A West Texan hopes for floods or an aquifer-recharging hurricane.
The Guardian reports:
Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry’s outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.
In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart’s case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking…
“We’ve got to get floods. We’ve got to get a hurricane to move up in our country and just saturate everything to replenish the aquifer,” he said. “Because when the water is gone. That’s it. We’re gone.”
This is Junk Science: Why the drought conditions and lack of rain not fracking is why there a water shortages Nielsen-Gammon said although rainfall in Texas has increased over the past century, climate models predict that annual rainfall will decrease by 2060.
“It’s hard to say whether [the models] are wrong about them or if the trend will reverse itself,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “It’s too early to tell.”
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news/2013/04/05/statewide-water-shortage-threatens-texas-economy-population-growth
So there been a lack of rain long before fracking ever came a long.
The most visible evidence of how dry the 1930s became was the dust storm. Tons of topsoil were blown off barren fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles. Technically, the driest region of the Plains – southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas – became known as the Dust Bowl, and many dust storms started there. But the entire region, and eventually the entire country, was affected.
The Dust Bowl got its name after Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. More and more dust storms had been blowing up in the years leading up to that day. In 1932, 14 dust storms were recorded on the Plains. In 1933, there were 38 storms. By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of the topsoil to the winds. By April 1935, there had been weeks of dust storms, but the cloud that appeared on the horizon that Sunday was the
The impact of the Dust Bowl was felt all over the U.S. During the same April as Black Sunday, 1935, one of FDR’s advisors, Hugh Hammond Bennett, was in Washington D.C. on his way to testify before Congress about the need forsoil conservation legislation. A dust storm arrived in Washington all the way from the Great Plains. As a dusty gloom spread over the nation’s capital and blotted out the sun, Bennett explained, “This, gentlemen, is what I have been talking about.” Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act that same year.
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/water_02.html
”Myth No. 2: A huge amount of water is used in the fracking process.
Producing natural gas from shale formations requires a smaller fraction of the water required to produce other sources of energy such as coal and nuclear. In 2010, the 3,500 shale-gas wells drilled in the United States used about 0.02 percent of total water used in the country.Companies drilling in the Marcellus and
Utica shale formations are rapidly adopting wastewater recycling that allows the returned frack fluid to be treated and reused in fracturing other wells, thus allaying other concerns over wastewater disposal. Some
companies are now recycling as much as 70 percent of their wastewater, reusing the millions of gallons of water needed to frack a well, and some are recycling 100 percent of their wastewater” Professor Robert W. Chase, professor and chairman of the Department of
Petroleum Engineering and Geology at Marietta College, January 27, 2012.