Reporting on Texas water -- drought and supply, reservoirs and groundwater, utility infrastructure, conservation rules, and the growing competition for a finite resource.
Farms, factories and water utilities that pump from the Edwards Aquifer are back under the deepest cut in the aquifer's drought plan: a 35 percent reduction in their permitted withdrawals, up from 30 percent.
Farms, factories and water utilities that pump from the Edwards Aquifer will now have their permitted withdrawals cut 30 percent instead of 35 percent, after the agency that regulates the aquifer moved the San Antonio Pool back to a less severe drought stage.
Texas environmental regulators will decide Oct. 7 whether people living near a planned biogas plant in Ellis County get a formal hearing before the state lets it spray treated waste across 4,553 acres of farmland.
The three members of the Texas Water Development Board meet Oct. 1 to decide whether to raise Kerr County's flood-warning grant to $6.85 million — more than five times what the county holds now, and about 14 percent of the $50 million the Legislature set aside for 30 counties.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved the final discharge permit for the Harbor Island desalination plant on Sept. 23, two days before a Corpus Christi lawmaker told a Texas Tribune Festival audience that seawater desalination is a key issue for the next legislative session.
The Texas House Committee on Natural Resources will gavel in at 10 a.m. Mountain time Oct. 6 at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research Center in El Paso to hear invited and public testimony on the Rio Grande Compact and oversight of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, followed by invited-only testimony on new water supply strategies, according to the official hearing notice.
The board that oversees Texas's 216 local soil and water conservation districts opens its members' annual convention at 7 a.m. Sept. 28 with a vote on whether certain landowners may collect state water-quality money a second time.
Farms, factories and city water systems that pump from the Edwards Aquifer must cut their withdrawals by 35 percent after the aquifer's key monitoring well dropped below 640 feet, six weeks after the region had climbed out of the same drought stage.
The three members of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality will decide Sept. 23 whether people who objected to a seawater desalination plant at Port Aransas get a trial-like hearing, or whether the permit moves toward approval without one.
Texas regulators cleared ExxonMobil on Sept. 15 to bury 53 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in the rock beneath a farming community southwest of Beaumont, over neighbors’ objections that the nearest house sits less than a mile from a well.
The 6,000 people who get their drinking water from Greenbelt Lake have been boiling it since Sept. 8, the reservoir behind the tap is down to 4.7 percent of the water it was built to hold, and the company that has offered to fix the problem is a data center operator with wells of its own.
Every day, Texas oil and gas wells bring roughly 26 million barrels of salt water to the surface — more than a billion gallons.
About one out of every ten acres of Texas cropland that depends on rain rather than irrigation has been given up on this year.
The four-member state board that has to sign off before most Texas bonds reach the market meets Sept. 17 to vote on a water borrowing authorized at up to $2.2 billion.