Texas drought

Historic drought causes big drop in Texas portion of Ogallala aquifer

By Kate Galbraith

Desdemona Despair,

4 July, 2012

The historic Texas drought caused the Ogallala Aquifer to experience its largest decline in 25 years across a large swath of the Texas Panhandle, new numbers from a water district show.

The 16-county High Plains Underground Water Conservation District reported this week that its monitoring wells showed an average decline last year of 2.56 feet — the third-largest in the district’s 61-year history, and three times the average rate over the past decade. Farmers pumped more water during the drought to compensate for the lack of rainfall, which was about two-thirds less than normal last year in Lubbock and Amarillo.

Further north in the Panhandle, along the state's border with Oklahoma, a second water district also registered large declines in the Ogallala. Steve Walthour, the general manager of the eight-county North Plains Groundwater Conservation District, calculated on Monday that the average drop in the Ogallala reached 2.9 feet last year.

"We’ve seen some pretty heavy declines," Walthour said, noting that the west side of his district got hit especially hard.

Given the catastrophic nature of the drought, which was the most intense in recorded state history, some farmers said things could have been worse.

“You never want to pull that much down, but under the circumstances I think we’re probably coming out pretty well,” said Tommy Fondren, who rents out his land in Crosby County for cotton farming.

Brad Heffington, a cotton farmer based in Lamb County, pointed out that the Ogallala in the High Plains Underground Water District was essentially stable in 2010, a rainy year that allowed for some replenishing of the aquifer. Some of the counties with larger declines had large amounts of groundwater, he said — and farmers were clearly making use of it, judging from the drops.

One observation well in Floyd County recorded a decline of more than 25 feet, according to the High Plains water district.

Heffington, who is also the chairman of the group Plains Cotton Growers, said that farmers were doing their best to conserve the resource. But “the bottom line is, it’s a finite resource and we’re mining it,” he said. His own farm experienced declines of up to two feet last year, and the place remains exceptionally dry, with less than 5 inches of rain since July 3, 2010. […]

As for this year, farmers say that spring rains have helped, but most of the Panhandle remains in moderate drought, or worse. Fondren is holding out hope for showers soon. "We’re going to go back to pumping pretty hard again if we don’t get some rain," he said.

Climate change: Texas water woes

Thousands Of Texas Farmers Won't Get Irrigation Water For The First Time In History

Business Insider, 2 March, 2012

HOUSTON (AP) — Thousands of Texas rice farmers won't get water for irrigation this year because lakes and rivers remain low after more than a year of drought.

The Lower Colorado River Authority said Friday it won't release water from two Austin-area lakes into the rivers and canals the farmers use for irrigation. The announcement was expected, but notable as the first time in the authority's history that it won't provide the water.

Texas is one of the six largest rice producers in the country, and the farmers in the Colorado River basin make up almost three-quarters of the state's total rice acreage. But without irrigation, many farmers will be able to plant only a fraction of the rice they usually grow, and some won't plant any.

"Farmers were prepared for the almost inevitability of this ... but things came so close at the end, there were some who thought we might get it," said Ronald Gertson, who grows rice in Lissie, about 60 miles southwest of Houston.

Conditions have eased in recent weeks with some significant rains, but two-fifths of the state remains in a severe drought. As of Friday morning, lakes Travis and Buchanan were about 3,200 acre-feet, or more than 1 billion gallons, short of the level they'd need to reach for the farmers to receive water.

A small percentage of farmers, those with senior water rights along the river, will get about 20,000 acre-feet of water. The rest will not get any.

LCRA spokeswoman Clara Tuma had said Thursday that the authority did not expect to reach the 850,000 acre-feet needed to provide water to all farmers.

But even if the lake levels had hit that mark, farmers would have received only 25 percent of the water they needed for their crops for this season, Gertson said. They would have had to break up big fields into smaller ones and do a lot of other improvising to make that work, he said.

"It would not have been the most efficient use of resources," said Gertson, whose family has grown rice in the area for five generations. "So while I'm not happy not to get water, I wouldn't have been jumping for joy to get only 25 percent."

