The clock is ticking on water in Texas.
Corpus Christi and its neighbors are facing an unprecedented water crisis right now, with its combined main sources for water down below the 10% mark, water restrictions in place, and the prospect of more serious curbs on water use. Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened to intervene with a state takeover if things get too critical.
The factors that have driven Corpus Christi to this crisis point are similar to those in many parts of the state: a rapidly growing population, huge growth in industrial demand, and a drought that has not let up.
In fact, demand for water has been growing at such a pace across Texas that four years ago, a State Water Plan for Texas was unveiled with a price tag of $80 billion, including 3,000 water management strategy projects designed to head off water shortages across Texas.
But there is a new draft of the State Water Plan for Texas, and the price tag has gone way, way up.
Megan Kimble, political economy reporter for the Houston Chronicle and the other Hearst News outlets in Texas, joined Texas Standard to discuss. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: So let’s talk about the damage here. How much is it projected to cost to save the state’s water infrastructure? What’s the new figure?
Megan Kimble: According to the draft state water plan released on Thursday, the new price tag for investing in Texas’s water security is $174 billion over the next 50 years.
Wow. Alright, well the previous price tag was $80 billion. What accounts for that huge increase?
A large part of that increase is simply inflation. It costs a lot more to build any kind of construction project now than it did five years ago.
There’s a backlog of projects that were approved in the last state water plan that haven’t been built for various reasons. And I think importantly, this new state water plant goes out to 2080 and that reflects the fact that, as water gets more and more scarce, it’s simply more expensive to access new sources of water.
Corpus Christi is a great example. Desalination is wildly expensive. As groundwater and surface water dries up, the cost of securing new water also goes up.
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There are certain private desalination plants that supply industry along the Gulf, but it’s my understanding that there is no municipal desalination project right now in Texas, and as you mentioned, there’s been this on-again, off-again talk about a desalination plant.
Are we talking about the prospect of having desalination plants up and down the Texas coast, or is that envisioned? Where are we gonna get the water from?
This new state water plan has 3,000 strategies similar to the last one. And so desalination actually still makes up a small percentage of the overall water supply in the future. It’s about 4% in this new state water plan, which is what it was five years ago.
The largest project in the plan, coming in at a price tag of about $10 billion, is a plan to pipe water from the Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Louisiana border to the Dallas-Fort Worth region.
So piping water from one area of the state that has a lot to another area that has less is one strategy. Pumping and treating brackish groundwater from across the state is one. strategy.
A huge part of the state water plan, though, is conservation — so using less water and then also reusing the water that we do use. So conservation and reuse together account for about 40% of the water supply strategies.
I gather that public comment is welcome on this draft plan. We’re just talking about a draft plan, but I guess I’m a little concerned about how much Texans are really plugged in to the water shortage in a larger sense, in a more general sense because there have been warnings about drought and the effect of a water shortage in Texas for as long as most Texans can remember.
And yet many Texans have not faced the sort of water shortage that, say, Corpus Christi is now facing, where you’re dealing with the potential of a catastrophe within months, you know, that sense of urgency.
How much do you believe that moving forward with some of these ideas is being held up by a sort of lack of momentum, a lack awareness, or Texans being plugged into just how critical the situation is?
Yeah, I mean, it depends on where you are in the state. I think in some areas people are very aware that it’s critical.
I think it’s important to note that this state water plan is basically a compendium of 16 regional water plans. So Texas’ water planning process is very much bottom-up. It starts in local regional water groups.
I think you’re right — a lot of Texans are not aware of the planning activities of their region in water group, for example, in Corpus Christi. And that’s where a lot of the kind of rubber meets the road on this planning process and getting involved early in the next round of planning is where a lot of these decisions will actually get made.
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Well, does this draft water plan lay out precise next steps for how to start to address this problem? Or is this, you know, I’m imagining, envisioning 16 sort of disparate ways to go with what needs to be a kind of coordinated effort.
Yeah, the purpose of this plan is really to give the Texas Water Development Board basically a list of projects that they can start to fund moving forward. So projects are not eligible for state funding until they appear in the state water plan.
And so now, you know, they’re all online and the interactive state water plan on the Texas water development board website. Those projects can now start to get state grants and state revolving loan funding.
So that’s basically the road map: Is like, what are we going to fund moving forward?
Where’s this money gonna come from?
Last session, the Legislature allocated $20 billion over the next 20 years to water projects, and a lot of experts are now saying that’s likely not enough.
