Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Ready to unpack the powerful stories of a Texas titan - the Brazos River? Listen as experts explain the Brazos River Basin's immense role in our daily lives. They'll cover everything from the river's fascinating history to all the work that goes into ensuring you have water when you turn on your faucet.
Hear invaluable insights on topics like why lake levels change, the important projects safeguarding our water, the many species that call the Brazos home, and even some tips for enjoying the water from Brazos River Authority experts.
This is your chance to understand the immense work that goes into developing, managing, and protecting the Brazos River Basin, which stretches from the Texas-New Mexico border to the Gulf. (The basin is the size of Tennessee, y’all, it’s big.)
It’s a huge part of our state’s story and we can’t wait to share it with you.
Clay Sellers: Got questions about the Brazos? No more unknowns. Ever wonder where that water comes from or where it goes? We're Unpacking the Brazos River.
Charlie L Shugart: If your dock is sitting in the mud or that lakeside park you love is underwater, it's easy to assume the people in charge have totally checked out. But here's the weird part. For a lot of these lakes, the apparent chaos actually means the system is working exactly how it's supposed to. The Brazos River Basin is full of different types of lakes. I know it sounds like total bureaucratic hair-splitting, but these differences literally determine why your favorite weekend spot acts the way it does. Why, one summer, the reservoir may be full and the next it’s several feet low. Why that annual camping trip you've been waiting all year for may be underwater for the first time. Put on your life jacket because we're going deep into how our water actually works. Welcome back to Unpacking the Brazos River. I'm Charlie Shugart, and I've got two guys with me who spend their lives worrying about this, so we don't have to. Aaron Abel is the BRA's water service manager, and Chris Higgins is a BRA lead hydrologist. These guys live and breathe this stuff. Aaron, first time in the pod. Welcome to the hot seat. Give us the Cliff's Notes of your history with the organization.
Aaron Abel: Great to be here, Charlie. I started at BRA in 2008, so it's been roughly eighteen years or so. And I've been in the water services department ever since. So, yeah, it's fun. Every day is a new day, and it's a lot of questions. And I think these podcasts are awesome, great platform, and I really appreciate you hosting these, and so we're glad to be here.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. No. Absolutely. This wouldn't have been done if you guys hadn't come in and answer all my questions. So, I appreciate that. And Chris, glad you could join us. Tell us a little bit about what you do. How long have you been with the BRA?
Chris Higgins: Oh, hey, Charlie. Yeah. Thanks. So, I started in 2006. This coming up March will be twenty years or so. I was originally hired as the water resources planner, and I was charged with at least starting the BRA's first water management plan. I served in that capacity for a few years until I was promoted to the hydrologist position, where I began, like, doing all that day-to-day type management of the BRA water supply system. I helped the organization transition with the establishment of the Brazos Watermaster back in 2015 and then helped integrate the BRA System Operations permit and water accounting plan. And so that's pretty much where I am today. I'm excited to answer your questions, and let's go. What do you got?
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Let's do it. Okay. So where do we begin? Do y'all know how many reservoirs are in the state itself?
Aaron Abel: So, I will say it depends on your definition of reservoir.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Explain.
Aaron Abel: Some folks think, you know, they have 100 acres or so, and they have a couple of stock tanks. Somebody could argue that those are reservoirs. But if we're just talking about major reservoirs, and when I say major, Texas Water Development Board has a definition of a major reservoir as a reservoir capacity being anything larger than 5,000-acre feet. And so, an acre foot, it's probably been defined here or there, but one acre foot is about 326,000 gallons. It covers roughly a football field inundated with a foot depth of water. That is one acre-foot. So, 5,000-acre feet is a decent size.
Charlie L Shugart: A lot of football fields.
Aaron Abel: A lot of football fields.
Aaron Abel: So, The Texas Water Development Board has an awesome website. It's www.waterdatafortexas.org. And they have a compilation of data specific to all the reservoirs and the major reservoirs across the state. So, there's, you know, roughly about 200 of those major reservoirs in the state.
Chris Higgins: If you count all those smaller reservoirs that are, like, 10-acre feet or larger, you're looking at 8,000 plus.
Charlie L Shugart: Oh, wow. Okay.
Chris Higgins: And if you count my dad's stock tank there in Gatesville, it's 8,001. His isn't 10-acre feet. You know, typically, you know, a smaller stock tank is going to be two, three, four-acre feet. I've calculated my dad's tank, and it's about three-acre feet.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Chris Higgins: You have a lot of these. They call them PL 56, public law five sixty-six, which were built back in the fifties and sixties by what was then the Soil Conservation Service, which is now the NRCS, the Natural Resource Conservation Service. Those were flood retarding dams to lower flooding on a lot of the tributaries in Texas. You have a lot of those scattered out, and those are relatively large, but you know, they're not part of those that Aaron was just saying, they're not 5,000-acre feet or larger.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Okay. So, it depends on your definition, size.
Aaron Abel: Yeah. I would say larger reservoirs and, you know, getting back to the acre foot, that's a definition or a term and a volumetric term, you know, for what we call big water. You know, most of the reservoirs in the Brazos, we think that they're large, but comparatively to other reservoirs across the world, they're pretty small.
Charlie L Shugart: Oh, interesting.
Aaron Abel: But, yeah, you could call the more major reservoirs you call them big water.
Charlie L Shugart: Big water. So, I’m going to 100% start referring to them as. Okay. So, speaking of the Brazos River Basin, zooming in, how many are we talking about there?
Chris Higgins: There's about 40. So, the BRA Water Supply System, of course, we have 11, but there are a lot of pretty significant reservoirs scattered throughout. Some of them are power plant cooling lakes.
Charlie L Shugart: What does that mean?
Chris Higgins: Well, so they were originally intended as cooling ponds for power plants, and so they use evaporative cooling. They withdraw water from the reservoir, and it goes through a, like, a closed cycle. When they produce power, it generates a lot of heat. And so, part of that water gets used to steam, and some of it gets returned back to the reservoir, and it evaporates out. And it's part of the cooling process for these power plants.
Charlie L Shugart: So, it literally cools down the power plant because it gets really hot?
Chris Higgins: Yes.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Okay. Okay. I just want to make sure I understood.
Aaron Abel: Yeah. And those power plant reservoirs, a lot of times, you know, they can't just use the water within the cooling ponds. They have to use another source. You know, it could be, you know, a source of water that is, you know, sourced from our water rights or groundwater or some other supplemental source to make sure that they can regulate the temperature of those reservoirs in a way that optimizes and maximizes the operation of the, you know, steam electric power generation process.
Charlie L Shugart: Interesting. Okay.
Chris Higgins: And then you have other reservoirs that like, the city of Lubbock owns Allens Creek, which BRA …
Aaron Abel: Allen Henry.
Chris Higgins: Allen Henry. Thank you, Aaron. I got Allens Creek on the brain. Smithers Lake is another cooling pond for NRG. Dow Chemical has Lake Brazoria and Lake Harris. There's, like, Lake Mexia up above Lake Limestone and a couple more lakes. There are multiple other reservoirs, but the 11 reservoirs in the BRA Water Supply System are probably the most significant. And I didn't even name, there's a lot in the upper part of the basin, like Fort Phantom Hill. You got Lake Waco here in Waco, which ironically enough, our Central Office is here in Waco, but it's not our lake.
Aaron Abel: The Corps of Engineers owns and operates Lake Waco. The City of Waco owns the water rights within Lake Waco. You know, it's a Corps reservoir that's within the Brazos, but is not integrated within our system. You know, BRA, we obviously, we own and operate Possum Kingdom, Lake Grandbury, Lake Limestone. We have dedicated water rights for water supply in those three reservoirs, but we also have what's called storage agreements. You could also equate it to, like, a lease agreement between BRA and the US Army Corps of Engineers to essentially lease the space within these multipurpose Corps reservoirs for water supply purposes. So, there's, you know, those reservoirs are also used for flood control, I think, you know, we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later. But to put it in perspective, it's kind of, how would you say? There’s a lot of different entities that are involved in just managing and maintaining the raw water. Folks who just turn on the faucet, you know, that's different. That's treated water. And to get from a raw water source to a treated water source or treated supply takes a lot of steps.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. So, you mentioned there were 40 reservoirs in the Brazos River?
Chris Higgins: Yeah. There's roughly around 40 total that are significant reservoirs. We're not talking about those, you know, the smaller PL five sixty-six reservoirs.
Charlie L Shugart: The non-big waters.
Chris Higgins: Yeah. The non-big waters. Yeah.
Charlie L Shugart: And so, the BRA's water supply system deals with 11 of those 40, then?
Aaron Abel: Yes.
Chris Higgins: Yes. And I would say ours, our 11 reservoirs, are probably some of the largest of those 40 reservoirs.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Okay.
Chris Higgins: So, Hubbard Creek is big. Fort Phantom Hill is large - it's big water. You have other reservoirs in the upper basin, Lake Davis and Lake Graham. Those are smaller reservoirs. Fort Phantom Hill, Lake Waco, Hubbard Creek.
Aaron Abel: Allen Henry is a decent size.
Chris Higgins: Even Squaw Creek near Granbury is a fairly decent-sized reservoir. But other than that, the other reservoirs throughout the basin are probably smaller. They're the smaller of the big water.
Charlie L Shugart: It’s good to know because I feel like we get a lot of calls or questions or emails, and there's a little general level of confusion that maybe we own/operate all the reservoirs throughout the Brazos River Basin, but really, it's just a portion of that. Okay. So, we throw the word basin around constantly. Obviously, we've used it several times in this conversation. But for people not in the water world, what does that actually mean? Where are we referring to when we say basin?
Chris Higgins: There are other names for that. There's drainage basin would be probably the more appropriate word for it because a basin can be a bathtub. So, when you're talking about a drainage basin, you're talking about, you know, a large area of land where the water drains into one river. You've also probably heard watershed or catchment. Those are somewhat interchangeable. The way I kind of view it is that typically when you say catchment or watershed, you're talking about, like, a smaller, like, sub basin. You're talking about an individual tributary or part of the river where the water drains into a tributary, then into a river, and then flows down to the Gulf. And I consider a basin or a drainage basin a larger area of land, like the Brazos River Basin. That's kind of the way I see it. It has boundaries. And if you're on the other side of the boundary, it's going to be the other basin that's adjacent to that basin. It's going to drain into that area. That's kind of my definition. What’s your thought?
Aaron Abel: Another thing that folks could visualize is, you know, imagine yourself down at Freeport, you know, surfside area. The water that is flowing out of the Brazos into the Gulf is sourced from somewhere. And it's upstream, obviously, and you can trace a particle of water all the way potentially up from the Lubbock area. And so, every basin or catchment or watershed has an outlet, or essentially, where water ends up and finally moves to, you know, somewhere else. You know, that could be the Gulf, that could be a reservoir, it could be a confluence or the meeting of a tributary or a stream to the main river. You know, obviously, water typically flows from high elevation to low elevation, so it can be confusing. But Chris is right. I mean, you can have my two hands cupped together. That could be a basin.
Charlie L Shugart: Now, is it only defined as long as it has an ….
Aaron Abel: An outlet.
Charlie L Shugart: That's the word. Yeah.
Aaron Abel: Yeah Well, there could be closed basins.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Okay. Okay
Aaron Abel: I think and correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, but, like, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, I think, there are certain basins that are closed, and they don't have an outlet. In the sense that, you know, we deal with rivers, you know, streams, etcetera, those basins or catchments or watersheds, you know, typically have an outlet. And, you know, for the Brazos, it's, you know, it's the Gulf. And for the watershed between essentially Lubbock and PK, it's PK. You know, all the water that flows from the Clear Fork and the Double Mountain Fork and the main stem above PK, you know, all that water ends up in PK, you know, assuming there are things that happen between, you know, rainfall and when it ends up in a reservoir. You know, there's evaporation. There's water use. There's you know, the plants need water, and, you know, that's another podcast. But…
Charlie L Shugart: You said something about there being a basin in between Lubbock and PK. So, does that mean there are basins within basins? So, we have the Brazos River Basin, and then there are other basins …..
Chris Higgins: We typically call those, like, subbasins.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Aaron Abel: Mhmm.
Chris Higgins: And there are different resolutions.
Charlie L Shugart: What is that?
Chris Higgins: You can have a sub-basin within a sub-basin. For instance, you can go even farther. I mean, because look at the drainage area of Lake Granbury. Lake Granbury has a lot of little tributaries that feed into it in the upper end of the lake, which you could call those little sub-basins. You have the Lake Granbury Basin within the Brazos Basin, then you have these other tributaries that contribute to Lake Granbury that are also smaller. It just depends on your resolution.
Aaron Abel: Yeah. So, I don't know if this is going to get way too much. You could argue that basins are on a fractal basis. Right?
Chris Higgins: Yeah. Yeah. You could probably go to infinity.
Aaron Abel: Yeah. So, and what we're saying is just take a square foot of land that's, I don't know, in between PK and Granbury. You could have multiple basins within just a square foot of land.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Aaron Abel: And then you size it up to an acre and, you know, that could be there can there's a lot of multiple basins within an acre. As you scale up, you can have multiple, I mean, a lot of basins.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Okay.
Aaron Abel: And that probably confuses people, but …
Charlie L Shugart: He says while looking at my face. Does it matter? Does it matter that there are different basins within basins within basins?
Aaron Abel: Yeah. It does.
Charlie L Shugart: Why?
Chris Higgins: There are actually defined, like, basins. So, they're not going to define a basin that's a foot of land, but they have, like, it's called, like, a HUC 8. So, the state defines a specific basin. They delineate the basin, and then they'll have and then and they use it in modeling. Modelers will use, like, these sub basins to look at, like, incremental inflows to model stream flow from as that water propagates downstream throughout the basin. It helps to divide it up because you can put parameters in each of those basins because they might have different characteristics and different loss factors and different vegetation, different substrates, different geo, what's the word? Geo…
Aaron Abel: Geomorphology?
Chris Higgins: Yeah. Geomorphology. And so, it's beneficial to break those up in the basins for, like, modeling purposes and looking at water availability in the basin. So, yes, they do serve a purpose.
Charlie L Shugart: Alright.
Aaron Abel: And even operationally, I mean, when we look at, you know, the potential of new USGS streamflow gauges, we look at basin divides and, okay, ‘Well, it would be good to have a USGS gauge in this sub basin.’ And, you know, we have to delineate those. You know, also, as Chris said, there are a lot of activities that go on from one portion of a basin to the other or in a sub-basin, and how that interacts with the main basin. So, I think we've gone down a rabbit hole.
Charlie L Shugart: Just so, everybody knows the USGS is the US Geological Survey. Okay. So, when we're talking about all these different reservoirs, Chris, you mentioned there are some specifically for cooling nuclear power plants. What about the rest of them? Do they all pretty much do the same job?
Aaron Abel: No. There are multiple different uses of reservoirs. In the case of the Brazos, you can subdivide the types of use of the reservoirs in maybe three or four. You know, obviously, our three reservoirs are water supply reservoirs. The Corps reservoirs are primarily for flood control, but also water supply. And then Chris mentioned reservoirs that are associated with steam electric power generation.
Chris Higgins: And hydropower at Whitney.
Aaron Abel: And then there's also hydropower. So that, you know, obviously, there's only one reservoir within the Brazos that has hydropower use associated with that reservoir.
Charlie L Shugart: And that's Lake Whitney.
Aaron Abel: And that's Lake Whitney.
Chris Higgins: And you would call those multipurpose reservoirs when they have more than one primary purpose. So, if the Corps reservoir's water supply, flood control, Lake Whitney, you add hydro to that. So, Lake Whitney has three primary purposes.
Charlie L Shugart: So, it would be a multipurpose reservoir.
Chris Higgins: Multi-purpose reservoir.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay. Okay. You mentioned that ours are strictly water supply reservoirs. What does that actually, look like in practice? What does that mean?
Aaron Abel: If the operation of a water supply reservoir, you know, obviously, we have wetter periods of time, and then we have drier periods of time. And as we may be entering a wetter period of time, but the reservoir may be a couple feet low. We get rain, that reservoir fills up, and we may have to make continued releases to maintain the safety of the dam and keep the reservoir level as full as possible. As we enter a dry period, you know, we want to keep water supply reservoirs as full as possible, as long as possible, so we can have the most amount of water that can sustain use throughout the next drought. Capturing water when it's available and keeping it around as long as possible to make it through the next drought. That's kind of how, you know, I think we've described the way we operate water supply reservoirs here at BRA, that's how many others do the same thing, you know, across the nation and the world. You know, I will say that there are secondary benefits of reservoirs. Right?
Charlie L Shugart: Sure.
Aaron Abel: These reservoirs were built decades and decades ago. Once they were built, that means that was a lake surface that wasn't there. There was definitely the need and the want to enjoy the lake surface and the multiple lakes that are around. And so, you know, we understand that that is an economic benefit. It's nice to own a house right next to the lake and see the water and play in the water and fish and do everything, but that is a secondary benefit.
Chris Higgins: And they were built, like, as far Granbury, Lake Granbury and Lake Limestone, they were built solely for water supply and funded by TXU, by BRA, through the sale of water to those to that entity for their power plant. So that was the initial reason why those reservoirs were there. But it's nice to be able to enjoy those secondary benefits. You get, and then you get the other benefit of fish and wildlife. It's habitat as well. It's a very large habitat.
Charlie L Shugart: You didn't mention Possum Kingdom, though. So, was Possum Kingdom originally designed just for water supply?
