Water, Texas: The Mismatch Between Development and Tightening Freshwater Constraints

“Texas is so big we’ve had a hard time coming to grips that resources are finite. We really never had to deal with that. Frankly, we’re reaching that point.”

- Dr. Larry McKinney, director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Texas A&M

By 2070, largely due to Texas’s strong economy and attractive big cities, the state will grow to 51 million, 22 million more people than today. The state’s demand for water, according to State Water Board projections, will climb to 21.6 million acre-feet, up from 18.4 million. One acre-foot is roughly 326,000 gallons.

At Circle of Blue, we've been covering the competition between water, energy, and growth on the frontlines, with reporting from Permian Basin to the Mekong Delta. Now, this new 5-part series reveals how the pandemic and an unlikely energy crisis are dramatically upending the Texas economy—and how water flows through every piece of the puzzle.

Water, Texas — beginning today and publishing every Monday in August — examines crucial aspects of the state’s resource challenges: demand and supply in the Texas Hill Country, energy development risks to the greater Big Bend region, water innovations in three major Texas cities, how the new border wall intrudes in the ever-present civic conversation about water supply and growth in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and the influence of water and drought on the Texas economy.

Water, Texas takes an in-depth look at the issues, individuals, organizations, and policies that influence water in Texas—from surface water and groundwater to wastewater and stormwater—and how they affect the drying state's landscape, residents, and supply of clean fresh water. Below are just a sample of the findings from the series.

• The mismatch between industrial growth and securing water supply in Texas is so disproportionate in wet years that the next deep drought in a bigger, more populous, and thirstier Texas is likely to be far more dangerous.
• A sharp downturn in the oil and gas sectors caused by overproduction and a geopolitical oil price war, followed by the Covid-19 global pandemic this year, produced market conditions that have put energy development in the greater Big Bend region on pause.
• The cities of Austin, El Paso, and San Antonio serve as innovators in water planning, technology, and use.
• Projections in federal and academic studies on climate change predict that water flows in the Rio Grande will shrink and evaporation from large reservoirs upstream will increase.

The series is authored by Circle of Blue Senior Editor and former New York Times and Polk Award-winning journalist Keith Schneider, and photographed by Brian Lehmann, a regular contributor to National Geographic and The New York Times.

Water, Texas is supported by a grant from the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation.

* Austin's Lake Travis at dawn: photograph by ?J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue