Texas Confronts Its Water Crisis

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Throughout history, access to clean drinking water has been a critical factor in choosing a location for human communities. A person can live for three minutes without air and three weeks without food, but only three days without water. Now people in Texas are waking up to the fact that water is a limited resource. They are also discovering that fracking — the process of torturing the Earth to get it to release natural resources such as oil and methane — is threatening the groundwater supplies that communities rely on for potable water. Particularly now that the American ayatollah has declared a fake energy emergency, damage to US aquifers will only increase.

Wars over water are already happening in the US, if not with actual armies then with armies of attorneys and lobbyists bent on ensuring a supply of water to those who can pay and denying it to others. Georgetown, Texas — the fastest growing city in the United States — knows it needs water in order to expand, but it does not have enough water to meet its goals. In 2023 it signed a contract with a for-profit company to import large volumes of water from the Simsboro Formation of the Carrizo Wilcox Aquifer, 80 miles to the east.

The only problem is that the cities of Bryan and College Station, along with Texas A & M University, rely on that water to support the needs of the 300,000 people in their communities. They have filed suit to stop the developer, Upwell Water of California, from fulfilling the contract. “We’re going to fight this thing until the end,” said Bobby Gutierrez, the mayor of Bryan. “It effectively drains the water source of the cities. That basically stops all the economic development we have. We’re talking about our survival,” Gutierrez said, according to a report by Inside Climate News.

The Upwell pump and pipeline initiative is just one of a half dozen similar projects recently completed, under construction, or proposed to bring rural Carrizo Wilcox aquifer water to the booming urban corridor that has grown up along Interstate 35 through Central Texas. When completed, it would pump up to 89 million gallons of groundwater per day. That is three times more than Bryan, College Station, and Texas A & M need for their own use.

The demand for water is rapidly outpacing the supply. The Texas legislature is attempting to address the issue by funding efforts to desalinate seawater, purify salty groundwater, and reclaim billions of gallons of effluent from fracking operations. Wastewater volumes in Permian Basin in Texas have increased in recent years to an astounding 25 million barrels per day, according to the Texas Produced Water Consortium. 25 million barrels translates to about a billion gallons a day. “It’s a lot of water. Instead of just throw it away, we could treat it and recover some,” Shane Walker, director of the Consortium at Texas Tech University told Inside Climate News.

The Filthiest Water On Earth

This is some seriously nasty stuff. Wastewater from fracking in the West Texas oilfields is the the filthiest fluid to ever be considered for treatment. It’s up to seven times as salty as seawater and is loaded with drilling chemicals and naturally occurring hydrocarbons, as well as ammonia and radioactive elements. It can’t be treated by the most common methods that use membrane filters, so using heat to purify that toxic stew is being actively considered. The technology is a known quantity but it will require enormous amounts of energy.

At current efficiency levels, treating all the effluent of the West Texas oilfield would require up to 26 gigawatts of power — more than the total generation capacity of most US states. Even if operators achieved their ambitious target efficiencies, the Permian would still need an additional five gigawatts, enough to power about five million average American homes. “It’s just more power needed when we’re already stressed,” said Doug Robison, a longtime fracking executive whose new company, Natura Resources, plans to use small nuclear reactors to treat the wastewater. “We need to add water back into the state’s supply.”

In January, the Consortium signed an agreement with Natura to develop a wastewater treatment facility powered by the heat of a next generation molten salt nuclear reactor. Natura is currently building its first unit at Abilene Christian University. The water may never be drinkable, but it could potentially be used in agriculture and in various industrial applications.  Current water treatment pilot projects in the Permian Basin are targeting energy costs between 5 and 25 kilowatt-hours per barrel of wastewater treated. In comparison, it takes 1.3 kilowatt-hours per barrel to desalinate seawater and 0.3 kilowatt-hours per barrel to treat municipal wastewater, according to Mike Hightower, director of the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium. “It’s expensive from an energy perspective; you need a lot of energy to treat this water. People need to think about costs and benefits rather than just cost.”

The Earth As A Toilet

Actually, Mike, people need to think about creating a sustainable society first and foremost. They need to think about not using the Earth as a communal toilet too, and taking advantage of clean energy technologies like wind, solar, and battery storage. Those may not be pollution-free, but they don’t create a billion gallons a day of liquid crud every day either. Elon Musk thinks people who care for the environment suffer from a “woke mind virus” but perhaps they simply don’t believe destroying the environment for the convenience of humans makes a whole lot of sense. That is especially true when there are perfectly good alternatives.

Texas law offers limited clarity, generally preferring a landowner’s right to pump their own groundwater over regulations on private property. But what Upwell is doing is a far cry from the 200-foot deep well with a 2-inch pipe a farmer might install for irrigation needs. Upwell is drilling down 1,200 feet or more and using up to 40 pipes that are two feet in diameter to get the volume of water it needs.

Despite fierce denunciations of the Upwell project from nearby city leaders, no one has alleged that its developers have broken any laws. “We’re following the rules. Why are we being vilified?” said David Lynch, a managing partner at Core Capital, an investment firm in Houston that is a partner in the Upwell project. “I think they feel uncomfortable about what’s coming and their reaction is to make us go away. People are starting to pay enough for water to make these sorts of projects work. There’s no cheap water left in Texas,” he said.

And there it is, right out front where everyone can see it. Profits. No power on Earth can hold back an idea that rewards investors for monetizing scarce resources. Preserving shareholder value, after all, is the highest expression of human existence and nothing must be allowed to interfere with the full and robust application of that principle. Readers who have seen the movie Total Recall have some idea where greed the quest for profits leads. The mayor of Bryan, Texas, says,  “They want to exploit everything we have for their personal benefit. It’s a race of who can take the most amount of water in the least amount of time to deplete a resource for their pocketbooks.”

Texas is hardly alone in its quest for more sources of potable water. A year ago we reported on efforts by communities near Phoenix, Arizona, to obtain water from other parts of the state, including a scheme to buy up farmland solely for the purposes of extracting the water beneath it and selling it to communities far away. The fight of the dwindling supply of water in the Colorado River is just getting started. Through it all, people ignore the fact that aquifers may take hundreds of years to replenish themselves. Humans cannot seem to stop themselves from pursuing short term gains despite long term harm to the environment. It is our biggest flaw and may ultimately lead to our undoing.