Greenbelt Lake, the reservoir that supplies Childress and neighboring towns in the eastern Texas Panhandle, was 5.1 percent full on Aug. 20, according to Water Data for Texas, the reservoir monitoring service run by the Texas Water Development Board, the state agency that plans and finances water supply. Two days earlier, a Houston data center company offered to build the local water authority a new supply and pay for it.
At an Aug. 18 meeting of the Greenbelt Municipal and Industrial Water Authority board, Lancium proposed to fund the construction and operation of a water treatment plant and roughly 16.5 miles of pipeline connecting three wells on its data center campus near Childress to Greenbelt’s storage tank in town. The company said the arrangement would cost Greenbelt, Childress and surrounding communities nothing for a two-year term, meant as a bridge while the region looks for permanent supplies.
“None of this water is for Lancium’s use or any of our data center use,” Scott McFarland, the company’s chief corporate affairs officer, told the board, according to KAMR/KCIT in Amarillo. “This water is all going to be provided from wells that we have drilled on our campus, and we will build and operate a pipeline into a treatment facility up into the greenbelt tank storage tank up in Childress.”
Greenbelt held 3,087 acre-feet of usable storage on Aug. 20 against a capacity of 59,968 acre-feet. An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons — roughly a football field under a foot of water. A year ago the lake held 5,598 acre-feet, or 9.3 percent of capacity, so it has lost nearly half of what remained in twelve months. It is still falling: 5.3 percent a week ago, 5.2 percent on the day of the Lancium meeting, 5.1 percent on Aug. 20. Childress and the communities Greenbelt serves are under Stage 4 drought restrictions.
Holly Holcomb, chief executive of Childress Regional Medical Center, said, “if there was a water suspension or a water decrease or even a water quality issue, number one, we would have to stop dialysis treatments.” Nineteen patients were receiving dialysis at the hospital that morning, she told the board, and water problems could also affect chemotherapy, surgeries and deliveries.
Data centers have mostly entered the Texas water conversation as a claim on supply rather than a potential source of it, which is what makes the Childress offer unusual: the company is proposing to bring its own water and hand some of it to the town. Lancium said three wells would be dedicated to the Greenbelt project and kept separate from the water its campus needs for construction and operations, and that modeling by Jacobs Engineering found the project could run without pulling the Blaine Aquifer, the source, below its established threshold. That model has not been made public.
The volume is the number missing from the record. McFarland said the company hopes the project can supply “hundreds of thousands of gallons” of treated water a day. No firm daily figure was given at the meeting.
Not everyone in the room was reassured. Roger Browning, a farmer, said the supply would help in the short run without fixing what is underneath it. “For short term it’s going to be great. It’s going to help build up a water supply, but it’s going to be a false narrative,” Browning said. “We’re already in stage four drought restrictions.”
Nothing has been agreed. Greenbelt General Manager Bobbie Kidd said the board favored the proposal but that terms, water quality work and permits all remain. “All the board members were in favor of it today,” Kidd said. “Of course, we’re a long ways from having water running, and there’s a lot of hoops to jump through still with water quality. Got a lot of permitting to do right away.” The project needs engineering work and permits from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s environmental regulator, before any water moves. Lancium is aiming to have the supply operating in the first quarter of 2027.
Lancium was among the companies that told Gov. Greg Abbott’s office this month it would comply with the state’s new data center standards, which ask developers to account for their power and water use and their effect on the communities around them.
Lancium and Greenbelt are still negotiating. Between the board meeting and Aug. 20, the lake fell another tenth of a percentage point.