SGrem said:

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Im sure all the folks over at 7 Seas are really conscientious folks but call me a cynic. They can make alllllll kinds of benefit arguments but BB has been doing great on its own without our help. Seems every time man intervenes for profit it turns to basura.

Why not pipe the brine offshore? Why not inject it back into the ground as other plants have proven successful.

I hate to see such a unique ecosystem even up for such a discussion. We lose way too many wild unmolested areas to this kind of progress.

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Believe me when I say I am neither for or against their current plan right now because we (and they) don't know enough yet to know whether it is good or bad. As somebody who works in the environmental consulting world, I have been on both sides of the permitting process for facilities like these and my biggest pet peeve is people who fly off the handle about proposed projects before there is enough info available to make an evaluation of the actual project impact. My main effort here has been to access what I can find of the available info about their plans and put it out there for folks to read about. The time will come when we know more about what the volume and TDS of their produced water will be and that will drive the design of the plant and the planned discharge quantities and TDS. When that happens, it will be easier to understand the likely impacts and then the debate can begin in earnest about whether it is a good idea. Right now all the arm waving and raised voices are based on very little factual information.

As somebody who knows intimately just how far we are overusing our current water supplies, particularly groundwater in the hill country, I think brackish water desal is a vital technology for securing our future water supply stability without drying up our springs and rivers. How and where the brine gets disposed of should be a site by site decision and knee jerk reactions that it should always be sent miles offshore (at a huge cost to build the pipelines) are not always supported by the science in the end. The construction of a pipeline across the laguna madre and PINS is no small undertaking and has its own set of ecological downsides.

If in the end the science suggests it is a bad idea, I will be right there with you opposing the discharge permit. But until we know more, I think assuming the worst case is premature.

So people are upset that a bay could possibly not fish as well afterwards even though no data exists to support that claim?

I have seen the data and timeline on CC running out of water and shutting down industries there.

I promise you that will be more impactful on everyone here.

docb said:

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They should just run a big pipeline from the Trinity river over there. Seems like Trinity bay is blown out with fresh water about half the time anyways. Crap we pump oil and gas everywhere, why not pump some fresh water.

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That water in the Trinity is going to eventually be needed for Houston's growing needs. If you want to pay the same price for water that you pay for gasoline, then you can start running pipelines across the state to carry it. As long as people expect to pay pennies per gallon for clean fresh drinking water, we need to be more realistic about where it will come from.

Red Fishing Ag93 said:

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docb said:

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I wish they wouldn't mess with Baffin Bay. It's probably the best big trout fishery in the Texas coast.

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It's even better than that. It's one of the best in the world.

This location is ridiculous.

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You have no way of knowing that yet. What if they tune the brine output of the plant to match the salinity of the creek it is going into? What if they are able to provide enhanced flows to the bay that will stabilize future drought flows and minimize brown tides and hypoxic conditions that have caused previous fish kills? Until you know what the output is, you have no idea if it is good or bad. Baffin Bay is a great trout fishery because it is in the middle of nowhere and the commercial shrimpers haven't destroyed the habitat there like they have everywhere else on the Texas Coast. As long as they are not drastically changing the salinity in the bay, increasing water flows to the bay is likely to be far more positive than negative.

docb said:

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I really doubt that it will help the bay one bit. Probably need to just stop building new industry in the area. Seems they have maxed out their water supply.

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What is the bolded part of your statement based on?

docb said:

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txags92 said:

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docb said:

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I really doubt that it will help the bay one bit. Probably need to just stop building new industry in the area. Seems they have maxed out their water supply.

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What is the bolded part of your statement based on?

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That the bay doesn't need any help. It's really just my opinion and that I think they are trying to word this to be helpful to the bay system. It's really no different than your counter opinion.

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I don't have a "counter" opinion. My opinion is that we have no idea whether it will help or hurt. The 7 Seas folks don't either and won't until they get their wells drilled and can test the yield and water quality. What I do know is that we have been slowly strangling the water sources feeding the in flows to Baffin Bay over time and the bay is showing signs of eutrophication because so much of what does reach it is coming out the end of a sewer treatment plant. Increasing the flow to the bay using water that is not anaerobic and loaded with nitrogen and other nutrients has the POTENTIAL to counteract that, so I am willing to be open minded to what their eventual planned discharges will look like.

