05/20/2025
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Could a $6 billion plan solve some of Texas’ water supply problems?© Marvin Pfeiffer, San Antonio Express-News
Canyon Lake in Comal County is currently about 46% full, according to data from the Texas Water Development Board. The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, which manages releases from the dam, is planning a new water supply project throughout the Guadalupe River basin to keep up with increasing demand.
As fast-growing cities, utilities and businesses clamor for more water in drought-stricken Central Texas, an ambitious $6 billion plan is emerging to meet some of their demand.
The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority wants to build a new reservoir to hold water from the river, and construct more than 250 miles of pipeline to move that water throughout the river basin, which runs from Kerr County to the Gulf Coast.
Dubbed the “WaterSecure Project,” officials say the plan would primarily rely on existing water rights that the authority already has for surface water from Guadalupe River, but it could potentially incorporate aquifer storage and brackish water desalination.
READ MORE: Canyon Lake is at a historic low, and it’s going to get worse. Here’s why.
If it becomes a reality, the first water from the project would be delivered in 2033, with more available by the 2040s as the project is expanded, the river authority said. It expects utilities throughout the region to participate, purchasing water and paying back bonds issued for the project.
The project could involve a new reservoir in Calhoun County, a new treatment plant, new desalination plant and underground storage wells in Gonzales County, and pipelines running all the way from the new reservoir to Kendall, Comal and Hays counties, according to regional water planning documents.
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It would be the latest large infrastructure project aiming to move water around the region, and likely the most expensive to date, with an estimated price tag more than double the cost of San Antonio’s Vista Ridge pipeline.
In recent years, the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority and other utilities have also spent hundreds of millions of dollars building their own pipelines to bring in groundwater from the Carrizo Aquifer east of Interstate 35 to shore up their supplies, but the WaterSecure project would be the first large-scale system aimed at transporting surface water throughout Central Texas.
“We’ve consistently seen explosive growth in this region,” said Charlie Hickman, the river authority’s executive manager of engineering. “That drives a need for new water supply for the region, and our
WaterSecure is a regional project that will help fill in a portion of the future projected demands.”
A regional approach
The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority regulates water in the Guadalupe River Basin, which runs from the river’s headwaters in Kerr County to the coast near Victoria. The agency provides water and wastewater services in 10 counties. Its water customers include New Braunfels Utilities, Boerne and San Marcos, among others, though no municipal utilities rely solely on the river authority for their entire water supplies.
The river authority also controls releases from Canyon Lake in Comal County except during flood conditions, and is permitted to take an average of 90,000 acre-feet per year from the reservoir to provide to customers. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover 1 acre in 1 foot of water; one acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons. But that water isn’t enough to keep up increasing demand, the river authority said, and its customers from the Hill Country to the coast are looking for more.
Enter WaterSecure, which river authority General Manager Darrell Nichols said would provide 100,000 acre-feet of “new firm water supply.” That means the water would be available and reliable during the drought of record, the most severe drought conditions used for water planning in Texas — currently, those rights aren’t considered firm, which is what utilities and cities want.
Nichols told the Comal County Commissioners Court in April that the river authority has spoken to utilities and cities throughout the region, including NBU, San Marcos, Kyle and Texas Water Company, about participating as customers.
PHOTOS: See how the drought is affecting Central Texas lakes
Visions of a new reservoir
Hickman said the bulk of the new supply would come from the river authority’s existing surface water rights, stored in a new off-channel reservoir in a location to be determined.
Most reservoirs in Texas are “on-channel,” meaning they’re created by damming the main channel of a river to hold back water in that location. That’s the case with Canyon Lake and the Highland Lakes west of Austin.
Off-channel reservoirs, however, are filled by diverting and pumping water from the river to a new location. Instead of building a dam on the Guadalupe River to create the new storage, the river authority would build the infrastructure to store water outside the river’s path.
Nichols said the authority doesn’t currently have property “under control” for that part of the project.
“We’ve identified potential locations,” he said.
That site is likely to be in Calhoun County, according to the South Central Texas Regional Water Planning Group’s initial plan for 2026. The group is made up of representatives from water utilities and providers, cities, counties and other agencies, including the river authority, and is tasked with created state-mandated regional water plans every five years.
