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EL PASO — The wind swept through El Paso one day in March, lifting a fine layer of dust that settled onto windshields, clothes and skin. The air was thick with haze from a dust storm. This border city, perched on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, receives on average less than 9 inches of rain each year.

Water in the city of 679,000 people is a challenge.

Inside El Paso’s Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant, Hector Sepúlveda, the plant’s superintendent, walks through rows of towering steel tubes as a loud hum vibrates through the air. This machinery is essential to providing thousands in the city with clean water.

“This is a desert community,” Sepúlveda said. “So the water utilities have to always think ahead and be very resourceful and very smart and find resources to take the water that we do have here and provide for a desert community.”

Sepúlveda says the city’s dry climate, compounded by dwindling ground and surface water supplies and climate change has made innovation essential. A key piece of that strategy is desalination — the process of removing salt and other minerals from seawater or salty groundwater so people can drink it.

When it opened in 2007, El Paso’s desalination plant was the largest inland desalination facility in the world. It was built through a partnership between El Paso Water and Fort Bliss, one of the nation’s largest military bases, when water shortages threatened the base’s operations. Today, at max capacity the plant can supply up to 27.5 million gallons per day — helping stretch the city’s supply by making use of the region’s abundance of brackish groundwater, salty groundwater with salinity levels higher than freshwater, but lower than seawater.

The city wants to expand the plant’s capacity to 33.5 million gallons per day by 2028. El Pasoans used about 105 million gallons per day last year.

As Texas faces twin pressures of population growth and prolonged drought, lawmakers are looking to desalination as a way forward. The Texas Legislature took a major step in 2023, creating the New Water Supply for Texas Fund, to support desalination projects — including both brackish and seawater. This legislative session, lawmakers are pushing to accelerate that effort with a bill by state Sen. Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican, that could dedicate millions for new water projects, including desalination. Senate Bill 7 cleared the upper chamber earlier this month and is now awaiting a House committee’s consideration.

“We’ve developed all the cheap water, and all the low-hanging fruit has been obtained. There is no more of it, and it’s depleting what’s left. We’re going into the second phase of water development through brackish marine, brackish produced water and brackish aquifers,” Perry said on the Senate floor before his colleagues gave the legislation unanimous approval.

Sixty municipal water desalination facilities are already online, according to the Texas Water Development Board, the state agency that helps manage and finance water supply projects. Of those, 43 desalinate brackish groundwater. El Paso’s is the largest.

As of December 2024, the agency had designated 31 brackish groundwater sites as production zones, meaning they have moderate to high availability of brackish groundwater to treat. The board’s 2022 state water plan proposes implementing an additional 37 brackish groundwater desalination projects in South Texas cities like McAllen, Mission, San Benito; and West Texas towns like Abilene and Midland.

The plan states that if all recommended strategies are used, groundwater desalination could make up about 2.1% of the state’s projected water needs by producing 157,000 acre-feet per year by 2070 — enough to support 942,000 Texans for one year.

Still, desalination isn’t without tradeoffs. The technology takes a lot of energy, and construction costs can be steep. There are also several factors to consider that affect the final price tag: How deep the water lies, how salty it is, how far it needs to travel, and how to dispose of the leftover salty waste.

The water board estimates treating brackish groundwater can run anywhere from $357 to $782 per acre-foot, while seawater desalination ranges from $800 to $1,400. Lawmakers say water funding at a state-level is critical to help communities shoulder the upfront costs of these alternative water supplies.

Sepúlveda, who has spent more than 30 years with El Paso Water, says the process at the desalination plant begins with brackish groundwater drawn from 15 wells near the El Paso International Airport. The salty water is transported to the plant where it is first filtered through strainers to remove sand particles. Then it is transported through cartridge filters. This process is similar to how household water filters work, but far more efficient.

The cartridge filters trap fine sediments smaller than a strand of hair, further filtering the water before it reaches the heart of the system: reverse osmosis, often referred to as RO membranes.