SGrem said:

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We can talk #put and surface area and gallons forever. That is not the issue.

What is the immediate effect on the estuary of the dump site? They don't have the data. They have been doing this in other nearby creeks why not share the data?

Not to mention pulling from this bring underground aquifers creates a void which gets filled from a good clear clean underground aquifer. They do communicate between them and the full pressure keeps em separated. If they are going to pull brine just to have it empty clean then what is the point.

If they piped it offshore absolutely NO ONE would have any issue. Noone. Period. Pipe it and go forward. Then charge every one a Lil more on their bill. But it is about the money not the estuary.

Again they did all this secretly and sneakily. Now that move is blowing up in their face.

Share data of the effects so people can understand. Throwing out guesses of ratios is more smoke and mirrors and BS weak tea.

Wars will be fought over water. The area needs it badly. So make it a good thing. Pipe offshore.

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Yeah, it doesn't work that way in reality.

The immediate effect on the dump site will be pretty much nil at the worst case scenario. Assuming the brine is either lower or pretty close in salinity to the existing water it will not have any effect at all. If it's lower, it's no different than any of the few estuaries that feed fresh water into the bay. If it's roughly equivalent, absolutely zero change.

The whole "just pipe it into the ocean and just charge everybody a little more" is great on paper and in theory. But in theory you can hang an elephant with a shoe string too. Doesn't mean it is practical or even a remote real world possibility.

There are impermeable layers between the brackish aquifers and the freshwater aquifers, which is why they remain fresh and brackish. We have been pulling water out of the Chicote aquifer for a couple hundred years now, if it was all this pressure you are talking about we'd have no fresh water aquifers because of the volume of water pulled. There is a reason that the brackish aquifers are being targeted. No clue what you mean by "pull brine to empty clean". Brine will be pumped from the Gulf Coast Aquifer, it will run through RO desal. The clean fresh water will be used for municipal, industrial and ag purposes. The concentrated brine will be discharged into the bay where it will mix with the existing high salinity water.

Any purveyor that provides water to the public has to make records available and notices available. You may not like how it's done, and that's completely fair, but the whole "they are out to get us and ruin the world!" is just not true.

txags92 said:

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The reason they have not released any numbers about the planned discharge is that the facility is a pilot plant and they won't know the likely effluent characteristics until they finish drilling and testing the first three wells (which is what they actually broke ground on today). Once they know the production yields and TDS of those wells, they will be able to design the plant and come up with anticipated discharge parameters that will be necessary for their TPDES discharge permit.

Something to note is that if the pilot testing is successful, the company is prepared to scale the plant up to much larger quantities if the demand is there and brackish water supplies are available. So whatever they start out doing may not represent the overall plan if they are successful. If you want to read a much more detailed description of the project, you can find it in the Initially Prepared Plan (2025 Regional Water Plan) for TWDB Water Planning Region N starting at page 411 of the PDF file linked below.

Region N Water Planning Group Initially Prepared Plan (March 2025)

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We don't like facts here. Mass hysteria is the only answer!

SGrem said:

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txags92 said:

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TarponChaser said:

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schmellba99 said:

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To put it maybe a better perspective that makes it easier to imagine:

Baffin Bay (just the bay itself, not including upper Laguna Madre) is roughly 64,000 acres surface area. Average depth is about 8 feet.

That means that the bay itself holds in the ballpark of 512,000 acre feet of water. Again, not including ULM.

Assume worst case scenario of discharge of 4.5mgd from the plant. That is equivalent to 13.81 acre feet of water.

That is .0000000083% of the volume of the bay.

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I was told there would be no math.

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Ok so I did a little more math. They claim they are going to take ~3000 mg/L TDS water and produce 3 MGD of ~500 mg/L TDS fresh water. If they are discharging 1.5 MGD of effluent that would presumably be around 5,000 mg/L TDS.