Aaron Abel: So initially, obviously, Possum Kingdom did have hydropower generation as a use type with PK.
Chris Higgins: Oh yeah.
Aaron Abel: So, you know, at the time, that was towards the end of the depression, coming out of the depression. So, the WPA program, you know, I think was leveraged to try to construct that reservoir, but there was, like, a rural electrification component to that. You know? So, but I'd have to, and we can come back to that.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah.
Chris Higgins: Yeah.
Charlie L Shugart: I want to go back to something, Aaron, that you said earlier. When we're talking about our three reservoirs, you mentioned that we want to keep them as full as possible, but we also need to protect the structural integrity of the dam. What do you mean by that? Can the water only go so high? Like, what?
Aaron Abel: Yeah.
Charlie L Shugart: How does the lake level affect the structure of the dam?
Aaron Abel: So as inflows are occurring during flood events, if we don't release any water, the water level will rise to a point where it will overtop the dam, overtop the gates, you know, if we're talking about, you know, all three of our dams, and that is a major dam safety issue. We have to, in real time, calculate inflows that are coming into the three reservoirs during flood events and make decisions on the magnitude and timing of the releases from the reservoirs to manage the lake level at safe levels. You know, obviously, we don't want the water level to overtop the gates. So, because we could lose control of the gates, and we wouldn't have any manner to release the water except it over topping. Those dams, both Morris Shepherd, DeCordova, and Sterling C Robertson, they were not designed to have lake levels that were any higher than what they were designed for. So, we can't store any additional water in those reservoirs.
Chris Higgins: We can't physically do it, even if we wanted to. It would overtop the gates, and it would jeopardize the integrity of the dam structure itself.
Charlie L Shugart: And that might not be something that everyone realizes, that the way water is released is not just when it gets full, and it rolls over the side of the dam, that the dam gates are actually operated in a way to release.
Chris Higgins: For Lake Limestone and Lake Granbury, they're outfitted with Tainter gates. And so, there's a cable that pulls those large gates up. I don't know the exact dimensions. They're, like, 30 feet by 30. The sizes are a little bit different between Limestone and Granbury, but they're very large steel gates connected to a cable. And we pull them up, and the water goes underneath over a weir. And so, it's designed to pass that water with minimum erosion, you know, downstream. That's kind of how those gates are set up. Lake Possum Kingdom, those are bear trap gates. And so, those are 13 feet tall. I think they're about 90 feet wide or so, maybe a little bit longer than that. And so, we drop those gates. And so, it's almost like it's on a pyramid or a triangle. It's two leaves sitting on each other, and then the front leaf goes down, and the top leaf folds over the top of it, and then water goes over the top. When the lake's full and those gates are down, that's about 13 feet of water going over the top of those bear trap gates to pass the water through the lake.
Aaron Abel: But we have other methods to release water in lower flow quantities. We have three low flow gates at PK Lake, and we also have what's called a controlled outlet conduit that releases up to about 3,000 CFS that, that water source from lower in the reservoir much lower in the reservoir. So, at Granbury, we have, you know, obviously, our 16 Tainter gates, and then we have four low flow gates that allow up to around 3,000 to 3,500 CFS through different portions of the reservoir, kind of middle portion of the depth column or so. And then at Lake Limestone, we obviously have five Tainter gates and then we have, two low flow outlets that, you know, we can release water, you know, outside of the Tainter gates. So, yes, we have different outlets that we can release water from - at different depths, too, depending on, you know, certain circumstances.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Okay. So just so I'm clear, whenever our three reservoirs are completely full, and there's no means of holding any more water without damaging the dam, we have to release water if more water is entering it.
Aaron Abel: Yes.
Charlie L Shugart: Yep. Okay.
Chris Higgins: What goes in must come out when the lake is full.
Aaron Abel: In real time.
Charlie L Shugart: In real time.
Aaron Abel: And that means 24/7, 365. Mother Nature doesn't take holidays.
Chris Higgins: And we're not unique to other water supply reservoirs in other areas of Texas and in the world. I mean, that's how you operate those types of lakes. You measure inflows, and you pass them downstream
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Chris Higgins: When the lake is full.
Charlie L Shugart: So, if the water in, let's say, Possum Kingdom Lake or Lake Granbury is being used for water supply, does that mean that water is what's coming out of my faucet if I live lakeside to that area?
Aaron Abel: Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe. Maybe not. No. I mean, you're not I guess the question …. Please don't drink raw water.