Sepúlveda, who wears a blue construction hat and highlighter yellow vest, stands amid a room full of long rows of stacked steel tubes, or RO membrane units. Here, brackish groundwater gets turned into fresh, drinkable water. It’s pumped through these tubes — each with 72 vessels — at extremely high pressure, leaving behind salt and bacteria.

“We’re separating the undesirable stuff from the potable water,” he said, as he opened a faucet and sipped the water. “At the end you end up with safe drinking water. The process is just amazing.”

Once cleaned, the water is divided between El Paso Water customers and Fort Bliss. Sepúlveda said they will soon expand the plant to produce 33.5 million gallons per day by adding a sixth row of RO membranes.

The brine, or concentrated salty water left over from the process, is pumped 22 miles to deep well injection sites. The desal plant can separate up to 3 million gallons of brine a day. At the site, the concentrate is sent 3,500 feet underground into a fractured rock formation.

While brackish groundwater desalination has proven to be a viable solution for inland communities like El Paso, environmentalists are raising concerns about the potential consequences of scaling up the water strategy.

Seawater desalination is gaining attention as Gulf Coast cities like Corpus Christi start developing their own seawater desalination facility.

For seawater desalination, Shane Walker, professor and director of a water research center at Texas Tech University, says the main concern is removing the excess salt. While most of the salinity comes from dissolved minerals that aren’t harmful, Walker says, high concentrations — think of over-salted French fries — can harm marine life and disrupt coastal ecosystems.

Seawater is much saltier than brackish water and salt levels vary widely depending on the source.

In seawater desalination, the brine byproduct — which can be twice as salty as seawater — is often discharged back into the ocean. If not properly managed, this can increase salinity in bays and estuaries, threatening species like oysters, crabs and shrimp that are critical to local fisheries and ecosystems.

Myron Hess, an environmental consultant for the nonprofit National Wildlife Federation, said that when plants take in water it could potentially suck in marine creatures with the ocean water.

“As you’re diverting particularly massive amounts of water, you can be pulling in lots of organisms,” Hess said.

For inland facilities like the Kay Bailey Hutchison plant, the environmental concerns are different. They don’t kill marine life, but disposal is still a concern.

In El Paso, Art Ruiz, chief plant manager for El Paso Water and the former superintendent of the utility’s desalination plant, calls this disposal “chemistry salts” and says that disposal is handled through deep well injection into an isolated part of the aquifer. Ruiz said El Paso is blessed with a geological formation that has a natural fault that prevents the concentrate from migrating and contaminating the freshwater supply. In regions where this is not feasible, evaporation ponds are used, but they require large amounts of land and careful management to prevent environmental hazards.

“Deep well injection is a common method used for larger desalination facilities, but the geology has to be right,” Walker said. “You have to ensure that the injection site is isolated and won’t contaminate freshwater aquifers.”

Another concern raised by water experts is how Texas manages brackish groundwater and whether the state is doing enough to protect nearby freshwater sources. Senate Bill 2658 proposes to exempt certain brackish groundwater wells located within state-designated production zones from needing a permit. Experts say the move would bypass a permitting process in the state’s water code that was specifically designed to safeguard freshwater aquifers.

The central worry is that brackish and fresh groundwater are often hydrologically connected. While brackish groundwater can be an important part of the state’s water portfolio, Vanessa Puig-Williams, a water expert with the Environmental Defense Fund, says there’s a real risk that pumping brackish water could unintentionally start drawing in and depleting nearby fresh water if oversight is not required from local groundwater conservation districts.

Experts also caution that the production zones identified by the water board weren’t designed to guide site-specific decisions, such as how much a well can safely pump or whether it could affect nearby freshwater supplies.

Hess, consulting for the National Wildlife Federation, authored a paper on the impacts of desalination, including the price tag. Constructing a facility is costly, as is the energy it takes to run it. El Paso’s desalination facility cost $98.3 million, including the production and injection wells construction, $26 million of which it received in federal funding.