According to what I can find online, the average TDS content of Petranila Creek is about 200 mg/L upstream of Driscoll and upwards of 15,000 mg/L downstream of Driscoll, and Baffin Bay averages around 40,000 mg/L TDS (seawater is typically around 35,000 mg/L).

So if all of that math is close to correct, this discharge should be decreasing the salinity of the creek and bay marginally, not increasing it. Given that Baffin Bay often gets too saline at times, I am not seeing that as a big negative.

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Baffin has been hypersaline for i don't know how many thousands of years. That is part of what makes it so unique and so productive. So yes lowering that salinity to be similar to the rest of the cr@ppy coastal bays is a huge massive giant negative. Anything that makes this productive incredible unique ecosystem back to ordinary is a huge massive giant negative.

They need the water in the area. Find a better way.

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You do realize that salinity is a fluctuating number and not static, right? And that over those thousands and thousands of years Baffin has fluctuated from nearly 0 ppt during flood events that dump a massive amount of fresh water into the bay to much higher than the ~40ppt during times of prolonged drought, correct?

You are acting like Morton's is going to line up a conveyor belt and dump metric tons of salt into the bay while we similarly put a dam at the mouth so that it becomes akin to the Dead Sea. That's not even close to reality.

SanAntoneAg said:

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SGrem said:

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Why not pipe the brine offshore? Why not inject it back into the ground as other plants have proven successful.

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We all know the answer to these questions. It'll cut into Seven Sea's profits.

So virtuous of them to want to help.0

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It's a little more than just profits.

Man, the absolute hate some of you have for any corporation is really astounding to me.

Of course the same folks that are of the "just pipe it offshore!" crowd would absolutely wail and scream and gnash teeth at what the cost of water would be with this design as well.

These pilot plants aren't cheap, and they are being done to reduce the stress and impact on fresh water sources, whether they be surface water or groundwater. It's a fact of life that we need water for pretty much everything we do - ag needs it, industrial needs it, municipal needs it - can't get away from that biological need for water. I'd personally much rather see exploration and uses of otherwise unusable water sources rather than just continuing to drain the freshwater sources we already use and everybody already complains about how precarious those sources are.

HumbleAg04 said:

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So people are upset that a bay could possibly not fish as well afterwards even though no data exists to support that claim?

I have seen the data and timeline on CC running out of water and shutting down industries there.

I promise you that will be more impactful on everyone here.

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Which is why CC is going to spend about a billion (probably more) on their own desal facility.

docb said:

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schmellba99 said:

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docb said:

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They should just run a big pipeline from the Trinity river over there. Seems like Trinity bay is blown out with fresh water about half the time anyways. Crap we pump oil and gas everywhere, why not pump some fresh water.

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I wish "just pump it across the state!" were so easy.

People ***** about their water bill as it is now, one could hear the screaming and crying on Mars if we "just pumped water across the state".

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I was being somewhat facetious with my post on that. It just screams that you shouldn't keep building things that need water when there is no water.

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Ah yes, the classic NIMBY argument. We are running out of water here, so we should move the project somewhere else where they are also running out of water. Newsflash. In the next 50 years all of Texas is going to run out of easily available fresh water. We are already well beyond that point in many parts of the state.

Brackish water desal is a relatively affordable way to take crappy groundwater that is undrinkable and unusable for industrial purposes and turn it into fresh water. Everybody has their hackles up over this project already, when all it amounts to at the moment is drilling a couple of wells into a brackish aquifer that is unusable for other purposes. Once they get those wells drilled and find out the TDS content and yield, they will know a lot more about what the eventual project discharge will look like and then we can all decide whether we need to have a big fight about where the discharge goes.

schmellba99 said:

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docb said:

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I agree with that. I think some of the problem with what's happening down there is that the city of Corpus Christi has known for a long time that this was going go be a big problem and they just did not address it sooner despite the warnings.

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They have been working on addressing it for a great number of years now, actually.

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You mean like completely draining Choke Canyon and most of Mathis?