A projection for when Corpus Christi expects to reach a water crisis was pushed back by three months after a wet April brought enough rain to delay an emergency but too little to quench a brutal drought.
The city was initially bracing for a Level 1 emergency — the point when water demand is projected to be six months from exceeding supplies — to hit by September.
Rain that the community has long prayed for fell last month, delaying the Level 1 projection to December and buying the city a few more months to plan for the expected emergency.
Still, the delay provided “some very encouraging news,” Nick Winkelmann, chief operating officer of Corpus Christ’s water department, told the City Council on Tuesday.
The new projection came largely because Lake Texana, one of three reservoirs the city depends on, jumped from 55% capacity last month to 76%. The two other reservoirs the city depends on have shrunk to historic lows: Lake Corpus Christi is a little above 10% capacity, and Choke Canon is at 7% capacity.
Winkelmann added that “there is a beneficial forecast this week, so we need to remember that these numbers do not include any future rain.”
For months, the city has been scraping by with a patchwork of temporary solutions — including more than a dozen recently drilled wells — to supply enough water for its 318,000 residents, businesses and a robust petrochemical corridor, plus another 200,000 residents served in a seven-county area.
Industrial demand accounts for around 60% of Corpus Christi’s water demand.
City leaders have been discussing an emergency curtailment plan for months, and the City Council is set to vote on a final plan at its June 2 meeting. The water department proposes requiring customers — ranging from residents to oil refineries — to cut water use by 25% during a Level 1 emergency.
See here and here for some background. It seems obvious to me that Corpus ought to demand more cutbacks from its biggest users, the industrial ones, but that may not be legally possible, and it may very well not be politically possible. So I guess we’ll just have to hope this makes a difference. Whether it will be enough to allow the more long-term options to become viable, who knows. It’s not like there are a lot of great alternatives.
But hey, the rain! It’s helping! This calls for a song.
That was a hell of a show, wasn’t it? Anyway, now I’m going to bring you all back down.
Corpus Christi is the canary in our coal mine. The city’s surface water supplies are running low, new groundwater wells have disappointed, and citizens can’t afford to make seawater drinkable.
In the City Council’s drive to attract industry and bring in new jobs and revenue, it stretched the water supply too thin. Now that the inevitable drought has arrived, the council will likely declare an emergency and impose strict rationing.
Experts told the Senate committee on May 11 that while 57% of city-owned water utilities say they have long-term plans with sufficient funding, 10% have no plan, and 43% do not have enough money.
This year was the first time the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas fell short, capable of providing only $1.28 billion of the $4.2 billion that water utilities requested. The Legislature created the fund 11 years ago to help local authorities pay for water projects.
The Texas Water Development Board, which administers the fund, rejected the Nueces River Authority’s request for help financing a Corpus Christi desalination plant, claiming it had to prioritize other projects.
Statewide, Texas doesn’t know where it will find 10 million to 12 million acre-feet of the 17 million the state will need over the next 50 years, [State Sen. Charles] Perry warned (an acre-foot is about 325,000 gallons). Making existing water treatment plants and pipelines more efficient will only meet 3% of the need.
“If I have to pick between spending all of my dollars on leaky pipes or all my dollars on supply, I will pick supply every day,” Perry said.
Water users will need a lot of dollars.
Producing drinking water from ground or surface sources typically costs between $1.10 to $4.30 per 1,000 gallons, according to the Texas Comptroller’s Office. Desalination costs range from $7.50 to $11 per 1,000 gallons.
“Everyone in the audience is going to say, ‘That’s too much, that’s double what we’re paying,’” Perry said. “But that’s the cost of new water in Texas … we have run out of the cheap water.”
[…]
Critics question the wisdom of trying to grow Texas beyond what its natural resources can sustain. Community activists want to prioritize residents’ quality of life over industrial development, and environmentalists want conservation over development.
Sid Miller, the Republican agriculture commissioner, called for a moratorium on data centers to conserve water.
“They draw massive volumes of water for cooling, even amid ongoing drought,” Miller wrote in a press release on Monday. “Rural communities that have conserved resources for generations now compete with corporate giants.”
Yes, even idiots like Sid Miller see the need to maybe dial back a bit on the demand side of things. That contrasts him with our idiot Governor. Please, you two, have a nice big fight over that.
Anyway, because I’m still pondering about it and have no other good place to include it, there’s also this.
Underneath the Permian Basin, the state’s largest oil field, lies an ocean of toxic, unusable wastewater that bursts out of rock formations when oil companies extract fossil fuels from the ground. For years, companies have struggled with how to dispose of it.
Now, many are turning to an ubiquitous, albeit controversial, technology to solve the problem — artificial intelligence.
In the race to keep up with skyrocketing demand for crude, oil and gas companies are increasingly turning to AI to gain an edge over their competition.
AI, experts and analysts said, is reshaping how oil companies handle the saltwater slush, also known as produced water, by giving operators more information about the region’s geography. It’s also providing access to data more quickly and allowing operators to file permits faster.
Despite its growing use in the industry, few details are available to the public — or to the industry’s regulatory agency.
“It’s a competitive advantage,” said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston. “That’s the reason why nobody’s really talking about it.”
The Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas, said in a statement that it is not aware of any use of AI by oil and gas companies.
There’s more, so read the rest. The idea is that the use of AI will make it easier to get at the oil, I guess. While using even more water for the AI. Yeah, I know. I’m pretty sure solar and wind use a lot less water on all ends of this, but, well, don’t get me started on that. Anyway, this story reminded me of this. It’s not clear that the two are related, but it’s not clear that they’re not, and that’s where my mind went.