That document, completed in March, describes WaterSecure as including diversion of surface water from the lower Guadalupe-San Antonio River Basin in Refugio County and storage in a new reservoir in Calhoun County. Water would then be carried north through Victoria and DeWitt counties to Gonzales County, where water would also be diverted from the river.
A new water treatment plant in Gonzales County would be used to treat the raw surface water, which would then be carried north and northwest to customers in Caldwell, Hays, Guadalupe, Comal and Kendall counties, according to the plan.
The project would not change how the river authority is managing Canyon Lake, Nichols said.
Two other methods could also be used to bolster the new supply: aquifer storage and recovery, in which water is injected underground and held there until it’s needed; and brackish groundwater desalination, the process of removing salt from water to make it safe to drink. Both methods are becoming more popular in Texas amid increasing demand for water supplies.
Hickman said the river authority is still considering “a few candidate sites” for where it could get brackish groundwater.
“We’ve been going out doing various groundwater quality testing and just evaluating different places and seeing where it makes the most sense to combine that with some of the surface water infrastructure that we’ve already planned,” Hickman said.
The river authority is also still assessing potential aquifer storage locations, he said.
READ MORE: Why more Texas utilities are storing their water underground
According to the regional planning document, both the aquifer storage and brackish groundwater wellfields could be in the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer in Gonzales County, where the river authority already has groundwater rights to pump water for another supply project.
To move the water throughout the basin from a downstream reservoir to upstream customers, the river authority would build more than 250 miles of pipeline, “from the coast all the way to the Hill Country,” Hickman said.
Building the pipeline and treatment plants accounts for the bulk of the cost of the $6 billion project: “In preliminary estimates, construction costs generally account for 60% to 70% of total costs with engineering, permitting, and land acquisition accounting for the remaining costs,” GBRA said.
The transmission pipeline alone is expected to cost nearly $1.9 billion, according to cost estimates in the regional plan.
READ MORE: SAWS turns saltwater into drinking water every day. Here’s how it works.
Planning more pipelines
The WaterSecure project wouldn’t be unique in using massive pipe infrastructure to move water around.
In 2020, the San Antonio Water System completed work on its own pipeline, the $2.8 billion Vista Ridge project, which carries groundwater 140 miles from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer in Burleson County to San Antonio.
Several Central Texas entities have built their own pumps and pipelines to move water from the same aquifer. San Marcos, Kyle, Buda and the Canyon Regional Water Authority combined to form the Alliance Regional Water Authority for the effort. The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, which has its own groundwater rights nearby, shares some of that infrastructure.
The river authority started receiving water from that project in 2023 and is currently bringing in about 15,000 acre-feet per year; work to expand the capacity of that new system is still ongoing and when complete, it’s expected to provide 24,000 acre-feet per year.
The river authority is not currently looking at using the WaterSecure system to transport water from the Gulf to the Hill Country, an idea some have suggested as a solution to the region’s water woes.
Texas does not have any active seawater desalination plants, and pursuing that would be more expensive than the current project plans, river authority officials said.
Brackish water has salinity levels between fresh water and salt water. Saltier seawater requires more pressure to treat, meaning more energy is required, which typically increases the cost of treatment. The leftover salt, or brine, also needs to be handled after treatment, an issue that’s been a flashpoint in Corpus Christi’s efforts to build a seawater desalination plant.
“The energy cost, along with the infrastructure cost of how you’d have to treat that seawater and dispose of that brine is a significant cost — and much higher than what the cost of this project is,” Nichols said. However, it could be considered in the future, if it became more comparable to other options.
“The transmission system, that corridor that we’re building, would allow for us to potentially integrate that at some point down the road,” he said.
READ MORE: As Texas eyes desalination, critics want protections for the coast
Paying for the project
The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority is working to get commitments from participants who will receive water from WaterSecure — and who will then pay for the massive project.
The river authority intends to use long-term loan programs available from the Texas Water Development Board to finance the project, including programs like the State Water Implementation Fund for Texas, which finances water projects through bonds. The state agency is working to finance $27 billion in state water plan projects over the next 50 years, according to its website.
“Each participant will determine their source of revenue for paying their share of the costs,” the river authority said, which could include revenue from water sales and capital contributions from developers and industrial customers.
The Texas Legislature is considering allocating additional and recurring funds for water needs in the state, which Nichols said could also be used to help fund the project.
The billions would be spent over eight to nine years or longer, he said, as the river authority gradually builds each component of the system.
