The Houston Chronicle
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Region faces challenge of meeting demand for water

By DAN FELDSTEIN
Copyright 2000 Houston Chronicle

Monday, August 14, 2000

Randy Goldman bought his home in Sugar Creek, an upscale subdivision in Fort Bend County, because of the water.

Not to drink. To look at. Oyster Creek flows serenely behind his back yard, perfect for gazing or even snagging a catfish.

Like most of his neighbors, Goldman had no idea the water belongs to someone more than 50 miles away. It starts in the nearby Brazos River, flows into a canal and ends up as tap water in Galveston County or refinery cooling water in Texas City.

Goldman's neighborhood, like virtually every other subdivision in Fort Bend County, gets its water from deep municipal wells, not a river. He's never thought twice about it.

He soon will. When the wells run dry, or when pending regulations force a drastic reduction in pumping, Fort Bend could get mighty thirsty.

"Water rights" are first-come, first-served in Texas. And the state has been handing out pieces of the Brazos for nearly a century -- long before anyone figured Fort Bend would be one of the hottest growth areas in the nation.

The river is booked solid.

There are similar stories all over the region. Conroe, for instance, cannot take water from Lake Conroe.

In north and west Harris County, subdivisions have only 28 months to say where they will get river water to replace well water. If they don't, homeowners could be penalized $200 to $300 per year.

The good news is that the Houston region, unlike other parts of Texas, probably will have enough water to meet its projected needs for the next half century.

The bad news is that connecting the supply to the customers will be expensive, controversial and sometimes even impossible.

"In theory, we have enough water. In reality, we don't," said Jeff Taylor, a Brown & Root Services consultant who is leading a regional water study.

Some holders of water rights will horde water, he said, and those who need it will confront a jigsaw puzzle of contracts and regulations. While water is most abundant on the east side of Houston, most of the population growth is on the west.

All the problems can be solved -- for a price. Water customers will pick up the tab, and they will find out why water has become "the new oil" of Texas.

Turn on the tap and there it is. Safe drinking water.

In the Houston region, it comes from the Brazos, Trinity or San Jacinto rivers or from the Gulf Coast Aquifer -- a massive, sandy formation hundreds of feet underground.

Once, all drinking water came from the aquifer. Its bounty enabled developers to build the Houston suburbs, as communities sank wells like so many straws in the ground.

Aquifer water usually requires no treatment other than a touch of chlorine to kill bacteria. Layers of clay and sand filter away Houston's industrial surface pollution.

Only about 12 percent of the rain that falls on Houston actually gets into the aquifer. The water drawn by most municipal wells -- 500 to 1,000 feet deep, sometimes more -- begins filtering down into the aquifer in Montgomery and Waller counties and even farther northwest. It moves southeast at about 12 inches a day.

"Five hundred years from Prairie View to Bellaire, I always say," said Branch McNeely, a Bellaire resident who has paid particular attention to that city's water issues.

The alternative to well water is surface river water, which is dirtier and more expensive. Sometimes reservoirs, such as lakes Conroe or Livingston, must be built to collect it. Then it has to be transported to population centers via canals and pipelines. And then it must be treated at plants that can cost tens of millions of dollars to construct.

The city of Houston estimates that its production costs are 34 percent higher for a gallon of drinkable surface water than a gallon of drinkable groundwater.

If the Gulf Coast Aquifer had an unlimited supply, no one would ever bother tapping surface sources. But it doesn't, which presents the two problems that drive Houston's water puzzle: Wells can fail, and the ground can subside, or sink.

When the aquifer is overpumped, the dropping water level can make shallower wells useless. It also can cause undrinkable saltwater to be sucked up from below the freshwater.

And it causes subsidence. Unlike the solid limestone aquifer beneath San Antonio and Austin, the Houston aquifer is a muck. When too much water is removed too quickly, the muck compacts -- and never springs back.

That drops whole neighborhoods, changes flooding patterns, cracks roads, stimulates geographic fault lines and opens the southern part of the Houston region to hurricane storm surges, according to the U.S. Geological Service.

In the '70s, subsidence was a household word. Parts of the Houston Ship Channel and Baytown had sunk up to 10 feet, threatening to submerge billion-dollar industrial investments. Most famously, the Brownwood subdivision in Baytown sank permanently into Galveston Bay.

The result was creation of the Harris-Galveston Coastal Subsidence District, authorized by the state to regulate groundwater use.

Rules adopted by the district's 19 board members, appointed by local governments, have already weaned Galveston County and southern Harris County from 80 percent of their groundwater use. Now northern and western Harris County must follow suit or face stiff penalties.

Fort Bend also has a subsidence district, and communities in the eastern part of the county can expect to see proposed regulations by the end of the year. They may call on cities and subdivisions to rely on wells for no more than 25 percent to 50 percent of their water.

Even Montgomery and Brazoria counties, though not subject to subsidence regulations, must begin thinking about surface water soon. Consultants predict population growth there simply will outstrip what the aquifer can provide.

Twenty years ago, 130,000 people lived in Fort Bend County. Today, there are 365,000. In 20 years, there will be 730,000. In the entire county, there is not a single surface water treatment plant.

Fort Bend is an excellent snapshot of just how complicated the water picture can get.

In the early part of the 20th century, canals were built to bring the local Brazos River water east to irrigate rice farms. They were then extended farther east to supply untreated water to industries in Brazoria and Galveston counties.

The BP Amoco complex in Texas City, which includes one of the nation's largest refineries, uses up to 28 million gallons of water daily for boilers, cooling and waste treatment, despite intensive on-site recycling.

That would satisfy the current household demand of roughly half of Fort Bend County, but the residents can't have the water. It belongs to the Gulf Coast Water Authority in Texas City, which long ago obtained a permanent "water right" from the state and sells it to BP Amoco and others.

Back in Fort Bend, however, experts say residents will be having a certain sinking feeling. In the heavily developed eastern areas, the county's elevation has dropped more than 4 feet in the last century and could drop 5 more in the next 30 years.

The aquifer's water level could drop as much as 200 feet.

Thinking ahead, the cities of Sugar Land, Missouri City and Stafford, along with Pearland in Brazoria County, have agreed to buy all the Brazos River water the Gulf Coast Water Authority can spare. Each of the three cities is paying from $68,000 to $135,000 per year simply for a right of first refusal on future use of the water.

It won't be enough. The options represent 55 million gallons a day, but Fort Bend County alone will need more than twice that in the year 2030 to supply its cities and suburbs.

The rest could be supplied by the state-chartered Brazos River Authority, which also has rights to huge volumes of water in the river and in a series of reservoirs. But the authority has fully committed its water to existing customers, and probably won't have enough even with a planned new reservoir in Austin County.

Tom Ray, Brazos River Authority deputy general manager, said some current users have tremendous surpluses and might be able to give some water back. They include Reliant Energy, the city of Waco and TXU, a Dallas-based utility.

But they all have plans and are not likely to be feeling charitable.

"We wouldn't part with any of our water," said Wiley Stem, Waco assistant city manager. "Our projections show we're going to need it ... in 50 to 100 years."

Fort Bend's problems might be solved if the Gulf Coast Water Authority built a 20-mile pipeline to its Texas City treatment plant from the nearest source of Trinity River water, instead of bringing water 75 snaking miles from the Brazos River.

That would allow Galveston-area clients to use Trinity water, and Fort Bend could take from the nearby Brazos. But Galveston users certainly would balk at paying millions of dollars for a new Trinity pipeline when they already have the Brazos canals and contracts in place.

Complicating things further, the Trinity River Authority, which has water to spare, is contractually barred from selling it in Galveston County.

When the city of Houston and the river authority jointly developed Lake Livingston on the Trinity, they signed a no-compete covenant, giving Houston any potential clients west of the river and the authority any to its east.

Thus, Houston would have to be the middleman for the Galveston area to buy any of the authority's excess Trinity water.

Something must give.

"According to our numbers," said Jim Adams, general manager of the San Jacinto River Authority, "Fort Bend County runs out of water in the next 20 years."

If you live in Chambers County, relax. Regional water planners calculate it has plenty of groundwater through the year 2050. Liberty and Waller counties are fine through 2030.

In Montgomery and Brazoria counties, there is no threat of regulatory sanctions. But that doesn't mean there will be enough groundwater to support growth. Planners predict both counties will face water shortages by 2010.

"A lot of folks' heads are still in the sand that they'll have enough," said Dean Towery, the city of Conroe's public works director.

Even though Conroe is on the shores of Lake Conroe, it takes not a drop of the water. Two-thirds is owned by Houston and a third by the San Jacinto River Authority. Like the rest of Montgomery County, Conroe consumes well water.

There's a possible solution, albeit convoluted.

The river authority could take water out of the Trinity and pump it into Luce Bayou for canal-style transport southeast to Lake Houston, which is normally supplied by the smaller San Jacinto River. Then, Lake Conroe would not be needed to back up and resupply Lake Houston for the city of Houston and, therefore, some Lake Conroe water could stay in Montgomery County.

To treat it, the river authority could build a treatment plant at Lake Conroe. Consumers would have to pay for the plant and the pipelines delivering the water.

In Brazoria County, industries and agriculture use huge amounts of river water. Dow Chemical's 75 plants use 148 million gallons per day.

But Alvin and other municipalities in the north and central part of the county primarily use groundwater and have few rights to the local river.

Like Fort Bend County, it's presumed that river water could become available if the Gulf Coast Water Authority built a pipeline to collect Trinity River water for its Galveston County clients, freeing up the Brazos for those closer to it.

Farther south in Brazoria County, the cities of the Brazosport area are in much better shape. Anticipating subsidence along with growth, they purchased spare Brazos River water rights from Dow and opened a treatment plant in 1989.

There are other ways to lower the region's reliance on groundwater. Two obvious ones are conservation and "reclamation," which means treating and reusing wastewater.

The city of Houston has never pressed too hard for water conservation, several local officials said privately, because it pays off its water system's bonded debt with the revenue from water bills. A drought can mean a big cash influx as people pour more water on their lawns.

