CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — I've been diving into our water crisis for a while now in my series called Water Watch, but today let's look at some of the science that's brought us to the position we're in right now and the science behind some of the decisions our local leaders will have to make soon.
Let's start off with one of the most common questions I get: How much water do we really need? How much water do we need to bring our reservoirs, Choke Canyon and Lake Corpus Christi, back up to 100% capacity? Well, as of today's numbers, we need 258 billion gallons of water to recover.
So we've been describing that amount of water to you in different units, acre-feet, percentages, millions of gallons, gallons, etc. Let's talk about what 'Mother Nature' could do to bring those numbers to reality for us.
So an average thunderstorm drops about 17.4 million gallons. I often hear folks say, "Well, we just need a little tropical storm, a hurricane, some kind of 'tropical trouble'. An average hurricane produces about 2.4 trillion gallons of water, and it also brings other impacts like extreme winds, tornadoes, storm surge, not exactly desirable, but let's entertain the conversation.
If a thunderstorm were to fix our problem, we would need 15,000 thunderstorms to achieve that much water. And as far as the tropical trouble goes, well, we don't need an entire hurricane; we could use just ten percent of the water in one hurricane— and again, those negative impacts. Plus, right now the tropics are looking fairly quiet, so that's not exactly an option. 'Mother Nature' doesn't want help us it seems.
So what are our options from a human standpoint? Other sources of water include groundwater and seawater. Now, both of these would have to be desalinated for our purposes, but let's talk about each option. Groundwater comes from the aquifer below us; seawater would come from the Gulf.
Now pros and cons: Seawater is more saline and has a longer timeline from when we would first see that water. Groundwater is a more 'sooner' option and is less saline in general. Both of these pose environmental risks and for the purpose of this conversation, we'll focus groundwater.
That comes from an aquifer below us. It's called the Gulf Coast Aquifer. It spans the Gulf Coast of Texas, so you see where the name comes from.But what is an aquifer? We talked about this in this week's Science Snippet.
And tap into this water so we can pump it out and use it for our purposes.Looking closer at the Gulf Coast aquifer, what exactly is underground though,because it changes along the coast of Texas up by Houston, the upper two aquifers or sub aquifers, the Chicot aquifer and the Evangeline aquifer are deeper, whereas in South Texas they're more shallow.
That poses an issue because we would like the deeper formation that is going to have better water quality— deeper water is easier for nature to filter. In the Corpus Christi area, that aquifer is going to be about 20 to 50 feet below the ground, whereas in Houston, it's much deeper: 50 to 200 feett below ground.
Looking at a legislative report from 2016 from the Texas Water Development Board,you can see here there are different colors to represent the wells within the Gulf Coast aquifer. So, the colors represent the salinity of the water in those wells, and there are a lot of wells shown here. The blue Dots indicate fresh water where the aquifer is deeper and of better water quality in the northern extent of the aquifer. I've outlined the Coastal Bend here in red, and a lot of our dots here are not blue. Instead, they are red or yellow, noting more saline water.
So, what do we do with the wastewater, or the 'brine', that comes after the desalination process? The water with impurities that we don't have a use for— how do we get rid of that? As Neighborhood News Reporter Alexis Scott showed us, one option is deep well injection. Here's how that works:
Click here to read 2020 presentation by the Texas Water Development Board on desalination and brine disposal methods. Click here to read a report the agency conducted on the future of desalination in Texas.
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