The technology to clean the water is energy intensive. Desalinating water in El Paso costs about $500 per acre-foot of water — 46% more than treating surface water from a river. Seawater facilities require even more energy, which adds to the costs in producing or cleaning the water. TWDB estimates those range from $800 to $1,400 per acre-foot.

Texas has no operating seawater desalination plants for municipal use, but the state’s environmental agency, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has authorized permits for two marine desalination facilities and has four pending applications for seawater desalination facilities, three in Corpus Christi and one in Port Isabel.

“The first seawater plant in Texas is going to be expensive,” Walker said. “The first time somebody does something, it’s going to cost way more than the other ones that come along behind it, because we’re having to figure out all the processes and procedures to do it the first time.”

Back at the Kay Bailey Hutchison plant in El Paso, Sepúlveda, the plant’s superintendent, walks into a lab opened to students and professors from the University of Texas at El Paso, New Mexico State University, and Rice University to test new technologies to help refine the desalination processes or extend the lifespan of RO membranes.

Sepúlveda said water utility employees have learned a lot since 2007 when the plant first opened. RO membranes, used to clean the salty water, cost anywhere from $600 to $800. El Paso uses 360 RO membranes to run its plant. To extend the life from five to 12 years, utility employees figured out a system by checking salinity levels before extracting from a certain well.

“When we first bring water in from the brackish wells, we know how salty each well is, so we try to bring in the wells that are less salty to not put the membranes under such stress,” he said. “It almost doubled the life of the membrane.”

He added that this technique is also helping plant operators reduce energy consumption. Plant operators have adjusted salinity levels by blending the brackish groundwater with less salty water, which helps prevent pipe corrosion and clogging.

Their pipes are also now winterized. After the 2011 freeze, El Paso upgraded insulation and installed heat tape to protect equipment.

As Texas moves forward with more desalination projects, Sepúlveda said the lessons from El Paso will be critical as more plants go online.

“You always have to be forward-thinking. Always have to be innovative,” he said, as the machines buzzed in the background. “You always have to be on top of the latest technological improvements to be able to extract water from whatever scant resources you have.”

Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.

AUSTIN (ABC) – Multiple people were injured on Sunday when a two-story house collapsed in Austin, Texas, and at least 23 other homes were damaged after witnesses reported hearing a huge explosion, authorities said.

The two-story house collapsed in northwest Austin around 11:23 a.m. local time, according to the Austin Fire Department.

“When Austin Fire Department crews arrived on scene they found a two-story home that looked like it had suffered an explosion, which was leveled to the ground,” Division Chief Wayne Parrish of the Austin Fire Department said at a news conference Sunday afternoon. “A second house, a neighboring house, had also suffered severe collapse damage.”

Parrish said firefighters also found a vehicle on fire outside the house that was completely flattened

“They extinguished the car fire and there was also some smaller spot fires occurring in the debris,” Parish said.

Firefighters extricated one critically injured person and another seriously injured person from the home that was leveled by the explosion, said Capt. Shannon Koesterer, spokesperson for Austin-Travis County EMS. Koesterer said a second critically injured person was extricated from the home next door, which partially collapsed in the explosion.

Koesterer said another adult patient was treated at the scene for minor injures and that two firefighters, including one who was hospitalized, suffered minor injuries while working at the scene.

“As far as we know, we have accounted for everybody that was in all of the residences,” Parrish said.

WEST TEXAS (AP) – Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launched his fiancee Lauren Sanchez into space Monday with an all-female celebrity crew that included Katy Perry and Gayle King.

It was the latest wave in space tourism, where more of the rich and famous than ever before — or lucky and well-connected — can enter the zero-gravity realm traditionally dominated by professional astronauts.

The New Shepard rocket blasted off on the quick up-and-down trip from West Texas. The fringes of space beckoned some 65 miles (105 kilometers) up, promising a few precious minutes of weightlessness.

