Oklahoma needs to conserve water, legislators told - Oklahoman.com

Oklahoma needs to conserve water, legislators told

Oklahoma is using more water than ever, but not replenishing underground supplies.
M. Scott Carter

Oklahoma should increase efforts to store water below ground and not rely solely on "surface evaporation basins," a university professor advised state lawmakers on Tuesday.

Speaking at an interim study on underground aquifers at the state Capitol, Todd Halihan told members of the House Natural Resources Committee that more than 98 percent of the fresh water available to humans comes from under the ground. Halihan is a professor and the interim director of the Boone Pickens School of Geology at Oklahoma State University,

He urged lawmakers to consider storing water underground instead of on the surface because surface water evaporates and quality water, he said, was essential to human health.

"Water, the ability to drink it and the ability to ignore it is a pretty new thing for our society," he said.

Halihan said most modern people look at a city and believe facilities such as a hospital keep them alive. "But from my perspective, I point to the water processing plant. That's the main way most people stay healthy. Half of us wouldn't have made it if it wasn't for clean water," he said.

Halihan said too often policymakers spend time and money regulating surface water and not paying enough attention to underground water.

"If you're going to have water during a drought, it's making sure the groundwater got filled in before it (the drought) started."

Large amounts of water evaporate, Halihan said, adding that almost everything humans do increases the amount of water vapor.

"Across the western U.S. we built large surface reservoirs all over the place, and we called them reservoirs as storage locations," he said. Using Hoover Dam, near Las Vegas, as an example, Halihan said the dam wasn't as much a water reservoir as it was an evaporation basin.

If the ground has space, put the water down there, he said. "That would be a great way to keep your water stored and not have it disappear during droughts."

But Halihan also urged lawmakers to develop better water usage policies.

"We've pumped enough out of the ground we've actually changed the tilt of the earth," Halihan said. "We can quantify that. As we are wobbling through space, we've actually changed the wobble by taking the water off the continent and dumping it into the ocean. As we go into the future, we need to convert that to 'let's fill it up and not let's drain it out.'"

That problem isn't new. In Oklahoma, the use of underground aquifers has increased even though those aquifers aren't refilling properly. Long a contentious issue in the Sooner State, water and access to it continues to generate legislative scrutiny.

Statewide estimates from a 2015 report by the U.S. Geological Survey show the average Oklahoman uses about 65 gallons of water per day. Nationwide, water use during the same period was estimated at about 322 billion gallons per day.

Oklahoma City — which supplies water to several communities around it — reported this year that it treats and delivers about 100 million gallons of water every day for more than 1.4 million Oklahomans in 17 different communities.

Oklahoma has several large surface reservoirs including Sardis Lake in southeastern Oklahoma, the Kaw Reservoir near Ponca City and the Canton Reservoir near Canton. About a decade ago, state officials, the city of Oklahoma City and the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations were locked in a two-year legal battle over the sale of water storage rights from Sardis Lake.

At the same time, in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Oklahoma in a six-year-long lawsuit between the state and the Tarrant County Water District over water sales from the Red River. The water district, which serves Fort Worth and other North Texas communities, had sought to purchase water from Oklahoma, but Oklahoma lawmakers passed legislation that prevented the sale. Texas officials tried to force the sale but lost.

Tuesday's hearing, conducted by state Rep. Carl Newton, R-Cherokee, looked at the history and impact of the state's underground aquifers. Because the state has a limited supply of surface water, Newton said farmers, ranchers and other consumers are forced to rely on aquifers to provide water for people, animals and crops.

"I want to look at how much water we've consumed from our underground aquifers and how it has been used so that we can determine best practices to preserve this precious resource going forward," he said in a media statement about the study.

Julie Cunningham, director of the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, told lawmakers the state has a 10-year water plan that is updated regularly.

"It provides an opportunity to engage stakeholders," she said. "We're in the middle of updating the plan right now."

Cunningham said the 2012 version of the plan included calls for new infrastructure and monitoring of water use. She also pointed to positive changes in state water policy such as legislation that allowed the use of brackish water — water that has a higher than normal concentration of salt but less salt than seawater.

"Before, if a well driller drilled a well and it came out that the water was slightly brackish — over 10,000 parts per million — they had to plug the well," she said. "Now, we can actually use the well and treat that water."

Cunningham said the goal was to expand the water supplies the state has and to manage those supplies.

With new changes expected to the state's long-term water plan and the expected growth of the state's urban areas, and the ag and energy industries, experts say water policy will remain a difficult topic. Legislators will return to the Capitol in February for the 2024 session.