Alpine
The estimated cost of a new well to replace a failed one—$1 million—is well within reason, and when it comes to municipal and residential water wells, you can’t compare the two, according to Alpine city officials and drilling professionals.
The estimate was released by the City of Alpine this week after the City Council approved funding for the new well. A pump failure and crumbling casing doomed the previous well, and officials decided to abandon and plug it. The loss of water supply sent the city into emergency council meetings and various stages of water-use restrictions, which now stand at Stage 4.
Depending on the time it takes to get parts and materials and required permits, the well project could take at least six weeks to complete.
Councilmember Robert Ruckes said residents have sent him photos of social media posts critical of the cost estimate and offering examples of costs for very different types of wells. “We’re not talking about just a residential well that’s going to serve a house, or a stock tank or something like that.”
John Skinner of Skinner Drilling, the company hired by the City of Alpine for the project, also said the two types of wells were not comparable, detailed some of the differences, and gave examples of costs involved in a municipal well project. The differences included the regulations governing the project, the equipment needed to drill the well, the well’s size, the time required to dig the well, and the required parts.
While residential wells are regulated by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR), municipal wells are more tightly regulated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), Skinner said.
“So for residential, the rules are completely different than what they are for a municipality water well,” Skinner said. An example of the differences in regulations, Skinner said, is the amount of cement required around the top of the well.
“Let’s say we put 100 feet of casing, I only have to put 10 feet of cement on a residential,” he said. “On a municipality, I have to put cement from the top of the water level all the way to the ground surface. So that’s a massive and expensive increase right there.”
How the cement is installed is also more tightly regulated, Skinner said. “With a residential, I can mix it on location by hand myself, and then I can pour it in there,” he said. “With a municipality, I pretty much have to do it like the oil patch does it,”––what Skinner called pressure-cement, which involves many more steps.
Other examples of cost-increasing regulatory differences that Skinner gave were the type of pipes used and the need for input from engineers. “On municipalities, the TCEQ is going to have their engineers draw up a set of plans, and then they’re gonna require that the screen that we use in the hole is stainless steel,” Skinner said. “So, for a residential, I can use PVC pipe … It’s way cheaper, the materials.”
The larger size of a well for a city the size of Alpine also adds to the cost, said Ruckes and Skinner.
While residential wells are about eight inches in diameter with five-inch casings, the much larger volumes of water that flow through city lines require much larger wells. Casings for municipal wells can be 12 to 15 inches, he said.
“I have to drill a big hole, more money, more time to do that, and it just jacks the price up,” Skinner said.
Other things adding to the cost, according to Skinner, are the testing required by TECQ and parts and supplies. He estimated the pump for the project could cost $100,000 or more and that the amount of diesel he would use to drill the well would be 300-500 gallons a day for about 27 days. At 400 gallons a day, at $5 a gallon for diesel, that would be $54,000.
Alpine Mayor Catherine Eaves later posted on Facebook slightly different statistics, but they were in line with the idea of how costs would add up for the project. “It is a 10-inch well, and we are going 700 feet deep,” she wrote. Of that 700 feet, we are going to have a 10-inch-wide casing, and it is ½-inch thick. It is thick, so we get life expectancy from it. This is about $ 200,000 to $ 300,000 in just casing. Then about 300 feet of stainless steel screening, which is also expensive. The pump going into the ground is about $400,000.”
Van Horn is currently working on a well of similar size, and Marfa dug one several years ago that both cost upwards of $1.5 million, Skinner added.
Digging has not yet begun on the new well that will supply the west side of Alpine, , but actions are being taken to act as soon as permits are given, Ruckes said. “We’ve got a bunch of stuff on order,” he said. “Now we’re just waiting on everything to get here and get permitted.”
While they wait for the new well, the city is shuttling water from the Musquiz Well Field to the Sunny Glen Well Field. “We’ve got two 6,000-gallon, 18-wheelers running almost nonstop for us right now,” Ruckes said. The trucks are from Water Runner, a company in Odessa.