City planners in Austin, Texas, are entertaining location options for a large aquifer storage and recovery project that would aid the city during droughts.
According to KUT 90.5, the Austin NPR Station, residents from Lee, Bastrop and Travis counties will meet with the city planners about location options. The storage space is intended to be 60,000 acre feet of underground storage by 2040 with a goal of reaching 240,000 acre feet by 2115. Once complete, the estimated cost is $367 million dollars.
According to Austin Water’s official fact sheet regarding this project, the primary driver of this project’s need is climate and drought resilience.
ASR was approved as part of the Water Forward Plan along with a suite of conservation, reuse, and other supply options that will be implemented. Modeling performed in Water Forward shows the need for additional supply strategies by 2040 to manage risks associated with climate change and droughts worse than the drought of record, and ASR is a major drought and resiliency strategy to help manage those risks. Water stored in an ASR will improve Austin’s climate resiliency by serving as a second source of water in drought or emergency situations, such as water quality upsets.
The Austin Water ASR website explained how historic drought from 2008 to 2016 in Central Texas brought Highland Lakes water levels to “historically low levels.” This moment is what created Water Forward, which is intended to create “an integrated plan to guide Austin’s water future for the next 100 years.”
According to quotes NPR Austin gathered from Marisa Flores Gonzalez, supervisor of Austin Water’s resources team, water rights are a critical part of the process of the project. Landowners in Texas have the authority to pump water from under their property, which presents some challenges in the design.
"Our intent with this project would be to implement it in a way that would allow us to maintain control over the water we would be storing,” Florez-Gonzalez said to NPR Austin. "We're not intending to remove more groundwater than we would be putting into the project.”
While the location of the aquifer storage and recovery project has not officially been decided, Austin Water has begun hydrological surveys to determine options based on science. NPR Austin also reported Florez-Gonzalez saying the utility will complete an “equity and affordability” study with the express purpose of distributing burdens and benefits appropriately for the project.
The site of the project is intended to be chosen by 2024, after which a pilot program will begin to determine efficacy of a full-scale design.
Learn more about the project with the following resources:
