Below is a HillCo client report spotlight of the TAMEST 2014 Texas Water Summit:
Presentations when available will be posted on www.tamest.org
Bradfield Lyon, Research Scientist with IRI

  • John Nielsen-Gammon, State Climatologists, while introducing Lyon stated that North of Midland and West of Wichita Falls area is the driest in 43 months for that region
  • Multi year drought is favorable – due to cooler temperatures in the Pacific and warner temperatures in the Atlantic
  • There is a lot of variability when analyzing patterns to predict drought
  • Many models are used and there is a lot of uncertainty
  • “By itself climate change is pushing towards increase water stress”

 
Carlos Rubinstein, Chairman of the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB)

  • SJR 1 and HB 1025 from the 83rd R is self-implementing
  • TWDB is focusing on HB 4 rule making
  •  The target is to have SWIFT rules finalized by December 18 well ahead of bill language
  • In order to apply for SWIFT funding, the project will need to be in the State Water Plan
  • SWIFT financing – stronger rated borrowers strengthens the rating
  • GO programs – lower rated agencies
  • Doug Shaw – has traveled over >3,000 miles as TWDB’s first Agricultural and Rural Texas Ombudsman

Elizabeth Fazio, Committee Director for House Committee on Natural Resources

  • Highlighted legislation – HB 4
  • Noted the legislation creates incentives
  • Lower interest rates – up to 50% off market rate
  • Longer repayment terms – 30 yr loans
  • Incremental repayment/repurchase terms
  • Deferred Repayment Terms – debt service coverage
  • Restated something she has heard the TWBD state in regards to a critical factor in funding being a commitment to closing factor – that they are ready to go on the project

Ari Michelsen, Texas A&M AgriLife Research

  • Noted the drought has cost $21b in the last 15 years
  • Conservation efforts are very effective
  • The “Drought Watch on the Rio Grande” is an update provided by AgriLife and has been effective in assisting with conservation

Shelia Olmstead, LBJ School of Public Affairs

  • Water pricing – prices should be signal of resource scarcity and value in use
  • Water demand does respond to price changes
    • Residential – a 10% increase in price reduces demand by 3-4% in the short run
    • Industrial – a 10% increase in price reduces demand by 1-8% in the short run
  • Agriculture paying a small fraction of the market is something seen across the world

Keith Phillips, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

  • Water prices are generally based on cost of treatment and delivery
  • Marker principles would allocate water more efficiently
  • Markets work best with lots of buyer and sellers
  • Thinks it’s important to have a fixed amount of water to property rights
  • GCD’s still on shaky legal ground as long as rule of capture is still around
  • Recommendations included: eliminate junior rights rule on interbasin transfers and strengthen role of GCD – assign private property rights
  • Reasons to be optimistic include: more water planners, farmers, and cities are realizing that market principles are part of the solution 

Jay Bragg, Texas Farm Bureau jbragg@txfb.org

  • Irrigation overview provided
  • Benefits of irrigation include double or triple crop yields and adds $4.7b to Texas economy
  • 2011 was worst 12 month drought on record and not getting better and it is not an isolated problem
  • Depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer projected losses approx 1.5m of acres feet and will worsen
  • Texas population is growing – adding over 20 million more people
  • Food production must increase by more than 50% to meet global demands
  • Just enough food is not enough
  • Btw 1997 and 2007 Texas lost 1.5 million acres of prime farmland
  • In long term need to maintain or increase total number of irrigated acres but reduce per acre water usage
  • Adopt practical technologies
  • Plan for new and/or alternative supplies where available
  • TWRI, Status and Trend of Irrigated Agriculture in Texas map shown

Wayne Halbert, Harlingen Irrigation District

  • In last year of a ten year demonstration project
  • System components design and built with off the shelf low cost and available on website
  • Adopted by LCRA and El Paso Irrigation District  
  • Optimized systems mean farmers can do more with less
  • Surge valve cooperative now offered – water saving tool at highly reduced cost and now several taking advantage of this program
  • Also built a water/meter calibration facility

