LCRA considers long-range water needs --Conservation apprears to be cheapest

At the next turn of the century, with the Austin area looking something like today's Houston, Travis County will see a near-tripling in water demand. Williamson and Hays counties will require four or five times as much water as they do now, as our descendants will need water to drink, to bathe and to wash clothes and dishes. And on the Gulf end of the Colorado River, in Matagorda County, demand for water will roughly triple with new power plants requiring it to help cool their systems and power their turbines.

Trying to meet the far-off demands along the Colorado River, the utility that provides much of the water from Austin to the Gulf has begun calculating the price tags — ranging from the hundreds of millions of dollars to the billions — for a preliminary menu of water supply options for today's policymakers.

Even with rapid population growth and industrial expansion, demand for Lower Colorado River Authority water is not expected to outstrip the nonprofit utility's supplies until 2080, according to a draft report given to LCRA board members last month.

"We have ample supplies to take us well into the future," said James Kowis, manager of water planning for the LCRA.

The river authority controls about 600,000 acre-feet a year of water available even in drought conditions equal to those of the 1950s, the worst on record. Current demand is approaching 230,000 acre-feet a year. An acre-foot is roughly the amount of water required to cover a football field 1 foot deep.

The range of costs reflects the variety of ways the LCRA can either cut demand or increase supply.

Among the options outlined in the Draft Water Supply Resource Plan:

• Conservation:By far the cheapest technique outlined, it could slice demand by 40,000 to 80,000 acre-feet a year, at a cost of $110 million to $220 million, or close to $400 an acre-foot, to pay for education, incentive programs for homeowners and businesses to buy things like low-flow toilets, and increased enforcement of conservation rules, among other things.

• Importing:Taking groundwater from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer and piping it to Travis County, a yield of 22,400 acre-feet per year, at a cost of $331 million, or $1,900 per acre-foot.

• Desalination:Building a coastal plant to treat seawater and pipe it to Bay City, where it can be used to satisfy industrial demand and alleviate pressure on the Highland Lakes. Yielding 22,400 acre-feet per year, at a cost of $463 million, or $2,890 per acre-foot.

• Dredging:Removing silt from the Highland Lakes, including the Sometimes Islands, to make the reservoirs larger. Yielding up to 746 acre-feet per year at a cost of as much as $263,000 per acre-foot, or $2.7 billion overall.

• Reservoir:Building a reservoir in the lower basin and piping it up to Travis County, yielding up to 100,000 acre-feet, at a cost of $1.9 billion, or about $2,150 an acre-foot.

The per-acre-foot costs of the options include 30 years in upkeep and operations and debt payments for each project. Many of the projects could take five to 10 years to build, the report said.

Not contemplated in the report was a potential $2.2 billion water-sharing project with the San Antonio Water System that fell through this year. That project would have sent nearly 30 billion gallons of water from the Colorado River to the city for 80 years. In return, the Colorado River basin would have received money to pay for reservoirs and conservation programs.

The LCRA predicts water demand will skyrocket over the next 90 years as industry and people move into the basin: in Travis County, from 211,300 acre-feet in 2010 to 577,867 by 2100; in Hays County, from 5,419 acre-feet to 27,015; and in Williamson County, from 15,741 to 67,000.

Some of that water will be provided independently of the LCRA. Austin, for example, has its own Colorado River water rights of about 330,000 acre-feet a year. But the lion's share of the water for cities, farmers and industrial plants up and down the river basin is provided by the LCRA. Even Austin, in coming decades, will supplement its water rights with LCRA water to slake the thirst of its residents.

Current water supplies controlled by the LCRA will not cover those future demands, so the river authority is casting for ways to cover the gap.

The river authority will ask for public comment on the document in the fall. Late this year, or perhaps next year, the LCRA board will begin deciding the direction to take to meet long-term water needs, said Emlea Chanslor, a spokeswoman for the utility.

Reflecting the scope of the challenge, the preliminary draft says LCRA staff members also looked, in passing, at such options as cloud seeding, diverting floodwaters of the Llano River into Lake Buchanan and using wastewater effluent near the Highland Lakes as a supply.

The draft report also says the LCRA will analyze how a change to its rate structure could affect water use.

Kowis said the LCRA is the only utility in the state that he knows of that projects to the end of the century. The state plan developed by the Texas Water Development board projects demand and supply 50 years into the future.

The value of looking far into the future "all depends on how you plan on using that water supply," said Jennifer Walker, a water resources specialist for the Sierra Club who served on an LCRA water conservation task force. "If you're implementing an aggressive efficiency program for customers and looking at future supplies to meet population growth and environmental needs, that's great."

A less healthy scenario, she said, is if the LCRA board "looks at the supplies and says, 'We can supply anybody no matter what, no matter how much they're using and what they're using it for.' "

A 2008 report by an LCRA water conservation task force of environmentalists, city administrators, engineers, golf course overseers and others recommended the utility expand conservation requirements for customers and enforce its conservation rules.

"Conservation is now widely accepted as the most cost-effective way to extend water resources," the report said.

By Asher Price - AMERICAN-STATESMAN