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Contact:
Steve Stevens -
Mesa Water
(214)265-4165
Dallas, TX - 5/15/2002
Mesa Water Inc. announced today that the Mesa Group landowners have received pumping permits from the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District to annually remove up to one acre-foot of water per surface acre from the Ogallala Aquifer beneath their private land in the northeast Texas Panhandle. The water can be delivered to any political subdivision or water authority in the State of Texas designated to the District as required.
Mesa Water is comprised of landowners in Roberts County that have previously announced plans to market the water to higher-population areas of the State that face long-term water shortages – as far away as North Texas, San Antonio and El Paso – or as close as communities in the Panhandle and West Texas.
“Today’s decision by the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District basically gives us the same rights granted in 1997 to the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority (CRMWA) and in 2000 to the City of Amarillo,” said Boone Pickens, president of Mesa Water and also a Roberts County rancher and landowner.
Under the terms of the local District’s permits, at least 50 percent of the Ogallala Aquifer’s 1998 volume must remain in place in 2050, thereby assuring up to a 200-year supply. In addition to the approximately 150,000 acres allied with the Mesa Group, CRMWA has 43,000 acres and Amarillo has 72,000 acres. CRMWA began pumping water from its well field in December 2001.
The northeast Texas Panhandle is not well suited for farming; only about 100,000 acres are under irrigation out of 2.5 million acres in the four counties of Ochiltree, Lipscomb, Roberts and Hemphill. Moreover, there is no projected demand for additional water in the area due to modest growth forecasts and the existence of the CRMWA and Amarillo acreage.
“The Region A (Amarillo) Planning Group declined to include our water in their 50-year plan,” said Pickens, “so this is stranded, surplus water that can best be put to use in more water-needy regions of the State.”
He added that Mesa will continue to study possibilities for using a portion of the water in West Texas, while at the same time stepping up efforts to assess interest from the other more populous markets.
Pickens said Mesa Water’s pumping permits are the most critical step yet in the group’s efforts to sell their water and that “we will now move ahead aggressively to do just that.
“The permits put us on an equal footing with CRMWA and the City of Amarillo in that we now have the right to extract the water,” he said. “These landowners who did not have an opportunity to sell to CRMWA and Amarillo earlier like some of their neighbors, will now have that same right to realize the economic value of their water,” he said.
“We’ve also been assured by investment bankers of financing to deliver water to any of the markets we’ve identified,” said Pickens, “and engineering firms have prepared studies showing that a pipeline can be constructed to deliver the water at competitive prices.”
Because of the significant costs associated with removing and transporting water over great distances, Mesa Water’s marketing efforts have largely concentrated on several of the state’s most populous areas, including North Texas, San Antonio and El Paso. Pickens said now that the production permits have been issued, the group could be delivering water in time to protect against anticipated shortages in those areas.
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