Texas is getting hotter and drier in the coming decades, and more of the state could come to be described as arid like far West Texas.
El Paso gets just nine inches of annual rainfall, compared with the statewide average of 27 inches. So how does the city manage its water supply and usage, and what could the rest of us learn from their system?
Robyn Ross reported on that question for Texas Monthly. She said El Paso uses 40 billion gallons of water a year.
“(That) is a huge number. And I think it’s hard for a lot of us to make sense of that,” she said. “One relevant figure is (the city uses) 131 gallons per capita per day. And the reason that that’s relevant is that it has decreased significantly since they implemented a really strong conservation program in 1991.
The city has a really diverse portfolio of water sources and also water strategies. So they get about 55% of their water from a couple of aquifers, 40% from the Rio Grande, and then a little bit through desalination.”
El Paso is on the leading edge of water recycling systems in Texas, Ross said.
“What we looked into in the story is how the city itself is sourcing its water and how it’s recycling water. So certainly individuals can conserve, but only the municipality really has the ability to recycle water on a large scale,” she said.
“El Paso is using a lot of reclaimed water, which listeners may be familiar with as the water that goes through purple pipes. If you’re ever out in a park and you see that there’s a purple pipe and a purple sprinkler head, that is wastewater that has been treated enough where it’s safe to use in a public setting like that. And El Paso has been using that type of water since the ’60s.”
This is used for grass in parks as well as for irrigation for some crops, Ross said. El Paso is planning to expand the ways they use recycled water, too.
“The city is working on a system that is called ‘direct potable reuse’ that is anticipated to be online by 2027. And that is a system that is going to take wastewater that has been highly treated to the standard that you could use in parks, and then it’s going to pipe that water directly to a drinking water treatment plant,” Ross said.
“And so it’s important to understand that a lot of the water that we use in general is recycled. It’s water that has been pulled from a river used by a city, treated to be clean enough to discharge into a river, and then it goes downriver and maybe the next city ends up using that as their water source. And so what El Paso is doing is essentially cutting out that middleman, keeping the water in the community and treating that water and then using it for drinking water.”
Ross said part of the city’s process of getting this up and running is educating the public and addressing what city officials call the “ew” factor.
“The water goes through an extensive treatment system that includes membrane filtration, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet disinfection. Essentially, it has already met or exceeded drinking water standards in the pilot test that they’ve done,” she said.
“El Paso has a strong community engagement program. So they actually have a visitor center that a lot of kids go to on field trips that talks about the desert ecosystem and conservation and the water utility. And they also have a citizens academy for community members like HOA and neighborhood association presidents. So they’re able to distribute these messages and talk about how they’re getting the water clean. And then those folks can become ambassadors in the community.”
Other cities in Texas often have pieces of the full El Paso system in place, but not the whole thing.
“This program is going to be really a national innovation. There are other cities in California that are doing a version of this, but they’re putting water into a reservoir first and then pulling it back out and treating it again,” Ross said. “So El Paso going directly from the cleaning of the wastewater to cleaning it again for drinking water is an innovation.”
