Canadian River Municipal Authority briefs Amarillo council on Lake Meredith, groundwater and salinity projects

The Canadian River Municipal Water Authority (CREMOIS) briefed the Amarillo City Council on the authority’s system, historical Lake Meredith performance and projects designed to mitigate salinity and supply risk.

CREMOIS general manager Drew Satterwhite and deputy director Chad Parnell described a long-standing decline in inflows to Lake Meredith since the early 2000s and rising chloride concentrations in the lake’s water. CREMOIS emphasized that the lake has been a variable supply and that blending groundwater from a wellfield with surface water has been used since 2001 to reduce lake chloride concentrations to the TCEQ/Texas secondary standard cited by staff (about 300 parts per million) for taste and aesthetic considerations.

CREMOIS reviewed the system: Sanford Dam (Lake Meredith), a 322-mile aqueduct built in the 1960s, and the groundwater well fields that CREMOIS has developed since 2001. The authority now operates dozens of wells and tens of miles of pipeline and can produce about 65 million gallons per day (MGD) from its wells; peak system delivery capacity can approach 88 MGD depending on available lake supply.

Satterwhite outlined CREMOIS projects to control salinity, including the John C. Williams well field and a salinity-control project in New Mexico that intercepts high-salinity flows and deep-injects brine to prevent it reaching Lake Meredith. The authority said evaporation, accumulation of dissolved minerals and limited outflows are factors that have raised lake chloride levels.

CREMOIS presented the concept of a major new groundwater pipeline (referred to as CREMOIS 2) — a roughly 70-mile, large-diameter line (preliminary discussion around 72-inch diameter) — to deliver additional groundwater into the aqueduct and provide redundancy to aging joints and sections of the original 1960s aqueduct. CREMOIS stressed that much of the current aqueduct is prestressed concrete pipe made in the 1960s; failures are difficult and time-consuming to repair, and a new pipeline would reduce reliance on the older infrastructure while enabling more consistent blending with well water.

CREMOIS staff discussed budgeting, cost allocations by delivery point, and how member cities — Amarillo among them — are billed for electricity, operations and debt service. The authority said Amarillo holds a large share of both lake allocation (about 37%) and groundwater allocation (approx. 40.6%). CREMOIS said the authority projects supplies and modeled groundwater out to 100 years and concluded a substantial portion of existing groundwater remains available, though long-term production exceeds recharge.

Council members asked about threats to supply, desalination and brackish-water options, and whether the authority had studied reverse-osmosis or brackish extraction. CREMOIS said reverse-osmosis (desal) would be energy intensive and raise O&M costs substantially; early feasibility work identified high capital and operating costs and limited nearby brackish source availability suitable to support a plant. CREMOIS said it and member cities continue to review options and that CREMOIS 2 aims to provide drought-proof redundancy and reduce the system’s vulnerability to lake-quality and lake-quantity swings.

CREMOIS representatives said they would continue to coordinate with Amarillo staff and that further engineering, financing and board approvals would be required to advance a large pipeline project and related capital work.