Oklahoma facing a water crisis

Water demand will outpace supply over the next fifty years unless mitigations are implemented, experts say.

Editor’s note: Kirkpatrick Policy Group advocates for issues that affect all Oklahomans, including animal well-being. Protecting our state’s natural resources has far-reaching ramifications such as the betterment of wildlife and farm animal populations.

Oklahoma’s fresh water supply will not meet projected demand over the next fifty years, state experts testified during an interim study before the House Energy and Natural Resources Committee on October 24.

The reason for the shortage cannot be attributed to one cause but rather a system of factors that include population and economic growth, inefficient water infrastructure and irrigation, a lack of adaptability in the face of climate change, and a misunderstanding at governmental levels of how water cycles work, the panel of experts from several state agencies said.

The study, hosted by Representative Carl Newton, focused on causes of Oklahoma’s rising water demand and possible solutions to mitigate its dwindling supply. The Oklahoma Water Resources Board is currently updating its Oklahoma Comprehensive Water Plan, a guiding document updated every ten years that provides a high-level look at water use in the state, OWRB Executive Director Julie Cunningham said. “We’ve got twenty-three major (groundwater) basins that store an estimated 320 million acre-feet of water.”

The number of wells dug in Oklahoma has increased exponentially since 1970, and recent droughts have forced farmers and ranchers to rely on water pumped from groundwater sources like the Ogallala aquifer in northwestern Oklahoma, which is being depleted faster than it can naturally recharge, Cunningham said.

During rainy seasons, flood waters are not captured efficiently, running off into streams and rivers that eventually flow into the Gulf of Mexico. To make matters worse, water infrastructure systems that service agricultural land and rural communities lose up to 30 percent of the water they carry, Cunningham said. “Let’s fix those leaks,” she said.

Surface reservoirs built to capture and store water for human use act instead as large evaporation basins, sending millions of gallons of fresh water into the atmosphere, said Dr. Todd Halihan, geology professor at Oklahoma State University and interim head of the OSU Boone Pickens School of Geology. Oklahoma City’s Lake Hefner is a prime example, losing four-and-a-half feet per year to evaporation, Halihan said. “We’ve got to manage that a bit better. This summer a study came out that says we’ve pumped enough water out of the ground that we’ve actually changed the tilt of the Earth.”

A solution already implemented in Australia calls for artificially recharging aquifers by pumping excess water back into them. Water stored underground is less susceptible to evaporation, and the process can also be used to create hydroelectric power that will be necessary later when the water must be pumped back out during drought, Halihan said.

However, water quality can be an issue when artificially recharging an aquifer. According to the American Geosciences Institute, river water and treated wastewater are best suited for this, as opposed to storm water, which can pick up pollutants as it flows overground. Water is naturally filtered as it seeps into underground aquifers, whereas deep injection methods do not receive that benefit. Regulatory parameters – environmental and economic – should be established to govern this new commodity, Halihan said.

The soil itself can store much more water when managed with regenerative farming techniques, said Greg Kloxin, assistant director of water quality for the Oklahoma Conservation Commission. “It has been shown in research that for every 1 percent of organic matter in the soil, you can store 25,000 gallons of water per acre,” Kloxin said.

Since man began farming in Oklahoma, there has been about a 2.5 to 3 percent loss in organic matter in soils. One way to keep moisture in the soil is to adopt no-till farming techniques; another is to plant cover crops between cash crops, Kloxin said.

Through photosynthesis, plants take carbon out of the air and move it into the soil, increasing the soil’s organic content while removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “(Soil) is not just a medium for growth. It’s a medium for water storage,” Kloxin said.

A second series of OWRB public meetings aimed at receiving stakeholder input as officials work to update Oklahoma’s Comprehensive Water Plan are scheduled across the state beginning December 5. A meeting schedule can be found here.