TRANS-PECOS — Sul Ross State University recently announced the establishment of the West Texas Water Research Center, a fledgling entity with an ambitious mission to help the region better understand and manage its precious, yet understudied, water resources.
“There hasn’t been a lot of study of the water resources out here,” said Robert Potts, chairman of the Dixon Water Foundation and board member of the Horizon Foundation — the organization committing $125,000 a year to the center for the next three years. “Obviously they’re really critical, and they’re becoming more critical all the time.”
The announcement comes just months after the university hosted its first-ever water conference, aptly titled Water in the Desert, focusing on Chihuahuan Desert hydrology. The event drew 260 attendees from across the state, and subsequently the attention of school administrators, said Dr. Louis Harveson, director of the Borderlands Research Institute, which the new water center will fall under.
“I had no idea that we would draw such a crowd, and not only draw the crowd but keep the crowd engaged the entire time,” Harveson said. “That really spoke volumes to our administration.”
Water issues are top of mind across the state as communities grapple with persistent drought conditions, aging infrastructure and population growth. But rural areas are often disadvantaged when it comes to robust data collection and proactive water management, something the new water center seeks to amend.
“It just makes sense that our university — located smack dab in the middle of the Trans-Pecos — steps up and becomes a leader in water conservation for this region,” Harveson said.
A steering committee made up of local and statewide water experts has been formed to help hire a director for the center, Harveson said, the critical next step in getting it off the ground. From there, a couple other staff members will be added. The start-up grant funds from the Horizon Foundation require a match, which Harveson is currently pursuing, he said.
Sul Ross technically already has a water research center called the Rio Grande Research Center, established in 2004 and led by Director Kevin Urbanczyk. Urbanczyk — who has been conducting research projects on groundwater resources, the Rio Grande River and more — said his center will remain intact but will likely be folded into the new center. Urbanczyk will also serve on the new center’s advisory board. Harveson and Potts said the center hopes to continue and expand upon the important work Urbanczyk has started.
Urbanczyk said he is excited to bring on an assistant director to his center — he is currently its sole employee — and continue groundwater monitoring projects as well as ongoing studies of the Lower Canyons and a South Brewster County aquifer not recognized by the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB).
Harveson and Potts said the new center intends to ramp up groundwater data collection to learn more about the region’s primary water resource — the Igneous Aquifer, which both private landowners and municipalities rely on. The Igneous Aquifer, spanning 6,075 square miles and six counties, is classified by the Texas Water Development Board as a minor aquifer.
Its status as a minor aquifer is one of the reasons it is understudied compared to major aquifers like the Edwards and Ogallala, which have been heavily researched because they provide for large parts of the state, Potts said. He said better knowledge and understanding of the area’s groundwater and springs — some of which have gone dry due to decreasing groundwater levels in aquifers — is “essential” moving forward.
“Unless we have good data on the aquifers we can’t really manage them to make sure that they continue to support the needs of the private landowners and the cities and everyone else,” Potts said.
The current lack of reliable water resources in South Brewster County — the subject of a recent Texas Tribune article — is an unfortunate example of how water crises are exacerbated by growth outpacing planning, Potts said. “All the growth in South Brewster County is putting a real strain on the groundwater resources before we even really have a real good understanding of what those are,” Potts said.
There is also the possibility that West Texas ranches that have been sold to urban cities may be mined for their water in the future, Harveson said.
Additional research topics the center may delve into include produced water, water policy, infrastructure, wastewater treatment, groundwater and surface water interaction and, importantly, groundwater recharge.
Aquifers are technically renewable resources, able to be replenished by rainwater, but several factors, including geology, impact that rate of recharge. Potts said unlike the Edwards Aquifer which has a high rate of recharge due to its porous, cavernous nature, aquifers out in West Texas are less permeable and more akin to an oil well that is depleted over time. Groundwater availability models from the TWDB, which Urbanczyk helped develop 20 years ago, show 1 to 2% of the total amount of precipitation flows into the Igneous Aquifer.
Harveson said the center will have a pragmatic, rather than “ivory tower,” approach to research and work closely with local stakeholders, including groundwater conservation districts. Initiatives will be based on need, with their results ideally helping guide groundwater management. “We really want to make sure that our municipalities, government organizations, landowners, communities — all these stakeholders that we deem important — have this resource so that they can make really good decisions on how we better conserve and capture and everything else with water,” Harveson said.
The new water center will also have an educational component in the form of undergraduate and graduate programs to help train the next generation of water professionals, Harveson said. A grant proposal has been submitted to the U.S. Department of Education to help develop that curriculum, which Harveson will know if the university received by this fall.
“These water challenges are becoming more and more serious, and we need to make sure that we have a trained workforce. We hope to help with that at the university,” Harveson said.
Both Harveson and Potts recognized landowner cooperation with the new water center will be essential, but it is not without its complications. Texas follows the rule of capture in regards to groundwater law, meaning landowners own the water beneath their land and have the right to pump however much they want regardless of how it may impact others.
Potts said landowner hesitation towards participation in groundwater monitoring programs — which are nonregulatory — is antithetical to wanting to keep their wells flowing.
“Unfortunately, when it comes to water, usually people’s knee-jerk reaction is not in their own self-interest,” Potts said. “It’s actually in everybody’s interest to have the greater knowledge and management of the aquifer. Otherwise, we just kind of go from crisis to crisis, and it’s bad for everybody when you have a crisis.”