Charlie L Shugart: Right. Yes. I didn't mean directly from the lake.
Chris Higgins: Unless you have an ironclad stomach.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Good to clarify, though.
Aaron Abel: If you live in a city that's close to Brazos or one of our reservoirs or within the county that, you know, surrounds one of our reservoirs or, you know, close to the Brazos River, yeah, you may be drinking some water that is sourced from either a BRA reservoir or the river, but I will say it's more complicated than that.
Charlie L Shugart: Of course.
Aaron Abel: Many entities take a city. They may have water supply sources that are groundwater, so they may operate, you know, multiple groundwater wells from a certain aquifer. But they may also have an intake in a BRA reservoir, and they also divert raw water directly from the reservoir and convey that raw water to their water treatment plant, treat that water, and then convey the treated water to homes and businesses. So, you know, you may have your faucet running, and you may be drinking a little bit of surface water, you may be drinking a little bit of groundwater.
Chris Higgins: You really have to look at whoever your retail provider is, whoever you buy your water from, they're required to send out reports, water quality report. They have to describe the source of the water. And so, for each individual, like Aaron said, you just have to read and determine where your water's coming from because a lot of entities do have secondary and alternate sources of water. And some of them are solely sourced by BRA. There are some of them, depending on your location, that if you live there, you are definitely drinking BRA-sourced water. I grew up in Gatesville, and I didn't pay the bill. I was a teenager. I didn't care where my water came from. I didn't know for a long time that we were getting our water from the BRA, from Lake Belton. I'm like and when I figured that out, I'm like, that's a long pipeline. Because when you drive to Belton from Gatesville, it's like it's a 30-mile drive. So, you can live right next to one of BRA's reservoirs and not have your water sourced from it, which could be groundwater, or you could live miles and miles away from any of BRA's water supply reservoirs and still be receiving your water from a BRA source. And so, Gatesville, they have intake, and then they treat other rural areas around that area, like Mound and Flat, and Coryell City. They all get their water from Lake Belton. And I don't know what the percentage of the population out there knows where their water is sourced from, but I bet it's less than half. I bet you know, a lot of those people in Coryell City are drinking water and have no idea that it's coming all the way from Lake Belton.
Aaron Abel: Hey, I grew up in Coryell City.
Chris Higgins: Did you know at the time that you were getting Lake Belton water
Aaron Abel: I did. Of course I did.
Chris Higgins: Yeah, but you were probably a nerd.
Aaron Abel: Another example, you know, to Chris' point, many people, I bet you, a lot of people out there listening to this have visited Galveston Island. You know how far Galveston Island is from the Brazos? It's pretty far. I don't know off the top of my head, but it's probably well over 80 to 100 miles. But one of our customers, Gulf Coast Water Authority, supplies water to the city of Galveston. Gulf Coast Water Authority diverts water from the river down in the lower basin, and they convey that water via a canal system down to the Texas City area. They treat that water, and I believe they convey that to the city of Galveston. So, you know, Galveston, they also have groundwater and maybe some other sources, but chances are, if you visit Galveston, you may be drinking a little bit of Brazos water.
Chris Higgins: And Texas City, GCWA, they supply not only to parts of Texas City and Galveston, but eight other municipalities that are in that San Jacinto Basin, which is way away from the Brazos River.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. Yeah. If you don't know where your water is coming from, there are two different ways that might be helpful that you can look up. Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has something called the Texas Drinking Water Watch, and it allows you to do something like enter the city of Waco, and then it'll list well or surface water intake that, like, your provider uses. And then there's something called the Consumer Confidence report. So, every public water provider has to publish this. And think this is what you were leading toward, Aaron, which the annual report lists some of the different information about the water source that you're getting water from. So, there are ways out there that you can find more information about the water that you're getting. So, if our three reservoirs are water supply reservoirs, and we kind of just barely touched on this, that a lot of people use these lakes and only view the lakes as a place to hang out on the weekend, to go fishing or boating or just, you know, enjoy the summer. How do we balance these lakes being designed for water supply with this recreational side to the point that we invest in boat ramps and parks? What does that look like?
