By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
Imagine being marched by force through a desert with barely anything to drink while your captor repeatedly cools himself by dumping gallons of water on his head, and maybe you’ll start to get a sense of what it’s like to live in Texas these days.
Water supplies in South Texas, already stretched thin after a seven-year dry spell, are being further strained by thirsty oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other energy-related industries that have boomed in Corpus Christi in recent years, Bloomberg News reported recently. The obvious, bitter irony here is that the fossil-fuel industry that is consuming most of this water is also the primary driver of the climate change that will make it even scarcer in the years to come.
Less obvious is what to do about it. It’s one of the knotty problems communities and policymakers face as they wrestle with the causes and effects of a heating planet while also trying to keep people employed, healthy and reasonably non-rebellious. In a perfect world, there would be no greenhouse-gas-spewing, water-guzzling refineries or petrochemical plants, but in this reality they’re huge employers and taxpayers that can’t just go away overnight.
For Texas, there are few easy answers. Worsening water scarcity is already endangering Corpus Christi’s economic boom by threatening shutdowns and potentially scaring off new investment, the Wall Street Journal suggested recently. Two chief sources of the city’s water supply are at just 12 percent of capacity. Both are on track to go dry in less than two years, leaving the city unable to meet demand.
The city and some companies are drilling groundwater wells and looking to bring water in from other locations by pipe. But groundwater is finite and won’t come close to matching the dwindling reservoir supply. Once it’s gone, it’s essentially gone forever, taking at least millennia to refill.
And piping water from other places isn’t a great solution if those places are also parched, which describes much of Texas. Last week, about 75 percent of the state was abnormally dry, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Last month, the Barton Springs-Edwards Aquifer Conservation District, which serves about 400,000 customers along the I-35 corridor south of Austin, declared it was experiencing exceptional drought for only the second time in history.
As the climate-change deniers in my inbox will remind me, Texas has always had droughts. And it’s true the latest is partially caused by weather, not climate. That includes a lack of rain during the fall season, which is crucial ahead of typically dry winters. Rainfall in the Corpus Christi area is running about 10 inches lower than normal for this time of year, according to the National Weather Service. Temporary conditions also include a La Niña pattern of cooler water in the East Pacific, which the NWS recently warned could last through winter. La Niñas tend to keep the U.S. South dry.
But climate is a large and growing problem for Texas’ water supply. By 2036, the state’s average annual temperature will be more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit higher than its 50-year average, according to a report last year by the Office of the Texas State Climatologist at Texas A&M University. Hotter air makes water evaporate more quickly and rainfall less predictable. Sometimes it will be bone-dry for painful stretches, and sometimes it will all fall at once in devastating floods. The net effect, according to the study, is that droughts will be more severe when they do happen, even if long-term rainfall totals don’t change much.
Meanwhile, demand for increasingly scarce water is soaring. Competing with those oil companies are data centers, of which Texas has about 400, the second-highest total in the country after Virginia, with at least 70 more coming, including massive projects such as OpenAI and Oracle Corp.’s 1.2-gigawatt Stargate facility in Abilene in West Texas and Nscale’s planned 240-megawatt facility for Microsoft Corp., announced on Wednesday.
The state’s existing data centers could use 25 billion gallons of water this year, or about 0.4 percent of the state’s total, potentially rising to 2.7 percent of demand by 2030, according to the Texas Tribune. That pales in significance to the consumption of industry and farming, but when you’re dying of thirst, every drop counts.
And all of these users will compete with human beings, who keep flocking to Texas, especially to towns along that dry I-35 corridor, which are among the country’s fastest-growing population centers.
The long-term solutions are politically and financially painful but necessary to keep Texas growing sustainably. First, we have to stop burning and refining those fossil fuels and making the climate problem worse. Texas offers some reason for hope in that regard because it’s the country’s leader in deploying green energy, whether its politicians like it or not. To the extent those data centers use renewable power sources, they’ll not only require less water, according to the Houston Advanced Research Center, a nonprofit group, but they also won’t make the climate problem worse.
Companies can also find ways to conserve water, including those fossil-fuel ones. Meanwhile, policymakers in Corpus Christi and elsewhere can try to attract employers that don’t immiserate their constituents. They can also set water prices that reflect its scarcity. Corpus Christi’s city council recently rejected plans for a desalination plant because of a cost that had ballooned to more than $1 billion. It will probably regret that decision.
Simple plumbing would also help: Leaky pipes alone cost Texas 129 billion gallons of water in 2022, according to the Texas Water Development Board, more than enough to cool the state’s data centers.
If all of this sounds uncertain and expensive, that’s because it is. It’s a classic conundrum of the global-heating age we’ve created. But like thirst, we can’t ignore it.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
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