Water: a winning investment

By E.R. Bills

Special to the Star-Telegram

Can I get some advice from business-minded, investor types?

Two investment opportunities are available. The first involves investing short-term in a tried-and-true but finite resource. The investment will pay off more quickly, but it draws from a limited source.

The second involves investing long-term in an infinite resource, but it won't pay dividends immediately. When it begins to pay, the dividends will be exponentially greater than those of the first opportunity, and they'll last for centuries.

Which is the wiser investment?

This isn't a trick. I'm not peddling wind or solar energy.

The first investment opportunity is fossil fuels, but the second isn't a competing power source. It's water.

Right now, debating the Keystone Pipeline from Canada to Texas is still the rage. It involves transporting crude oil from the Athabasca Oil Sands in Canada to the Gulf Coast through Texas, to be refined and shipped off to foreign markets. Supporters of the project say it'll pay off like a slot machine and put thousands to work, but once the pipeline is done it will hardly employ hundreds. And we'll have invested in a diminishing resource that's bad for the environment and a Lone Star dead end.

But water, we never have enough of that. Ninety-four percent of the state is abnormally dry, and 54 percent is experiencing a severe drought. Last summer, the E.V. Spence Reservoir in West Texas south of Midland -- normally a 14,600-acre lake up to 108 feet deep in places -- was transformed into a muddy puddle no longer capable of meeting the needs of the 230,000 folks who rely on it. The surrounding landscape and local citizenry got mighty parched, and state officials did little more than pray for rain.

Meanwhile, cities like Dallas were lobbying for a new dam on the Neches River in East Texas to supplement their H {-2}O demand. And in Fort Worth, the natural gas industry was using billions of gallons of water for fracking and possibly fouling billions more through the destabilization of injection wells caused by fracking-induced seismic activity. Water-rationing programs were enacted, and North Texans suffered through a dry one.

A new year won't a difference make. Dams and rationing aren't enough. We need a pipeline or three in Texas, but not for crude oil. We need pipelines for water, and we need to get that water from the Gulf of Mexico.

Texas' first permanent seawater desalination plant is scheduled to open on the shores of South Padre Island in 2014. El Paso has been using desalination processes to clean up the brackish groundwater that makes up most of its water supply. And San Antonio has goals for a seawater desalination plant and 140 miles of pipeline, but construction wouldn't start for decades.

Desalination is not cheap. But neither is drought.

It's time to use our multibillion-dollar rainy-day fund to ensure "rain" and our state's reign as a prosperous, resourceful state. We need to invest in more desalination plants along the Gulf and pipelines to bring water inland. Cities like Fort Worth and Dallas should join San Antonio, but speed up the process. In the long run, this type of investment will be profoundly more useful, profitable and job-stimulating than the Keystone imbroglio.

E.R. Bills is a freelance writer from Aledo.

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