Charles West, Texas Alliance for Water Conservation

  • Needs are going up while supply of irrigation water is going down
  • Several tools available on website
    • Resource allocation analyzer – producer could match the crop to amount of water available
    • Irrigation schedule – in season decisions allow water use to be tracked day by day or week by week
  • Will be expanding demonstration sites – field testing of emerging technologies
  • Identified challenges/barriers that limit widespread adoption
    • Most influential factor for producer change in production practices is other farmers
    • New technologies are complex and expensive
    • Crop consultants becoming more important in data acquisition, management and advising
  • Moving to phase 2 which includes among other things: enhance online tools, conduct intensive workshops for crop consultants, demonstrate how TAWC can be a model for use

Stephan Maas, Texas A&M AgriLife Research

  • New irrigation scheduling tools – want to develop tools in order to maximize adoption of the tools (Such as cost reduction, etc)
  • Standard Crop Coefficient Method can’t tell you how much water the crop in a particular field is using
  • To get around that method – spectral crop coefficient approach (main difference is equivalent to ground cover of crop which can be measured from satellite imagery)
  • Summary – thanks to satellite remote sensing data there will be new irrigations scheduling tools for managing crops with little or no cost to the user which will hopefully enhance adoption of irrigation tools

Questions to the panel on agricultural use

  • Rep. Doug Miller asked if previous efforts have been paid for by others; had there been any investment from municipalities or public sector providers to help support studies or put some of the technological measures discussed in place  – no case of municipalities and one GCD known of, but panel would welcome more support/investment of funds

Laura Huffman, The Nature Conservancy

  • Creative solutions are needed and thinking must go beyond borders
  • Hydrology of the Highland Lakes – LCRA story is that inflows are happening at an all time low and fundamental hydrology becomes compromised
  • Primary action needs to be conservation but it will not address all water needs, infrastructure will have to be part of the solution
  • Thinks it would be more useful if more did the SAWS public procurement process for future water needs because the discussion needs to be public
  • It was also noted that groundwater can be overused – Houston was offered as example

Bill Hoffman, Water Management Inc.

  • Says water stresses have to do with infrastructure  – not a supply issue but infrastructure issue
  • Gallons per flush takes 4.9 cents for each flush but in approx. 20 years approx. 15.4 cents per flush
  • Points out the draft water plan says we do not have enough water
  • Biggest use of non-agricultural water use in Texas is industrial commercial use – ICI 55%
  • Points out cooling tower use – as huge amount of water in ICI sector is for cooling
  • Money is saved on energy with cooling tower
    • Research is needed in this area
    • Huge amount of technology available
  • Texas has several initiatives such as financial incentives, etc
  • Onsite reuse and sources are the next big push

JP Nicot, Research Scientist

  • Shows map of fracking wells and fracking water use
  • In 2011 they used 81.5 kAF and now the 2013 estimate is over 100kAF but that 2013 is not public information or readily available yet
  • For Permian, Eagle Ford, Barnett Shale need to keep population of counties in perspective when thinking of water use
  • Alternative resources: use brackish water or recycle water
  • Some recycling is happening but a lot less than what could be done

Todd Langford, GE Power and Water

  • Historical practice on drilling and production water lifecycle was provided
  • Looking at recycling the water, will do some sort of desalination of water – treat for discharge and beneficial reuse products (road salts, calcium chloride flakes or reuse in additional frack job)
  • Water management drivers include: regulatory, economic and sustainability
  • Transportation of water has historically been done via truck @ $85-110 per hour
  • Fracking company may find themselves adding $1.50-3 per bbl to go to zero liquid discharge
  • Pennsylvania reuse/recycle somewhere around 89% of their water 
  • Technology is available to treat for beneficial reuse but it is more expensive than going to traditional disposal well

Carey King, Energy Institute

  • Cooling towers – water consumption of power plans overview
  • Brazos Basin story was offered as example – “West’s Drought and Growth Intensify Conflict over water rights.”
  • What amount of electricity is needed for “public health and safety”?
  • Do you need full peak summer power? Meet air-conditioning load? Enable city services (fire hydrants)? Commercial buildings operating? Industrial products? Agriculture?
  • Maybe answer is in the economics of use – high value placed on consuming electricity
  • “IF the state of Texas assures legal access to water for existing power plants during drought …what about new power plants? Will legacy facilities, with water rights, have a market advantage in ERCOT?

