FEATURE - Texas oilman Pickens looks for big payday in water
Date: 17-Dec-02
Country: USA
Author: Jon Herskovitz
The oilman and corporate raider has started a new chapter in his business career and it involves a Texas-sized venture to sell ground water from the state's arid Panhandle to the thirsty and growing cities in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
In his Dallas office, where Pickens monitors commodity prices, there are maps of Texas awash in swabs of blue and white. The blue indicates where water is located in the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches from Texas to South Dakota; the white represents where the underground water supply has been depleted.
Pickens formed a venture called Mesa Water in 1999 to sell water from a part of the Panhandle to the growing metropolitan regions in the state, and if he finds customers, it could be one of his biggest deals ever.
Mesa Water aims to tap into the aquifer in parts of four counties in the Texas Panhandle and transport it by pipeline to the Dallas-Fort Worth region, or even as far away as El Paso.
Pickens has a 27,000-acre ranch in the area and has enlisted ranchers to sell their water rights with Mesa to customers downstate. Pickens would get paid a commission above a certain level of sales and the ranchers who join the group would see the value of their land as much as triple.
"I am a landowner and have been since 1971. But I didn't want to sit there with an opportunity to sell water and not do anything about it," Pickens said.
Pickens started his business career working as a junior geologist for Phillips Petroleum in 1951, and in 1984, he launched a hostile takeover bid for the company. The takeover bid was one of several for Pickens in the decade and his targets also included Gulf Oil and Unocal.
He decided to drop the "T" (for Thomas) from his name shortly after his father, T. Boone Pickens Sr., died in 1988.
ACRE-FEET LUCRE
In a state where oil has been king, Pickens may see one of his greatest fortunes coming from water.
Mesa wants to sell each year 150,000 to 200,000 acre-feet of water - the amount it takes to cover one acre in a foot of water, or some 326,000 gallons. Mesa has enough water to last until about 2130 and is asking $600 to $700 per acre-foot.
The price for Mesa's water is notably higher than the current $300 to $550 an acre-foot that utilities pay in North Texas, but Mesa can deliver water more quickly to the expanding urban areas than some other plans on the books aimed at meeting the region's growing needs.
New York investment bank J.P. Morgan has agreed to finance a 328-mile (525 km) pipeline project to the Dallas-Fort Worth region that will cost just above $1 billion with a tax exempt bond issue - provided Mesa can find a customer for its water.
And that is the major problem.
James Parks, head of the North Texas Municipal Water District, which serves Dallas and some adjoining counties, said he is considering the Mesa Water plan.
In the Fort Worth area, the head of the water board, Jim Oliver said he is studying the plan and may make a decision early next year on signing a contract with Mesa Water.
"We believe that our water hits a window - in 2008 to 2010 - where North Texas needs the water. And they will need the water because of the growth," said Pickens, who has put about $5 million of his own money into the project.
If he cannot find a buyer in North Texas, Pickens has floated the idea of running the pipeline to San Antonio some 460 miles (740 km) away, or El Paso, about 440 miles (700 km) away.
PANHANDLE CONCERNS
Another obstacle faced by Mesa Water comes from the concerns of conservationists groups and from cities in the dry Panhandle, such as Amarillo, that do not want to see water in their backyard siphoned off and heading hundred of miles away.
"From the Panhandle's standpoint, the stakes could not possibly be greater, given the pressures building to send our region's valuable ground water to water-starved communities downstate," the daily Amarillo Globe said in a recent editorial.
Environmental