He has estimated he can grow about a third of his rice with groundwater. If he pushes it, he might get about 45 percent of the acres he normally plants. Like many farmers, he had already been looking at what he could do to cut costs and make it through what's clearly going to be a hard year.

The three counties that won't get irrigation water — Wharton, Colorado and Matagorda — are some of the poorest in the state, with poverty levels above the national average. Many farmers in the region alternate between growing rice and ranching, but those with cattle sold off much of their livestock last year as the drought parched rangeland and pushed up hay prices.

Environmental news

Peru's vanishing fish stocks 'devastated' by corruption and growing fishmeal demand

Soaring global demand for fishmeal primarily for animal feed or fish farms, including salmon, is wrecking havoc on the once abundant fish stocks of the southern Pacific

The Ecologist, 

28 January 2012

The fish stocks of the southern Pacific and in particular Peru are being plundered by widespread cheating and overfishing, according to a new investigation.

Peru is the world’s second largest fishing nation after China, with the majority of its catch converted into fishmeal, a feed for farmed fish and pigs. More than a million tons a year exported mostly to Asia, in a trade worth $1.6 billion.

For article GO HERE

U.S. Cattle Inventory Drops to Lowest Since 1952 on Drought

U.S. cattle inventories fell to the lowest in 60 years after a drought in the South scorched pastures, prompting ranchers to shrink herds

Bloomberg, 

28 January, 2012

As of Jan. 1, beef and dairy farmers held 90.77 million head of cattle, down 2.1 percent from a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in a report. That’s the fewest since 1952. Ten analysts in a Bloomberg News survey were expecting a 1.5 percent decline.

“We had one of the biggest droughts in Texas this past year,” Chad Henderson, a market analyst at Prime Agricultural Consultants Inc. in Brookfield, Wisconsin, said in telephone interview before the report. “Guys have been ripping up pasture and planting crops. It’ll take years for this thing to build back up.”

Cattle futures in Chicago surged to a record $1.29675 a pound on Jan. 25. Texas, the top state producer, had its driest year on record in 2011, according to the National Weather Service. The drought destroyed pastures, forcing ranchers to sell or slaughter animals rather than incur feed costs driven up by corn, the main ingredient, which reached an all-time high in 2011.

For article GO HERE

Climate chaos in the United States

In Texas' worst drought on record, trees dying by the millions

MSNBC

The National Weather Service has officially declared last year as the driest on record in Texas and the second hottest. Meteorologists predict the situation won't improve much this year. That means water restrictions will continue, and we'll lose millions of trees.

Record-setting heat and little rain in 2011 has left North Texas in a severe drought. The water level at Lake Lavon is down 12 feet.

“It is a challenging time, especially to bring awareness to our consumers and businesses how critical our drought has impacted our reservoirs,” said Denise Hickey, spokesperson for the North Texas Municipal Water District. “As we're planning to move through this drought period, we're also planning and initiating additional strategies to bring additional sources online.”

The diminished water supply forced many counties to put residents under water restrictions indefinitely.

The Texas Forest Service says the drought may have killed as much as 10 percent of the state's trees. That's 500 million trees.

Some trees in your yard might look dead, but tree experts say don't cut them down yet. They still might come back in the spring and you should continue watering them.

“A lot of trees are dormant and a lot of trees go dormant early when there's a drought situation. And they kind of do that for a defense mechanism,” said Matt Grubisich, urban forester for the Texas Trees Foundation. “Most municipalities still let you use a soaker hose, and that is a very adequate way to be able to still water your trees.”

Forecasters expect the drought to last through at least June.

“It's going to get worse before it gets better,” said Grubisich.

Record Heat in January

This is how the zombie press in the United States talks about climate chaos.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Coal plants

Water. Coal. Texas. Sanity. One of these words does not belong.

Grist, 
21 November, 2011

In case anyone missed it, Texas had a big drought last summer -- the worst one-year drought in the state's history. Lakes dried, animals were slaughtered, cities imposed lawn-watering restrictions, the governor prayed for rain. Among the doom-and-gloom sector of the left, talk has been circulating of Texas as a failed state.

