water in Texas—so-called environmental types, landowners, water district folks, a mixed bag—who are adamantly against both assumptions.”
Beard is the chair of the Far West Texas Water Planning Group and an advocate for rural interests in a region that makes Roberts County look like a wetland. He has the physique of a bantam rooster and the disposition to go with it. Beard used to be a staunch proponent of the rule of capture. “Ten years ago, we’d of had a fight right here if you argued it with me,” he says. The long dry spell and cities going dry two hundred miles away have changed his way of thinking.
In March 2000 he wrote an editorial in Livestock Weekly calling for dramatic changes to the rule of capture. Considering the publication’s readership, it was akin to a declaration of war. “Rural Texas and agriculture have two problems,” Beard wrote. “The first is that we cannot compete with Big City (or any other Big Pump) and will lose our water—literally. The second is that we will lose our water rights if we force the State of Texas to start regulating water because we insist on defending the Rule of Capture to the death. I do not want somebody to take my water, and I do not want somebody to take my water rights.”
Beard’s solution is a system of “correlative rights,” in which property owners may pump groundwater but only as long as it doesn’t unfairly impair their neighbor’s ability to pump water. He proposes to use sophisticated hydrologic science to settle disputes and establish pumping rates. “Agriculture and rural Texas have been the defenders of the rule of capture,” he says. “If we modify the rule slightly, we can keep it. And we can keep the State of Texas out of our business and off of our property.”
But to do that, Beard and other West Texas residents are going to have to reckon with the apparently bottomless thirst of El Paso, 220 miles to the west, a city that is forever short of water. From the office of Ed Archuleta, the general manager of Water Utilities for the City of El Paso, it is possible to see just how bad things have gotten. Archuleta has the daunting task of finding 130,000 acre-feet of water a year for this city of 750,000 in the heart of the Chihuahuan Desert, where the average annual rainfall is eight inches. The Rio Grande is largely spoken for by farmers, and the city’s primary source of drinking water, the Hueco Bolson, is expected to run out of good water within twenty years at the current rate of withdrawal. Unlike aquifers, which are recharged by rains soaking into the soil, bolsons are closed, finite underground pools. Worse, the shallower portion of Hueco Bolson that extends beneath Ciudad Juárez—that city’s sole source of water—is expected to go dry within four years. Juárez, which only began to put together a master plan earlier this year, is ill-equipped to cope with the looming crisis. Like it or not, that’s El Paso’s problem too. It’s hard to ignore that many thirsty people on the other side of the ditch. “We have to practice total water management,” Archuleta says. “We’re never going to have a lake or an iceberg to provide for our needs.”
The future of water in the half of Texas west of Interstate 35 is on view in El Paso today. Watering restrictions are permanent, in force year-round. Water audits are free to any resident who wants one. You can’t water your lawn in El Paso between ten in the morning and six in the evening from April to September. Customers such as the University of Texas at El Paso who use more than one million gallons per day are required to have a conservation plan approved by the Water Utilities board. Two hundred thousand low-volume showerheads have been given away. Residents receive $300 rebates for switching from evaporative coolers (a.k.a. swamp boxes, which use water) to more efficient refrigerated air conditioning.
Until his recent transfer to another city department, Tim Grabe was one of El Paso’s two full-time water cops. He and four temporary workers handled calls and e-mails reporting water abuse. They prowled the streets, looking for streams and trickles in the gutters where they shouldn’t be, taking photographs and videos to document the waste, and issuing citations for class C misdemeanors with fines ranging from $50 to $500 to offending parties. Together they issued 10 to 30 warnings and tickets a day, depending on the time of year. They handed out 5,000 citations last year, up from 1,500 the year before. Most were for water discharged onto public rights-of-way.
On one run up Ryan’s Crossing with him, one of the more affluent-looking residential streets on the west side of the Franklin Mountains, he pointed out a typical problem. “This subdivision was designed years before water conservation was implemented in 1991,” Grabe says. He noted a preponderance of turf grass, officially discouraged by the city. “Fescue requires watering year-round, and during the summer, a lot of water. The problem here is with the sprinklers. The water is coming out of the head rather than going into the soil.”
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