As Texas’ population continues to grow rapidly, how can the state meet its increasing water demands?
Texas State University’s Keisuke Ikehata, Ph.D., and Robert Mace, Ph.D., share insights on the actions needed to protect and preserve Texas’ most vital natural resource.
These interviews were taken from Faculty Experts videos and have been edited for brevity.
With decades of experience in water policy, hydrology, and hydrogeology, Mace is forwarding initiatives that foster stewardship, education, and research of Texas’ water resources.
RM: Our mission is to help Texans understand water so they can make informed decisions. We do that through education; by educating everybody, from kids through college students to adults. We also do that through stewardship by taking care of the springs and the river that flow through campus and across the state. And then we do that through research, policy-relevant research that can be used to help people make practical decisions about their water resources.
RM: A great example is our Texas Stream Team. We've trained over 10,000 citizen scientists statewide to monitor river water quality. That builds science literacy and acts as an early warning system for contamination. It’s incredibly rewarding work with a real impact.
Ikehata's work focuses on water and wastewater treatment processes with an expertise in emerging technology and solutions for sustainable water reuse.
KI: By 2050, the state population will increase by 20 million people or so. We will need two to three billion gallons of water per day. That’s the water we need to secure by 2050 in order to accommodate the growth in Central Texas.
KI: There are several ways to solve the problem — conservation, moving water, desalination, and water reuse. The first two are not complete solutions, so we need either seawater or water reuse. If we use or reuse our waste water, combined with other water sources, we can make drinking water a lot cheaper than seawater. We need either $20 billion to make waste water drinkable or $40 billion to make seawater drinkable. The answer is simple.
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