Chris Higgins: So, I'm just going to say it how it is. I mean, there's not really a balance. These lakes have a primary purpose. They're for water supply. And the secondary benefits are great. You know, I use the lake. I have a little John boat. I love going out on the lake, and I hate it when the lake's low because you can hit stumps and hit, like, low underwater islands that you can't see. But it's better when the lake's full. And many people here in the BRA enjoy the lakes for recreational purposes, and we all want the lakes to be full. When the lake is full, it's a good indicator that our water supply system is in good shape and is in a position to serve our customers for its intended purpose going forward. So, we all want full lakes, whether you're a recreator or you're a water supply manager like BRA. We do maintain parks and boat ramps at our three BRA-owned and operated reservoirs, and the Corps does the same for their eight reservoirs in the BRA Water Supply System and across all the other reservoirs because we realize that is a great benefit for the population, for the public to come out and enjoy. But Mother Nature, you know, sometimes has other plans, and we can't control that.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah.
Chris Higgins: During prolonged droughts, lake levels are going to fluctuate. And at some point, you're going to go through intense dry spells, intense droughts. Those secondary benefits may be temporarily unavailable, but they'll always come back. They always do.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah.
Chris Higgind: It's always going to rain, and there's going to be the end of the drought. You know, to answer your question in a nutshell, there's not really a balance there. The reservoirs are serving out their purpose.
Aaron Abel: You know, to Chris' point, you know, we understand that there are many billions of dollars that are spent annually across Texas, you know, for people to enjoy the reservoirs, whether it's fishing, boating, whatever. The only thing we can do is there are a couple of things. Communication. And, you know, this podcast is a great tool, I think. You know, we're having an honest conversation here, and these are tough questions that you're asking, Charlie.
Charlie L Shugart: Thanks.
Aaron Abel: We have to convey, and folks should know that the water that's stored in these reservoirs and that is flowing down the rivers is there because Mother Nature allowed the water to be there.
Charlie L Shugart: Right.
Aaron Abel: BRA and its customers invested in the future by building these reservoirs many decades ago.
I don't know if we, in the late thirties, early forties, and, you know, through the fifties, realized, you know, how much of an economic engine, you know, these reservoirs would be.
Charlie L Shugart: Sure.
Aaron Abel: We have to communicate to folks that, like Chris said, the lake levels are going to go down in drought, and we're going to have floods, the lake levels are going to come up, and there's going to be damages. You know, we do have some management protocols in certain parts of the basin, and the only part of the basin that we really can balance is between PK and Granbury. And we do have a lake level management protocol that essentially balances the impacts. We're not balancing water supply to the recreational interests. We are trying to balance the impacts of low lake levels across both of those reservoirs because we knew that, you know, after years and years of hydropower generation that went away. We understood that we needed to study that and figure out a way to balance those impacts during dry times. And so, I know we have a lot of information out there, and I don't know if we want to get into the protocol itself, but that's not directly related to this question, but it is fed into the equation to some degree.
Charlie L Shugart: We mentioned briefly that Possum Kingdom Lake had hydropower for a while, but we ended up having to decommission the hydropower plant there because after some studies were done, there was extensive economic analysis that concluded that the renovation that was needed at the time, the relicensing, and the continued operation of the facility was just no longer viable, and so the plant itself was decommissioned. So that is why Possum Kingdom Lake no longer has hydropower for those who just aren't familiar with that history. Okay. So, when we are talking about water supply, you already mentioned the one on the coast, the Gulf Coast
Chris Higgins: Water authority.
Charlie L Shugart: Water Authority. Okay. So, who else is getting the water that we are supplying?
Aaron Abel: Our largest customer right now, as we speak, and Chris can correct me if I'm wrong, but NRG is a power producer. They operate one power plant lakeside at Lake Limestone, and they have another power plant that's in Fort Bend County, down in the Richmond-Rosenberg area. They are our largest customer. You know, we also have you know, and we mentioned Gulf Coast Water Authority. They're actually our second-largest customer. They have multiple different uses for the water. They have rice irrigation. They have, we've mentioned the city of Galveston and a lot of the municipalities. I think they supply water for over 300,000 people in the Fort Bend, Brazoria, and Galveston County areas.
Chris Higgins: I've heard them quote around 400,000.
Aaron Abel: Okay. So, 400,000 people between Fort Bend, Brazoria, and Galveston.
Chris Higgins: And about seventeen, eighteen thousand acres of riceland.
Aaron Abel: Yeah. It varies, I would say, I mean, 15 to 18. It's kind of going down.
Chris Higgins: Yeah.
Aaron Abel: But they also have industrial customers like Marathon Oil, the refinery in Texas City. You know, one of our largest municipal customers is Bell County Water Control & Improvement District No. 1. So, they provide water to a lot of the Bell County area. And Bell County, you know, its population is approaching half a million.
Charlie L Shugart: Oh my gosh.
