Water Efficiency June 2012 : Page 12
The Institute The Texas Water Resources Institute at Texas A&M University is primarily tasked with doing research, extension, and technology transfer for water sci-ence to meet the needs of the state of Texas and beyond, says Neal Wilkens, director of the Institute. “We can use Texas as a crucible for other parts of the nation,” he adds. Wilkens, new to his position, says the challenge for him was taking over the helm of a water resources institute in the midst of a record drought. “Trying to keep from getting blamed for the drought was a major feat,” he says. “It’s very difficult to have or initiate drought-related research programs and get outcomes that are relevant and usable in such a short turnaround time when people are in the midst of real, creeping disaster.” The Institute also has focused on coordination among state agencies and other public agencies such as water authorities and groundwater districts “simply making sure they had a reliable source of information they could count on so they could antici-pate what their situation might be five years down the road,” says Wilkens. Case in point: the Institute was called upon to help assess the conse-quences of utilizing water out of Lake Texoma into the Trinity River Basin, which serves as the water supply for the Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan areas. “They were about to go into some pretty severe stages of water restric-tions,” says Wilkens. “We were faced with taking water out of Lake Texoma, and our scientists who had worked in that area were well aware of a problem with zebra mussels in Lake Texoma.” That put the Institute in the position of helping to balance federal agencies’ concerns about zebra mus-sel introduction in Texas from Lake Texoma with water management dis-tricts’ demands for water to take care of the large human population. “We don’t tell them what to do, but we do the risk assessments of what would happen given each decision,” says Wilkens. “Before they actually had to take water out of Lake Texoma and risk putting zebra mussels into the state of Texas it rained, helping them manage their water supply in those reservoirs to very close tolerances. “If you get a power plant cooling reservoir below the level intake for that reservoir, you’ve lost the ability to generate power, and that puts us at further risk, particularly in the middle of the drought, because it takes water to produce power,” he adds. The Institute addresses whatever drought-related priority manifests itself on a weekly basis. The Institute supplied the university’s 250-county network of extension agents with drought information “that was imme-diately useful for water efficiency and conservation in rural communities, information they could use to help those communities cope with the loss of their normal use of outdoor water use,” says Wilkens. Additionally, there was the $5 billion-plus economic impact to the agricultural base. “That’s not just loss of cotton, corn, and grain, that’s spinach in the winter garden and all kinds of special-ty crops because of irrigation restric-tions,” says Wilkens. “The nursery and landscape in-dustry was devastated in many areas, because when you can’t use water outdoors, you’re not going to sell very many nursery plants for people to plant outdoors. We have some communities here that have cut to the chase, and they’ve said ‘man up’ and go brown. I have two acres of grass —that’s the attitude I use.” Wilkens says there’s evidence that the extension service’s efforts have made a difference, with water conser-vation in some usage sectors freeing up water for higher priority uses. The drought has created an oppor-tunity to apply practices and technolo-gies for achieving long-term conserva-tion, Wilkens says. One key application is an evapotranspiration network for agriculture to achieve water efficiency in the High Plains of Texas. “If we could get an evapotranspi-ration network established across 50% of the irrigated acreage in the High Plains of Texas, we would save about 50,000 acre-feet of water a year, basi-cally the equivalent of a new reservoir, which takes 15 to 20 years to plan and build,” says Wilkens. “What this drought did is it prompted us to reinvestigate those things that are of modest expense,” adds Wilkens. “For nine dollars an acre-foot, which is really cheap water, we can conduct water conservation over the Ogallala Aquifer over the High Plains of Texas through sophis-ticated but existing technology for an evapotranspiration network in the irrigation scheduling.” That means the production of the same amount of agricultural products at a much-reduced water savings. Ad-dressing infrastructure needs in a time of drought has been tough, Wilkens notes, adding there are examples of solutions the Institute proposed and for which it was able to gain traction. One example is Loving County —the smallest population county in the state of Texas—and its only town, Kermit, which serves as the county seat. “The water infrastructure to run all county services, and basically the town, came from a pipe where they literally pumped water from the next town,” notes Wilkens. “We have been able to combine desalination technology with wind energy to create a soon-to-be in-stalled wind-driven desalination plant to support the whole town of Kermit, all of the population of the county.” There is plenty of brackish groundwater from which to draw in that part of the state, says Wilkens. To try to use that same technology close to Dallas/Fort Worth “would make no sense whatsoever,” he says. “It wouldn’t be cost-effective. But within the context of Kermit, it’s cost-effec-tive, which is defined as having very few other choices. That was some-thing that might not have been pos-sible to initiate without the drought.” 12 WATER EFFICIENCY WWW.WATEREFFICIENCY.NET
Publication List
Using a screen reader? Click Here