In April, the river authority’s board authorized Nichols to begin negotiating memorandums of understanding with customers who want to participate in the project.
He said those agreements will indicate how much water those customers are looking for from the project, helping refine estimates and planning. Those are expected to be completed this summer, and draft contracts could be available by August or September. To apply for TWDB funding in 2026, those contracts would then need to be finalized by next spring, Nichols said.
The river authority has spoken to more than two dozen retail water providers about the project, Hickman said.
Among them is Texas Water Company, which serves about 78,000 customers in seven Hill Country counties, primarily in Comal, and has said it wants to participate. The private company recently turned down service requests from nine proposed housing developments due to the ongoing drought conditions and water availability concerns.
“To say that I am active in every one of those conversations would probably be to put it mildly,” Texas Water Company president Aundrea Williams said at a recent community forum near Canyon Lake. “That is a priority for us,” she said, and the company wants as much water as possible from WaterSecure.
The river authority’s board has already approved the first commitment to participate in the project: an agreement with Synergen Green Energy, an industrial customer in Calhoun County. The authority will ultimately provide 7 million gallons per day to Synergen from WaterSecure, and will provide half that amount in the interim until the system is up and running.
In addition to negotiating agreements, the river authority is continuing to work on designing the system, Hickman said.
“There’s going to be a lot of stakeholder coordination, a lot of big engineering, design and construction projects, a lot of contracts that are going to have to be issued and managed to make something like this happen,” Hickman said.
Environmental questions
The $6 billion WaterSecure project isn’t the only path the river authority is pursuing to expand its water portfolio to meet rising demand, though another effort has been met with opposition.
For almost two decades, GBRA has been working on what it calls the “Mid-Basin” project, which calls for building one or more reservoirs in Gonzales County that could hold up to 125,000 acre-feet of water.
The river authority applied to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in 2008 for permission to divert up to 75,000 acre-feet per year from the river to use or store for later use. The application didn’t identify the location of new storage locations, but said the water would be diverted “from one or more points within 37-mile diversion reach near the city of Gonzales.”
The permit was approved in 2020, but the National Wildlife Federation filed suit, alleging that potential impacts on fish and wildlife habitats weren’t properly assessed, among other errors.
The National Wildlife Federation challenged the permit “both because of the adverse environmental impacts this individual permit could cause and because of the bad precedent it would set for ignoring state law and TCEQ’s own rules designed to minimize environmental damage and ensure informed decisions,” Myron Hess, the federation’s attorney, said in a news release last year.
READ MORE: Opponents sue to overturn state’s ruling on Guadalupe water rights
In 2024, a Travis County judge overturned the permit, but TCEQ and the river authority appealed. The case is still pending in the 15th Court of Appeals. In a brief filed in January, the river authority said the court should reverse the decision, reinstate the permit “and allow a regional water supplier — which requested this water right 17 years ago — to use state water to satisfy the I-35 corridor’s immense (and growing) demand for water supply.”
Hickman said the authority’s goal is to ultimately have multiple storage locations, increasing reliability. While WaterSecure is a huge project, it’s not enough on it own to meet projected demand for the next 50 years, he said.
Hess said Water Secure is different from the Mid-Basin project because it’s using existing water rights, not seeking new ones. But he said that doesn’t mean there aren’t environmental concerns with the proposal.
While the water rights are already allocated, “the reality is that they’re not using that water now,” he said. That will change once it can be stored and becomes more reliable — and that has implications for San Antonio Bay, where the Guadalupe empties into the Gulf.
“The concern is, what does that mean that that water is no longer going to make it to the bay, for all the organisms in the bay?” Hess said.
Hess said some of those concerns could be addressed with a habitat conservation plan, which the river authority is working on, but that remains to be seen.
Hickman said the river authority’s environmental division is working on various strategies for environmental protections, including river flows and threatened and endangered species.
With increasing demand and use of surface water from the river, “we have a pretty good idea that, as we have droughts like we’re experiencing now, the impacts on our bay system are going to be pretty extreme,” Hess said. That’s the case across the state as water sources are put under more pressure, and more proactive strategies are necessary to protect those ecosystems, he said.
“We’re worried about getting enough water for all the people,” Hess said. “But to me, if you don’t start working on that now, we’re going to be in a world of hurt that we don’t need to be in.”
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