A Charred Life 
The Last Drop
The good news is that Texas has an incredibly detailed plan for how to deal with the looming shortfalls in every one of its major urban areas. The bad news is that you can’t drink a plan.
(Page 4 of 4)
That may sound a bit rarefied, the sort of experimental technology found only at research facilities, but exactly this kind of reuse accounts for an enormous amount of the water intended to save the Metroplex. It will come in the form of two projects. This year North Texas Municipal will complete a $250 million, 1,840-acre wetland on the east fork of the Trinity River, just east of the city of Dallas. The low-quality, sediment-filled water, mostly effluent and urban runoff, will be pumped into one side of the wetland; seven days later it will emerge on the other side, cleaner than the water in most reservoirs. This project is critical to the water supply of those same suburbs that were stricken by the 2005¬2006 drought and will help to ensure that a similar near-catastrophe does not take place again. The East Fork Raw Water Supply Project will generate 102,000 acre-feet of water per year, approximately the equivalent of one major reservoir.
A win-win situation, right? Not exactly. Even with such benign, natural technologies there is controversy. Farther down on the Trinity, the Tarrant Regional Water District has built an even bigger wetland, one that will produce 188,000 acre-feet per year. But in order to get rights to that water, the utility had to endure eight years of tough negotiations with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Texas Parks and Wildlife, the cities of Houston and Dallas, and various Galveston Bay organizations. Why? Because by reusing Region C’s effluent, Tarrant Regional would effectively be siphoning off water that would normally flow downstream in the Trinity to Houston and the Gulf. Houston depends on the Trinity for almost all of its surface water. (Which, by the way, means that on any given summer day some 95 percent of the water filling Houston’s two main reservoirs is effluent from Dallas and Fort Worth. Yes, that’s what I said: The toilets of Dallas supply the faucets and drinking fountains of Houston.)
“Reuse can add tremendously to the water supplies of Fort Worth and Dallas,” says Ronald Kaiser, a professor of water law and policy and the chair of the Texas A&M Graduate Water Degree Program. “But there are real limits to what they can do. If they reused all of their water, for example, several things would happen. The ecology of the Trinity would change dramatically. The river would run dry. But the big impact would be that Houston would come unglued because they have come to rely on those base flows.” Reuse—that great idea—will likely occasion major battles between Dallas and Houston in the coming years as these two thirsty populations compete for the dregs of the Trinity basin.
So if Region C doesn’t get its water from pipelines to East Texas, strict conservation, or reuse, where will it get its water? T. Boone Pickens thinks the answer to this question could be worth a lot of money. Never one to let an opportunity pass by, Pickens has come up with a scheme to pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer and sell it to the big suppliers in Region C. The Ogallala is pumped on a massive scale, irrigating corn, cotton, wheat, and sorghum crops in the areas around Lubbock and Amarillo and accounting for about 40 percent of all the water used in the state of Texas. Of course, it is being slowly depleted and sometime in the next century will run completely dry. But in the meantime, Pickens has been buying up groundwater rights in the area. His idea is to get one or more of the Metroplex’s three big suppliers to finance the building of a pipeline for about $2 billion; once the pipes are up and running, he’ll sell Region C the water in them.
This may sound like a perfect, if somewhat ecologically irresponsible, match of supply and demand, but in fact Pickens’s water is extremely expensive compared with the alternatives. According to a recent engineering study, his water would cost some $2.60 per thousand gallons, more than three times what it would cost to get water from the new reservoir on lower Bois d’Arc Creek (one of the four East Texas reservoirs proposed for Region C). Pickens’ scheme also costs more than piping water in from Toledo Bend. According to the main suppliers, there are only two sources of water more expensive than Pickens’s—a large aquifer that stretches south and east of Dallas, called the Carrizo-Wilcox, and the Gulf of Mexico (though, due to its prohibitive cost, desalinated Gulf water is not yet in the picture).
But Pickens persists. His project relies on the near absence of state regulation of groundwater. This circumstance may be short-lived—most water experts expect more-stringent state groundwater regulation in the next 25 years—but for now groundwater from either Pickens or the Carrizo-Wilcox remains on the table for all three water suppliers.
