Pickens Still Wants To Drain The Ogallala

The Texas Panhandle is a semi-arid area. The only reason it's not an outright desert is the Ogallala aquifer. The aquifer lies under most of the Panhandle and West Texas (in addition to parts of seven other states), and irrigation and drinking water taken from the aquifer is vital to communities and agriculture in this region.

But T. Boone Pickens (pictured) doesn't care about that. He bought himself a ranch in the Panhandle, and was planning on pumping millions of square feet of water out of the aquifer and selling it to Dallas and Fort Wort and other cities hundreds of miles away.Texas law would have let him do that because it says you own all the water under your land. The problem with that outdated law is that he could drain the entire aquifer just by pumping water from his own land, leaving the residents of the Panhandle and West Texas with vastly inadequate water supplies.

We thought we had prevented Pickens from doing that. The last legislature passed a law limiting the length of water pipelines to around 75 miles. That would be about 300 miles short of the length needed to get the water to the DFW urban area. Then three water districts here in the Panhandle got together and limited the amount of water that can be pumped from the aquifer (to keep the aquifer at a reasonable level). That plan was approved by the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) (over Pickens' objections).

Since he couldn't get the TWDB to kill the water conservation plan, Pickens has now filed suit in an Austin court. He is asking that court to declare the plan invalid, claiming it would cost him $10 million in water rights. Of course, the only way it could cost him anywhere near that much money is if he still has plans to drain the aquifer and sell it to other areas of Texas.

And you might notice that he didn't file this suit in a Panhandle court (whether the water districts are located). He knows if he's going to win this suit, it's going to be in an area of the state with a lot more water than the Panhandle.

You can bet if Pickens is able to get the water conservation plan tossed out, he'll try to do the same with the pipeline limit law. Then there'll be nothing to prevent him from draining the entire aquifer -- hurting people in eight states. Our only hope is that an Austin judge will see through this scheme which will enrich one man while destroying the lives of many others.

This is a perfect example of a capitalist pig ignoring the misery he will cause to millions of people as long as he can fill his bank account with greenbacks. What a greedy and uncaring bastard he really is.