Tim Finley, Dow Chemical Company 

  • Water conservation at the Dow Chemical Texas Operations Freeport Site
  • Speaker says failure to produce at this site would have ripple effects on US industries/economy
  • Have relatively senior water rights but not most senior 
  • Dows response included assessment and advocacy, increase long term storage, reduce internal demand, multi-decade strategy going forward
  • Very close to initiating Water Rights call multiple times already in 2014
  • Approx. 80% of the time the lower Brazos experiences excess flows
  • Brazos river droughts require user reliance on storage
  • Advocate for water master because it enhances transparency
    • May create room for compensation for those who are impacted by rights cut off
  • Need to escalate discussion – echoes sentiments of previous speaker Laura Hoffman
  • Brackish vs clean water
    • Salt content perspective – Permian total dissolved solids 120k vs less than 10k in the aquifer of average salt content
  • Salinity requires different technologies – can increase cost
  • Additional filtration and technology will be needed
  • Q? Why is Allen’s creek reservoir not being built?
    • Interesting and valuable process but divided ownership (BRA has 30% and city of Houston has 70%) 
    • Sits on plot of land that has wetlands – could take many years to get through permitting process
    • Dow would have interest in buying water out of Allen’s creek if it was developed and available – there is demand there
  • Instead of using freshwater why can’t use brackish water during fracking process
    • Companies are moving that way but it has a slightly higher cost

John Meyer, Brackish/Salt Water Resources

  • Project deliverables – each study has to be tailored and tweaked
  • Typical deliverables is a peer-reviewed report, GIS data, BRACS
  • There is approximately 2.7 billion acre-feet of brackish groundwater in the state
  • The real value is in the data
  • TWDB Groundwater Database (over 138k records) and BRACS Database (over 43k records)
  • Geophysical well logs – used for variety of purposes
  • Look at fine scale distribution
  • Significant areas of the state need to be evaluated
  • BRACS studies with this level of detail take a long time
  • All information they put together is available to the public

Benny Freeman, UT upgrading technologies

  • Can use Thermal Desalination – tremendous energy cost but can be brought down
  • Reverse Osmosis down near bottom of cost
  • There is now recognized a strong connection between water and energy
  • We need water to grow the economy because we need energy to grow the economy – strong connection between energy and water
  • Water is needed in shale gas well fracturing
  • Fouling – a major challenge in water purification membranes results in a large operating cost  
  • One approach to control – polydopamine
  • Conducted constant flux fouling experiments
  • Field pilot – Barnett Shale Pilot Test
  • Summary this technology is not competitive with “a hole in the ground” – disposal well
  • Surface modification of membranes can mitigate fouling and it can be translated to the field

Bob Holt, GE Power and Water, Industrial Water Reuse

  • Water resuse and technologies reviewed
  • The technology could be stand alone or combined technologies and as complexity increases so does investment
  • Example of cases include:
    • food and beverage: Coke will squeeze every ounce of product they can
    • Oil and gas industry
    • Automotive
    • Irrigation
    • Etc
  • Reuse enablers include: technology, economics, and policy

Spotlight on Open Discussion

  • Little incentive for farmers to conserve because if you are member of district have to pay for fixed cost which differs from municipal
  • Urbanizing areas and counties have no authority for land use and given that condition some places have no connection fees while others charge thousands
  • Study done on effective ways to enhance aquifer recharge – panels said would like to see the research
  • It costs under $3 for 1k gallons of water and over $3 for one gallon of gasoline said Danny Reible, Program Chair for 2014 Water Summit