El Paso Launches New Plan to Import Hudspeth County Water
Pinched by historic drought conditions on the Rio Grande, El Paso water planners are looking to underground water in Hudspeth County to meet the city’s drinking-water needs. If exploratory drilling planned in 2015 proves out, El Paso could soon begin importing 10,000 to 20,000 acre-feet of water a year from western Hudspeth County.
El Paso Water Utilities has a long-term plan to import water from Dell City, and from properties the city owns near Valentine and Van Horn. But now, the city is looking at groundwater resources beneath the Diablo Plateau for a more short-term fix.
In the interview with the Herald Tuesday (Dec. 23), John Balliew, president and CEO of El Paso Water Utilities, said that the utility plans to drill an exploratory well in early 2015 on property leased from the Texas General Land Office. The property is located about 15 miles north of Fort Hancock, on the uplands of the Diablo Plateau, relatively close to the El Paso County line.
The El Paso city council and the Public Service Board, which oversees EPWU, recently budgeted $5.2 million to pursue a project to import water from Hudspeth County. That money will be sufficient to drill a single exploratory well, Balliew land, on the GLO land, which the city leased earlier this year.
“That money is just for exploratory drilling and other preliminary tests,” Balliew said. “I think that the only thing we could say now is that there is water there – but this will give us a preliminary indication of how much is there.”
Balliew said that EPWU may also pursue water resources from property owned by developer John Turner, in Desert Haven. Balliew said Turner had recently given the utility permission to drill an exploratory well – but he said the funding allocated for 2015 would likely not be enough to drill wells at both locations.
The city has an official plan for meeting its long-term water needs. Under that plan, El Paso will begin importing water from Dell Valley – and from the city’s Wild Horse Ranch, near Van Horn, and Antelope Valley Ranch, near Valentine – in 2050. El Paso owns acreage at the Armstrong Farms at Salt Flat, but would have to acquire additional land or water rights in Dell Valley to obtain the quantities of water it seeks.
Constructing hundreds of miles of pipeline to transport water from Jeff Davis, Culberson and northeastern Hudspeth County to El Paso would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and Balliew said EPWU wants to put that investment off as long as possible. Importing water from western Hudspeth County could help the city postpone the larger project, he said.
Water would only have to be transported about 20 miles from Turner’s Desert Haven property, and about 40 miles from the GLO land, to put it into the city’s water system, Balliew said. The Desert Haven property has the advantage of being at a higher location; water would not have to pumped up and over a mountain range to reach El Paso, as it would from Dell Valley, Van Horn or Valentine.
El Paso has historically relied on a groundwater resource called the Hueco Bolson, in the basin east of the Franklin Mountains, as its drought-proof water source. But scientists believe that pumping the bolson on an ongoing, intensive basis could cause the aquifer to become contaminated with salty and brackish water. During the last decade, El Paso Water Utilities has made a sustained effort both to reduce consumption through conservation and to diversify water sources – by building a desalination plant and acquiring water rights on the Rio Grande, among other measures.
With those water rights, El Paso has been able to obtain almost 60 percent of the water it needs each year from the Rio Grande. But during the last two years, drought on the river has been intense – in 2013, river levels were lower than at any time since the Rio Grande Project dams were completed, in the 1940s. In 2013, El Paso was only able to obtain about 10,000 acre-feet of water from the river, compared to about 60,000 acre-feet in 2008.
Because of drought on the river, EPWU has been forced to increase its reliance on the Hueco Bolson, a situation that Balliew said is likely not sustainable.
“Because of the ongoing drought on the Rio Grande, we have had to really ask some questions about the viability of our drought-proof water supply,” Balliew said. “The question is, How long can we keep up that higher level of pumping before we draw brackish water? It’s probably not long – probably not longer than another five years.”
Water planners are considering the possibility that drought on the river may be the new status quo. In the coming years, Hudspeth County groundwater could allow El Paso to “fill part of the gap,” Balliew said. Neither the Desert Haven nor the GLO properties are located within a groundwater district, so no local body could limit pumping by EPWU. If El Paso began to produce water from the GLO property, the city would pay a royalty to the agency, which helps fund K-12 public education in Texas.
The Hudspeth County groundwater sources EPWU is exploring are not far from areas where the Plano-based company Torchlight Energy hopes to open an expansive oil-and-gas development. If it follows through on the project, Torchlight is likely to use the technique of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking – which involves pumping large quantities of water or chemicals deep into the earth, and which critics say can lead to groundwater contamination.
Balliew said he is skeptical that large-scale fracking will occur on the Diablo Plateau in the coming years. And he said that while EPWU is mindful of the impact that oil-and-gas activity could have on the groundwater it targets, “there are plenty of places where fracking coexists with drinking water supply.”