back
11 comments
The cynic in me wonders whether they're actually worried about the water, or if they're worried about their own land valuations.
> At the same time, he said, “Bryan can’t claim the water.” Groundwater is a private property right in Texas as sacred as any other. Everyone is allowed to pump whatever their land produces.

This leads me to believe that if someone owns just enough land to access the aquifer, they would be entitled to pump with no limits until it’s depleted?

> so long as they don’t affect other permit holders “unreasonably,”
As it was explained to me in law school, yeah, that's basically how oil rights work.
Water recycling is extremely limited in Texas. I wish cities would do more. Maybe they could make it mandatory to recycle water in new developments while going through approvals. It won’t happen though as city governments seem to be beholden to developers.
Cannot get into the article, but this is what you get with people and companies moving to areas that are one step away from a desert.
This is kind of a red herring or a tempest in a teapot; we're talking about municipal water use, not agricultural water use. The number being bruited about here is only 89 million gallons per day (3.9kℓ/s in modern units) for 270k people: 14.4 milliliters per second per person, or 1250 liters per day per person, so I guess they water their lawns a lot.

I mean, they say that's three times what Bryan uses now, but Bryan is only 83980 people, so the per-capita use there is actually slightly higher.

You can get water pretty cheaply if you have unlimited energy, and the rapidly dropping prices of solar panels have made that a reality.

The ocean is only 250km a way, and the Sorek desalination plant http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-... was already desalinating seawater for 58¢/kℓ in 02016 at 7.1MPa (≡7.1kJ/ℓ). At US$40/MWh (US$11/GJ) the energy would cost 7.9¢/kℓ, so designing the plant to be energy-efficient is an important priority. At US$15/MWh (US$4.20/GJ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43468177 or less you can afford to use simpler, cheaper designs for the desal plant, at the cost of using more energy. But even at 58¢/kℓ, we're talking about a cost of US$260 per person per year.

This is not the new motherfucking oil. We're not "talking about our survival". It won't "basically stop[] all the economic development we have". Not unless you think rice farming is the path to economic development.

It's trickier for places that are further from the ocean. Condensing water out of thin air generally requires cooling the air to the dewpoint, removing its heat of vaporization (2.2564MJ/kg ≈ 2.3MJ/ℓ) and letting the air heat back up again. The cooling and reheating process doesn't inherently dissipate energy (you can do it in a countercurrent heat exchanger) and anyway involves much less energy than the condensation does. 2.3MJ/ℓ at US$4.20/GJ is 0.95¢ per liter. At 1250ℓ/day per person, that would be US$12/day per person, a much more alarming figure. Even dividing by the coefficient of performance of a typical vapor-compression heat pump (3 or so), giving us about 0.3¢/ℓ, we're talking about US$4/day per person.

But residential Los Angeles uses 70 gallons per person per day (3.1mℓ/s per person in modern units, or 260ℓ/day per person) https://xtown.la/2023/09/05/residential-water-use-in-los-ang..., though total potable water use is about twice that https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/southern-california/environment..., and at Burning Man we use 6ℓ/day per person (0.07mℓ/s) https://burningman.org/event/preparation/playa-living/water/. 6ℓ/day from a dehumidifier at 0.3¢/ℓ is 1.8¢ a day or US$6.60/year.

We need to find ways to make dehumidifiers cheaper, because at that point the energy cost is basically insignificant.

Note that Texas is currently attempting, through legislation, to disadvantage solar and batteries and attempt to financially support fossil gas [1]. Also note that the US domestic fossil gas market is now exposed to global price movement due to LNG exports, which will cause the cost of producing power from fossil gas to rise [2]. Could Texas use cheap solar to desal? If Texas had different politicians, perhaps.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43501255

[2] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/us-lng-exports-raise-electr...

The legislation is still too weak to overcome solar and batteries' advantages; Texas is still installing solar and batteries quite rapidly and keeps setting new records: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/texas-brok...

> The famously developer-friendly Lone Star State has struggled to add new gas power plants lately, even after offering up billions of taxpayer dollars for a dedicated loan program to private gas developers. Solar and battery additions since last March average about 1 gigawatt per month, based on ERCOT’s figures, Texas energy analyst Doug Lewin said. In 2024, Texas produced almost twice as much wind and solar electricity as California.

https://seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight-rep...

> Texas was the leading state for solar installations in the first half of the year [02024], with 5.5 GWdc online – nearly twice as much capacity as Florida, the second-ranked state, which had 2.9 GWdc.

I'm not sure to what extent desalination in particular can economically do demand response. My numbers above about the Sorek plant suggest that at least that plant design would be far more expensive to run intermittently, no matter how low it drove the cost of their energy. And 7.1MPa is too much pressure for a practical water tower to supply passively.

Of course, Texas could outlaw economic development (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/will-texas...) as most of the world does and always has.

I hope you’re right that Texas can’t slow down decarbonization.
Oh, I think they could! It's just that it would be self-destructive.