That's easy to dismiss as tit-for-tat revenge for Texas' age-old talk of secession; after all, droughts end, and places recover. Unless they don't: When one takes a hard look at Texas' water supply, and plans to build nine water-intensive coal plants, it becomes clear that the state's apocalyptic droughts are more likely to become the norm than the exception.

The state's water shortage is structural, warns the Texas Water Development Board. Currently the state needs 18 million acre-feet of water, and it has 17 million acre-feet available to it. Aquifers deplete. Population grows. By 2060, the state is expected to need 22 million acre-feet, but only have 15.3 million acre-feet available to it. Because some dry places simply can't have water piped, the total shortfall is projected to be 8.3 million acre-feet. Roughly, the state will have two gallons of water available to it for every three gallons it needs.

Houston, we have a problem.

Currently, 18 cities are high priority -- they'll either run out of water within six months unless the rains come, or they don't know how much water they have. Texas' water supply for the future is uncertain, and the health of Galveston Bay, home of the state's most commercially productive estuary, is in jeopardy. Last week, voters approved one of two water-related measures on the ballot -- a water bond to build dams, but that's no short-term solution for a state whose wildfire "season" is now over one year old.

In the meantime, the state is blithely planning multiple power projects to meet projected population growth -- nine coal plants in planning stages will be added to the 19 to 20 coal-fired power plants already in the state.

Most electricity power plants require large amounts of water. How large? Short answer: a lot, but no one knows. Medium answer: Thirsty power plants threaten watersheds, and Texas' coal plants are among the nation's thirstiest:

“Coal-fired plants alone account for 67 percent of freshwater withdrawals by the power sector and for 65 percent of the water completely consumed by it, the report said. Newer plants include air-cooling or "dry cooling" technologies, but so many plants rely on water-cooling that they accounted for 41 percent of the withdrawals of freshwater in the United States in 2005, according to the United States Geological Survey.”

In more detail, a Union of Concerned Scientists report on freshwater use by power sources begins by noting the impact on drought-stricken Texas:

“As of late summer 2011, Texas had suffered the driest 10 months since record keeping began in 1895 (LCRA 2011). Some rivers, such as the Brazos, actually dried up (ClimateWatch 2011). The dry weather came with brutal heat: Seven cities recorded at least 80 days above 100 degrees F (Dolce and Erdman 2011). With air conditioners straining to keep up, the state's demand for electricity shattered records as well, topping 68,000 megawatts in early August (ERCOT 2011).

“An energy-water collision wasn't far behind. One plant had to curtail nighttime operations because the drought had reduced the amount of cool water available to bring down the temperature of water discharged from the plant (O'Grady 2011; Sounder 2011). In East Texas, other plant owners had to bring in water from other rivers so they could continue to operate and meet demand for electricity. If the drought were to persist into the following year, operators of the electricity grid warned, power cuts on the scale of thousands of megawatts are possible (O'Grady 2011).”

State planners have begun to notice the water-intensive nature of coal plants. The White Stallion coal plant, near Bay City, south of Houston, planned to take water from an estuary rich in oyster and shrimp nurseries. Even after promising to switch to a less water-intensive dry-cooling plan, the project has been opposed by farmers who don't have water to sell. This week, the Lower Colorado River Authority recently rejected a water contract that would have given White Stallion a 25,000 acre-feet-per-year water permit. Citizens of Sweetwater, in west Texas, were outraged upon hearing that the city was secretly negotiating sale of water rights for a so-called clean coal project.

Texas will stay thirsty. A structural water shortage is a permanent water shortage that can only be solved by a drastic change -- less agriculture, fewer people, more water from somewhere else (dams? desalination? Oklahoma?). More coal plants sucking more water from rivers and estuaries is not part of a sane water policy. Some alternatives to coal-fired electricity are just as water-intensive; natural gas power plants are frugal users of water, but extraction of natural gas through fracking uses billions of gallons of water. Fortunately, one electricity source uses virtually no water and is plentiful throughout west Texas: wind energy.