“Boone’s thing is certainly feasible,” says Jim Oliver, the general manager of the Tarrant Regional Water District. “Water from the Carrizo-Wilcox is also feasible. But their markup is incredible, and they want a whole lot more money than what we can build other reservoirs for. Boone is revising his model. But he is just going to have to get real.”
In the midst of all this uncertainty about the future of the region’s water supply lies a single, tantalizing possibility. A solution so complete, a water supply so prodigious that it could take Region C through the next two centuries and actually remove the need for East Texas reservoirs like Marvin Nichols and Fastrill. From an engineering and cost perspective, it is astoundingly simple and cheap. The project was not included in the plan because of its extraordinary political sensitivity, which you will understand immediately when you learn the source of this gigantic volume of water: Oklahoma.
This is not a new idea. Oklahoma, particularly its eastern half, is swimming in rainwater, more water than its population of 3.6 million people (a little more than half that of the Metroplex) could ever imagine needing or using. In the eighties, the City of Dallas was behind a bill in the Oklahoma legislature that would have allowed Texas access to water from Oklahoma reservoirs. It failed, as did a similar attempt in 2000 by an alliance of suppliers and cities led by North Texas Municipal. Both efforts were met with heavy political opposition: “The Texans are coming to steal our water” and so forth. Oklahomans were so upset that they slapped a moratorium on all out-of-state water transfers.
Then the folks at Tarrant Regional came up with a solution. What if, instead of sticking Texas straws into Oklahoma reservoirs, they took the water after it left those reservoirs but before it hit the Red River (which is so salty it needs treatment)? Water, in other words, that Oklahoma does not use, water that normally flows into the Red River and then down through Louisiana, which has more water than it knows what to do with, and finally out into the Gulf of Mexico. There are 8 million acre-feet of such water, more than four times what Region C will need fifty years from now and nearly the total shortfall for the entire state of Texas in 2060. Tarrant Regional’s proposal is to take roughly 4 percent of this water from three pipeline access points: Cache Creek and Beaver Creek, in the western part of the state, and the Kiamichi River, in the east. They are willing to pay for it, and they agree that they would never have any rights to water in the reservoir itself. (The water would be shared by the three big suppliers.)
But a large number of Oklahomans still hate the idea of Texans sniffing around their water, fearing that this would be the first step in a larger assault on their drinking and sporting supplies. Tarrant Regional has sued Oklahoma in federal court, saying that the moratorium is unconstitutional. If it wins that case, it would then be allowed to apply for permits. If it gets such permits, it would probably not have to pay for the water, which is why the Oklahoma legislature is already playing a high-risk game. Like everything else in the water business, this will likely take years to negotiate and settle and then many more years before the pipelines are completed.
The Texas Water Development Board’s 2007 plan offers an implicit warning to the people of Region C: Implement the four proposed strategies (new reservoirs, new pipelines, reuse, and conservation) or your farms will die, your businesses will go bankrupt, and your cities will dry up. But as we’ve seen, executing even just one of these strategies can be demonically complex. Water politics are by nature deeply adversarial. There are literally thousands of competing interests. It is almost impossible to put forward a plan of any kind that does not cause harm to someone, somewhere. The issue is a sort of paradise for lawyers. Programs like “interbasin transfer” promise hellish, multiyear court battles. The environmentalists and “NIMBYists” who have tried to stop Fastrill and Marvin Nichols are merely previews of the future conflicts that will rage in Texas.
These conflicts will pit vote-rich cities against rural areas, farmers against suburbs and exurbs, Dallas against Houston, the Metroplex against landowners in the Panhandle, environmentalists against business and residential water users, Texas against Oklahoma and Louisiana, and Texas against federal and local governments. And when all the smoke has cleared, there is no guarantee that anyone will have been able to avert that hypothetical water catastrophe of September 15, 2035. It is entirely possible that the state that knows everything about its water problems may be powerless to solve them.
My Library
