Water Runs Away

That ground under your feet may seem pretty solid, but if you're in West Texas, it may already have been taken out from under them. T. Boone Pickens has been planning something. It involves the Ogallala Aquifer, which still has no regulations concerning the use of its water in the state of Texas. By "capture rights" anyone with rights to the water can take as much as she/he likes.

Water shortages have been coming for a long time as development in N.Texas exceeds the rate of anywhere else in the country. Boone Pickens has been watching, and thinking about the money to be made.

Representatives of the oil and investment tycoon last month sent letters to about 1,100 landowners along a proposed 250-mile path through 11 Panhandle and Central Texas counties to tell them their "property may be affected" in obtaining rights of way for construction of an underground pipeline and aboveground electrical transmission lines, the letter stated.

The two delivery systems will allow Pickens to transport water from the Ogallala Aquifer — though he has no buyer yet — and deliver wind energy to "customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and potentially elsewhere," the letter states.

Hardeman County landowner Kenneth Horton called Pickens — once was known as a corporate raider for takeovers of oil companies in the 1980s — a "natural resources raider."
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"The state of Texas has for over 100 years authorized the use of eminent domain to permit the common necessities of life, water, electricity, telephone service, oil and gas for use in the big cities," said Humble, Pickens' attorney.

Until last year, though, the wind project couldn't not have been included in the process of obtaining rights of way.

Lawmakers in the last legislative session voted to allow renewable and clean-coal energy projects to piggyback obtaining rights of way with a district like the one Pickens formed last year to "construct, maintain, and operate transmission lines."

The locals aren't lying down and letting Pickens' Mesa Company pipe their water off to the big city, it seems.

Mesa Water's promise to sue a local water district didn't stop that group's leaders from voting to set different goals for different people.

The North Plains Groundwater Conservation District's board voted unanimously Tuesday to set a goal of having 60 percent of existing water in the Ogallala Aquifer in its eastern counties in 50 years and 40 percent of existing water in its western counties.

"The western counties would be taking water at the expense of the eastern counties," said Steve Stevens, a Mesa representative. "We don't care how much pumping is allowed, if it's one acre-foot or two acre-feet, as long as everybody is treated equally."

An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons.

The district's goal is to retain an average of 50 percent of existing water in 20 years across the district. It set the 60 percent goal for its territory in Hansford, Hutchinson, Lipscomb and Ochiltree counties. The 40 percent goal covers Dallam, Hartley, Moore and Sherman counties where irrigation is a heavy.
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The different goals were part of the district's new management plan. The board will pass rules to achieve that plan at a later date.

The world is becoming a little more attuned to the use of its resources. While the local farmers may be in for a battle, it would seem unlikely that anyone could deprive the whole area around them of the water necessary for their livelihoods.

In Saudi Arabia, aquifers are being saved by stopping local wheat growing. With vast amounts of profit from oil production, the country has gone to buying from abroad to meet the needs for wheat, reserving water for other uses. It may be time to take a hard look at what needs are primary, as the water runs out in the plains states.

This will not be the first time the plains have had a water crisis. There was once a Dust Bowl there. That's when the Ogallala first was tapped, so that those plains states became the breadbasket of the world. Most of the states that depend on it legislated controls so that it couldn't be stripped away. In Texas, that never happened. In Texas, a battle is brewing over rights to resources that are vital to life, not just to an investor.