Texas growth on collision course with new reality of drought

Texas leaders' dreams of unlimited development and a rush of AI data centers are on a collision course with a new reality of drought.

Vital South and Central Texas rivers are experiencing what may be their worst droughts in recorded history. Key springs are going dry. 

And in what many experts call an omen of things to come, cities and towns are beginning to fight in court over scarce reserves of groundwater.

Water fights are bigger in Texas

Meanwhile, attempts to slow the drawdown of aquifers have met opposition at the highest levels of the state. Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) vetoed a bipartisan law that would have allowed a Central Texas water district above the rapidly depleting Hays-Trinity Aquifer to begin charging fees for groundwater withdrawals — something that local governments had argued was essential to avoid over-pumping by new developments.

That veto comes amid an array of water fights playing out across Texas, even as a wave of more than two-dozen new data centers are planned for water-stressed parts of the state and hundreds of thousands of new residents — on balance the most in the country — move in each year.

Amid all that are two overriding patterns: the booming economy and unchecked climate change, which together are making water into a potent and divisive political force on a hotter, drier Texas landscape.

With voters now facing a referendum that could release billions into new state water supplies, experts told The Hill, Texas faces a critical question: Can it make the necessary investments in time to keep the miracle growing — and do so without sucking the environment dry?

On the one hand, the state is “looking into the abyss,” said Rice University environmental law professor Gabriel Collins. “But what you see next to us is a partially assembled jetpack — where with a bit of tinkering we can fly out of here,” Collins said.

Facing climate change

In the Hill Country region west of Austin, rivers are at their lowest levels “since record keeping began over 100 years ago,” Charlie Hickman, executive manager of engineering with the Guadalupe Blanco River Authority, told KXAN news. In May, the Edwards Aquifer, a key source of water for San Antonio, dropped to its lowest level since the 1950s — driving local regulators to cut permitted pumping by nearly half.

Driving this dynamic is, above all, a planet heated up by the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, which has created a hotter, thirstier atmosphere that sucks moisture from the land, and increasingly replaces soaking rains — which replenish soil and aquifers — with torrential storms that run right off them.

Climate change has plunged the state into a new reality, said Robert Mace, director of the Meadows Center at Texas State University, a state mecca for the study of water. 

In the past, Mace said, when a drought ended, people could relax. “You could say, ‘woohoo, it’s over. We’re not gonna have to do that again.’”

But now, less than a decade after the worst drought in the region’s history, “here we are back in it.” Mace added that “this is probably the new normal going forward: that we keep experiencing droughts worse than the previous drought.”

In the near term at least, that reality means shortage and conflict — at least regionally. In April, a private water supplier announced it was cutting off water supplies to nine planned developments in Central Texas; in June a municipality west of Austin considered banning bulk sales of water, a key lifeline to exurban residents whose wells have gone dry. In Montgomery County in East Texas — one of the 10 fastest-growing regions in the country — the cities of Magnolia and Conroe have halted permitting new commercial or residential wells. 

'This is a grab for water'

The downstream effects of shortages are playing out between cities as well. Last week, the city of Bryan-College Station — home of Texas A&M University — settled a lawsuit over a permit its groundwater authority had given to a landowner selling water from the aquifer to a rapidly growing suburb of Austin. Similar legal fights are playing out in Houston County and the city of Jacksonville, in East Texas.

"Folks, it's clear what is going on," attorney Clayton Bailey told a Jacksonville courtroom last month, per WFAA. "This is a grab for water, and it's by a rich man who's trying to enrich himself to the detriment of all of these good people here."

Making the picture more difficult for cities is a 2023 state law that makes it easier for residents — or developers of subdivisions or data centers — to remove themselves from a city’s jurisdiction and tax base.

That law could allow developers of data centers or real estate to effectively secede from city authority, secure a private source of surface or groundwater, potentially impacting water availability for nearby municipalities and other private landowners.

While cities have the potential to get ahead of that problem by carefully negotiating development agreements with new entrants — effectively getting them to help fund the new civic water infrastructure they need — the prospect of the new rush “makes me so anxious for my cities,” environmental lawyer Toni Rask said. 

Most of the cities and water districts she represents, Rask said, “are just tiny, and it would be easy for them to get pushed around by big fancy tech companies.”

Voters set to get a say in November

Like most experts interviewed by The Hill, Rice University’s Collins argued that while Texas towns and cities have to wake up to a new reality of drought, the state is far from running out of water — and notes that they may be about to get a huge infusion of new resources.

In November, voters will get a chance to approve what advocates have billed as a generational investment in water infrastructure — which would unlock a $20 billion public investment in new water supplies, conservation and recycling.

Once federal, local and corporate investments are added in, that’s a “meaningful bite” of the approximately $154 billion the state needs to safeguard its water supplies, said Jeremy Mazur of Texas 2036, a nonpartisan think tank focused on the state’s long-term future.

This year, Mazur said, “the legislature recognized that the water supply issue access is one of the more substantive policy issues informing the continuation of the Texas economic miracle.” 

If voters approve that measure in November, a new flood of funding will pour into water projects across the state, ranging from desalination of seawater and briny water to the reuse of wastewater and the repair of leaky pipes.

The state’s towns and cities, Collins said, should think about water not in terms of something to be mined and ultimately depleted — like copper or oil — but in terms of a shifting, balanced portfolio of supplies. 

The gold standard for this approach, he argued, is the city of San Antonio, which combines pumping from aquifers like the Edwards and the Carrizo-Wilcox — “the Saudi Arabia of groundwater” — with systems that stash excess river flow in underground, evaporation proof reservoirs, desalination plants for briny groundwater and “in pure volume terms the biggest recycling program in the state.”

But the state’s municipalities face significant risk if they get the calculus wrong, Collins said.

“People and companies move to Texas,” he said, because it’s “attractive” and they want to, “not because they have to.”

“And if we ever do something, have a set of circumstances emerge that changes that analysis, we will suffer for decades and generations as a result.”