Aaron Abel: They provide water to Fort Hood, Killeen, Harker Heights.
Chris Higgins: Coppers Cove.
Aaron Abel: Coppers Cove. A lot of the areas and entities in Bell County. Now, we mentioned about or we touched on how water is widely used, even water source from BRA is widely used even away from the river or reservoirs. One other tidbit, the city of Rosebud is a customer of Central Texas Water Supply Corporation. Central Texas Water Supply Corporation diverts water from Stillhouse. They divert, treat, and convey water all the way to Rosebud in Falls County. And that water is coming from Lake Stillhouse Hollow. So, a lot of these reservoirs, you know, have customers, you know, our customers divert the water and convey it to multiple different counties and entities throughout the counties that are surrounding, especially in the central part of the basin and in the lower part of the basin. You know, Dow Chemical is another one of our customers. Dow Chemical, Gulf Coast Water Authority, and NRG, they maintain their own water rights that allow them to divert water directly from the river, and that's completely separate from their BRA contracts. But when the river gets low, the actual river level in the lower part of the basin can reach points where they cannot divert the amount of water that they need to satisfy their customers. Whether it's for Dow, you know, they're developing and producing different products. They need that water. And so, they have contracts with us, and we coordinate with them closely, along with the Watermaster, to determine how much water we need to release from reservoirs that are further upstream. And sometimes that can take three weeks for water to flow from Possum Kingdom all the way down to Freeport. The water that is used within the BRA Water Supply System and throughout the basin is used for a wide variety of different things.
Charlie L Shugart: So, I just want to make sure I have it right. So, I take water toward the lower part of the basin, straight from the river. But if there's not enough water in the river, and I also have a contract with the BRA, I can say, hey, I need water, and we will release water from a reservoir somewhere else, so that it will travel downstream, and then I can access it once it gets to me.
Aaron Abel: Yes.
Charlie L Shugart: Okay.
Chris Higgins: Yeah. And that really applies to kind of our three major Lower Basin customers, which are Dow, Gulf Coast, and NRG. When you're looking at the sizes and sophistication of our customers, what do we have, Aaron? Like, a 170-plus long-term contracts right now. And of those, you know, we have anywhere from, like, a small 40-acre pecan farmer all the way up to what we were just mentioning, these big guys in the lower part of the basin and everything in between. We have mining operations, municipalities scattered, you know, throughout the basin. We have, you know, some industrial activity. All different types of customers for different types of uses up and down the basin. And even Abilene, you know, we have a contract with Abilene, they're one of our top 10 customers as well. At some point, we're going to need to convey water to them, and they would be getting that water from PK. And so, when you add up our top 10 largest customers, it's about 70% of the total amount of water contracted.
Charlie L Shugart: Oh, wow.
Chris Higgins: Currently. And so, we have those big guys we mentioned are really, like, a really significant portion of our contract base, of our customer base. Dow Chemical, you know, last I checked, they were the third largest chemical producer in the world.
Charlie L Shugart: I didn't realize they were that big.
Chris Higgins: NRG, like Aaron was saying, they have their power plant on Limestone, but they also have their WH Parish plant along the main stem of the Brazos in the lower basin. This may have changed, but last I checked a couple of years ago, they were the second-largest conventional power plant in the United States. They're like a 4,000-megawatt plant, so they're a big deal. And the Gulf Coast Water Authority, you know, they provide water to, like Aaron was saying, 10 different municipalities, 400,000 people. They have seven different refineries and industrial complexes that they provide water to. And so, these are a big part of the Texas economy.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah.
Chris Higgins: With the BRA, you know, providing this vital water source, it's a big part of the engine that keeps the Texas economy, you know, really afloat and going.
Charlie L Shugart: Yeah. So, I'm obsessed with the side quest we went on. Truly, top-tier content. But we never broke down what makes a flood control reservoir a flood control reservoir. So, would you guys be down to come back soon so we can maybe get into that?
Aaron Abel: Absolutely. That'd be awesome.
Chris Higgins: Yeah. Sure. We'll circle back around.
Charlie L Shugart: Perfect.
Chris Higgins: For sure.
Charlie L Shugart: Alright. Well, everybody, then just stay tuned for the next episode. I'd still like to know, you know, how we keep track of every gallon that gets pulled out of the river, and, you know, what's the deal behind what many call a constant level lake. Basically, I took notes, and shocker, I have follow-up questions. Thanks for joining us on Unpacking the Brazos River. We'll see you next time.