In the long run, however, compared to building a new reservoir, it can cost half as much per saved gallon to use proven conservation techniques -- like auditing swimming pool leaks and cooling towers and educating the public how to save water.

The city could also try to reduce the 10 percent of treated water that leaks out of the system -- which is not considered a high number for a major system.

Under a state mandate, the city of Houston enacted a conservation plan in 1997. But it avoided measures that would have caused "customer acceptance" troubles, such as an ordinance that would require low-water landscaping for all new commercial and apartment developments.

Regional planners, however, are relying heavily on increased conservation and less waste in the future. Brown & Root's Taylor said the situation is so tight that residents might be asked to save 7 percent or more through conservation -- a number that's proved tough to achieve in other water-strapped regions.

Taylor is the lead consultant for a state-mandated water planning project for the Houston region. A 1997 law broke the state into 16 regions and requires each to produce a report outlining where they will get all the water they need.

Desalinization -- or removing salt from saltwater -- is being seriously considered by water planners elsewhere in Texas, but is still considered by the Houston group as too expensive. Reclaiming wastewater, however, will be getting major attention.

"I tell people that when they go through Dallas, flush twice so it'll fill Lake Livingston," said Charles Settle, Houston's assistant director of public utilities planning.

The joke is not inaccurate. Between 60 percent and 70 percent of water that enters any municipal system comes out again on the other end, the sewer drain, where it is cleaned up and dumped back in a bayou or river.

That means water from Dallas toilets is treated and dumped in the Trinity River, eventually making its way into Houston supplies. Technically, the river could be cut out of the equation, and wastewater could be cleaned sufficiently for immediate, local household reuse.

Water officials think residents here might not accept that, so they are concentrating on the increased use of treated waste effluent for industry and irrigation, such as golf courses.

The problem is the expense. Among other things, an entirely new pumping and pipeline system would be needed to distribute the treated wastewater separately from drinking water.

That's where Houston might be lucky. As it turns out, three city wastewater plants dump effluent in Buffalo and Sims bayous on the east side of Houston. And one of the world's largest concentrations of petrochemical plants extends east from Houston between the Houston Ship Channel and Texas 225.

A wastewater reclamation plant near the East Loop and Texas 225, possibly the world's largest, could have a huge industrial customer base with only one or two main transmission lines. It would supply more than 80 million gallons of water a day to the plants, which could then give up an equivalent amount of raw water for municipal use.

Wastewater reclamation does have a side effect -- it lowers the amount of water flowing downstream. If Dallas and Fort Worth recycle too much wastewater, it reduces the flow to the Trinity River. If Montgomery or northern Harris County decided to recycle to help meet their needs, it would cut the flow into the San Jacinto River, and thus Lake Houston.

Texans sometimes use their rivers and bayous like so many canals, simply to provide water.

But rivers are also a home for wildlife, a means of recreation, a flood-control instrument and a source of freshwater to the Gulf of Mexico.

"Water rights" in running rivers are parceled out by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, based on the historic flow after deducting the amount already apportioned to existing rights-holders.

An industrial or agricultural applicant can get a permit for an amount of which 75 percent would be available 75 percent of the time.

A municipality, however, can only get a permit for an amount that would be 100 percent available in the worst drought recorded on that river.

All of these calculations mean that in times of severe drought, a fully allotted river can nearly dry up from all the use.

But lack of sufficient flow into the Gulf of Mexico is a serious problem even in good years. It can hurt fishing and shrimping along the coast, and can cause saltwater to creep back up rivers and infiltrate municipal water systems.

To keep that from happening on the Trinity River, the Wallisville Salt Dam was opened last year near the river's mouth into Trinity Bay. The structure is only closed when the Trinity flow is very low, to partially block the river and prevent saltwater from flowing upstream.

State law requires environmental and recreational factors to be considered when water officials look for supplies. But it causes difficulties.

If Montgomery County wants to use Lake Conroe water, for instance, Houston and Harris County will need another source to refill Lake Houston.

That would be the Trinity River, using an artificially extended Luce Bayou to link it to Lake Houston. But that likely would include lining part of the bayou with concrete, which could run afoul of environmental regulations.

"OK," grumbled Adams, "you just stop water to the whole damn city."

The board of the Houston region water group has endorsed a handful of strategies to meet local water needs by the year 2050.

Conservation is critical, as are the use of Luce Bayou to get Trinity River water westward, a wastewater reclamation plant and an arrangement that lets Houston sell some Trinity River Authority water in Harris and Galveston counties.

Finally, it recommends a study of three new reservoirs. Allen's Creek, site of a canceled nuclear power plant that would have required cooling water, is well along in the permit process. But Little River Reservoir on the Brazos in Milam County and Bedias Reservoir on the Trinity in Madison County should also be pursued, the group said.

Bedias has potential environmental pitfalls and Little River has not been studied yet. The combined cost of the three is estimated at $644 million.

Dan Sallee, president of the Association of Water Board Directors-Texas, said there was probably one simple lesson that most residents needed to take out of the water puzzle:

"Our people need to be educated that their water bills are going to go up."