The cost to stave off future water crises in Texas just went up – by a lot.
According to a draft 2027 State Water Plan approved on Thursday, Texas will need to invest $174 billion over the next 50 years if it wants to keep up with demand. That’s more than double the cost of the previous state water plan, published in 2022.
That higher price tag, captured in 2023 dollars, comes as parts of the state have already begun to experience water shortages and experts warn that droughts will become more frequent and severe. Thursday’s draft report, issued by the Texas Water Development Board, said the higher price tag is due to inflation in construction costs and a growing backlog of projects that have been approved but not built. But it also reflects the fact that as water becomes scarcer, accessing new sources becomes more and more expensive.
If nothing is done, Texas faces potential water shortages of 3.6 million acre-feet per year as soon as 2030, according to the plan, more than half the total municipal use across the state. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land to the depth of a foot, or about 325,000 gallons.) By 2080, potential water shortages rise to 5.8 million acre feet.
The hefty price tag of the new water plan is raising some alarm among experts, who question whether state lawmakers allocated enough resources last year to the problem when they earmarked $20 billion over the next two decades for water infrastructure and supply projects..
“This figure validates concerns that $1 billion a year is not going to be sufficient to meet the infrastructure needs to ensure our water supply,” said Perry Fowler, the executive director of the Texas Water Infrastructure Network, a construction trade coalition for water projects.
The $174 billion price tag encompasses more than 3,000 water management strategy projects, providing 7.6 million acre feet of water by 2080. By far the most expensive recommended project is a long-distance pipeline to import surface water from Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Louisiana border to the Dallas-Fort Worth region at an estimated cost of $9.8 billion.
The total does not include costs associated with repairing aging infrastructure, like Houston’s leaky pipes, which waste more than 30 billion gallons of water annually.
The new statewide total also doesn’t reflect regional differences in water supply and demand, said Matt Nelson, TWDB’s deputy executive administrator. In Corpus Christi, for example, city leaders are grappling with a water emergency that could hit as soon as next month, forcing the massive petrochemical complex to shut down or scale back operations considerably.
The state water plan begins with 16 regional planning groups, which identify future water demands and strategies to meet them. This plan is the first that regional groups were required to plan for a drought worse than the drought of record, Nelson said.
The draft plan is open for public comment and will be approved by the TWDB later this year. A public hearing will be held in Austin on May 27.