"Neighbors Face off Over Texas' Other Lucrative Resource: Water"

The recently deceased T. Boone Pickens had an audacious plan to get control of big chunks of Texas water rights gussied up in green dress, as an undisclosed part of his wind and energy Pickens Plan. There's big money in Texas water, some links below.

From the Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2019:
Wildcatter Clayton Williams Jr. made his first fortune in oil. He aims to make another off a treasure buried beneath his family’s West Texas land. It’s a massive trove of water.

The powerful Williams family wants to pipe as much as 25 million gallons a day away from its property at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert and sell it to oil companies, cities and anyone else with deep pockets and an unquenchable thirst.

The plan is pitting neighbor against neighbor and rekindling a debate over who should control fresh water in a bone-dry region. Many of the region’s farmers and ranchers depend on income from selling their water to oil producers. Desert towns like Fort Stockton, near the Williams farm, fear their water sources will dry up.

“I don’t know why the hell you would want to pipe water out of the desert,” said Kirby Warnock, 67, whose family has owned a ranch near the Williams farm for nearly a century. “It’s like Space Shuttle astronauts selling their oxygen. It boggles my mind.”

Another influential Texas oil family is suing the local water regulator, hoping to limit how much the Williamses can pump. The family investment office of the Cockrells, for whom the University of Texas engineering school is named, is worried over-pumping could deplete water wells on their farm and put their 68,000 pecan trees at risk.

For the Williamses, the issue is straightforward: Under Texas law, they can pump water from under their land and use it for whatever commercial purpose they choose, with few limits. Their farm’s main product is alfalfa, used to make hay, which is sold to customers as far away as China.
“If we sell alfalfa to Saudi Arabia or China, it’s basically us exporting water there, so what’s the difference?” said Jeff Williams, 45, who runs the family farm for his father, in an interview last year. He didn’t respond to fresh inquiries this month.

Mark Tisdale, a lawyer for the family company, Clayton Williams Cos., said the area has more than enough water to support the Williamses’ plans.

Humans have fought over water for much of recorded history, especially in the American West, where it is scarce in many places and control of it can yield fortunes. The fight here comes as competition is heating up for water around the world, in dry regions and wet ones. Surging populations, rising demand for industrial-scale farming and manufacturing, and hotter temperatures are putting new stress on the constrained resource.

There has never been a better time to sell West Texas water, thanks to the fracking boom. Shale companies use large volumes in hydraulic fracturing, blasting underground rock with water, sand and chemicals to unlock oil and gas.

Drillers have made the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico the top-producing U.S. oil field, helping raise the country’s total production to a record 12 million barrels a day. Permian water use grew nearly ninefold between 2011 and 2016 as drillers added more than 10,000 wells, according to a Duke University study published in August. An average well there in 2018 used more than 15 million gallons, compared with 7 million in 2013.

Frackers in the region pay an average 50 to 75 cents for a barrel of water, according to Bluefield Research, a water advisory firm. That amounts to more than $200,000 a well. Supplying water for fracking in the Permian is a roughly $1.2 billion industry annually, and including transportation and other costs, water spending for fracking there will surge to as much as $54 billion over the next decade, the firm said.....

....MUCH MORE

And on 'ol T. Boone:
August 2008 
T. Boone Pickens and Power Politics-Texas Style
Tokyo Tom has a lot of detail in "Pickens buys eminent domain powers and wind power transmission rights for his personal 8-acre "water district"':

I previously reported on T. Boone Pickens' plan to suck down half of the water from that part of the Ogallala aquifer that underlies the Texas Panhandle, sell it to Dallas and put the money in his pocket - other users of the aquifer be damned. Pickens' has subsequently launched a publicity blitz to get the federal government to subsidize his wind farm power scheme.

July 2008
Beyond Wind Plan, Pickens Eyes Pipelines in Drought-Ridden U.S.
July 2010
"Boone Pickens unceremoniously drops wind from his energy plan"

We've had some posts on this hombre.*
Boone Pickens is such a slut whore.
Going back to the Mesa days, it's always been about the money.

When his investment vehicle, BP Capital Management was getting its ass kicked because of Boone's wrong-headed calls on hydrocarbons he said the purchase of 667 turbines from GE was "delayed".
I wonder if that was ever the plan in the first place, or if he was just playing the alt/eco/green zeitgeist of 2007-8.
There are a whole bunch of turbines that may be coming on the market, and some lawsuits too....

February 2019
"Crisis on the High Plains: The Loss of America’s Largest Aquifer – the Ogallala"
The Ogallala is a big resource with a big problem.
It contains as much fresh water as the third largest of the Great Lakes, Lake Huron, and underlies  174, 000 square miles (450,000 km²)