Sanchez, a helicopter pilot and former TV journalist, invited the others along for the 10-minute, fully automated flight, packing on the star power with singer-songwriter Perry and “CBS Mornings” co-host King.

Also sharing the ride were film producer Kerianne Flynn; Aisha Bowe, a former NASA engineer who started her own companies to promote science education; and Amanda Nguyen, a scientist who studied planets around other stars and now advocates for survivors of sexual violence.

Blue Origin declined to say how much the flight cost or who paid what. The trip came two months before Sanchez and Bezos marry in Venice.

It was the 11th human spaceflight for the Washington state-based company, founded by Bezos in 2000 after making a fortune with Amazon. Bezos strapped in for Blue Origin’s first space tourist flight in 2021 and accompanied the latest crew to the pad.

The celebrity launch was the nation’s first spaceflight where women filled each seat. The only other all-female crew in 64 years of human spaceflight was back in 1963. That’s when Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova launched by herself, becoming the first woman in space. Tereshkova spent three days off the planet.

Even after the latest launch, women represent barely 15% of the more than 700 people who have traveled into space. Sanchez said she deliberately chose women to launch with her, each of them eager to inspire both the young and old to dream big, and even commissioned special flight suits.

“It’s an important moment for the future of commercial space travel and for humanity in general and for women all around,” Perry told The Associated Press last week.

The launch brought out VIPs to West Texas including Oprah Winfrey, Kris Jenner and other members of the Kardashian family, and several women who previously have flown on private flights. Winfrey, a close friend of King, wiped away tears when the capsule reached space and the passengers were heard marveling at the moon and shouting with joy.

As the women were buckling up after a few minutes of weightlessness, Perry sang a few lines of “What a Wonderful World,” King said in a post-launch televised interview.

Bezos opened the capsule’s hatch minutes after touchdown, embracing Sanchez, the first one out. As they emerged, Perry and King kneeled and kissed the ground. “Oh my God, that was amazing,” said King, who considers herself an anxious airplane flyer.

This wasn’t the first Blue Origin launch with marquee names.

“Star Trek” actor William Shatner caught a lift to space with Blue Origin in 2021 at age 90, soon after Bezos’ inaugural trip. He was followed by former New York Giants defensive end and TV host Michael Strahan and Laura Shepard Churchley, the eldest daughter of Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, for whom the rocket is named. Two aviation pioneers who missed out on space when they were younger — Wally Funk and Ed Dwight — also rocketed away at ages 82 and 90, respectively.

Most of Blue Origin’s passengers — 58 counting the latest launch — have been business or science types, TV hosts or YouTubers. Ticket prices are not disclosed.

The Russian Space Agency also has launched its share of space tourists, beginning with a California financier in 2001. Two decades later, a Russian actress filmed aboard the International Space Station.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX also sells multi-day trips to private customers. SpaceX’s first client to fly, billionaire tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman already has launched twice and performed the first private spacewalk. He’s now set to become NASA’s next administrator if confirmed by the Senate.

Chinese-born bitcoin investor Chun Wang just returned from the first spaceflight to carry people over the north and south poles. Wang picked up the whole SpaceX tab for himself and three polar explorers for an undisclosed sum.

“In this exciting new era of commercial spaceflight, the dream of becoming an astronaut is no longer limited to a select few,” Wang said via X last week.

HOUSTON (AP) — Family, friends and the public are preparing to remember boxing legend, pastor and entrepreneur George Foreman during a memorial service in his hometown of Houston.

George Foreman IV, one of five sons of the boxing legend, along with Houston Mayor John Whitmire and former boxer Michael Moorer, who Foreman defeated in 1994 to become the oldest man at age 45 to win the heavyweight championship, are expected to speak at the service Monday.

The service will be hosted by Foreman’s family and the city of Houston at the Wortham Theater Center, a performing arts center that is home to the city’s ballet and opera companies.

“We’re going to celebrate the life of George Foreman, two-time heavyweight champion of the world and certainly the face of how great Houston is,” Whitmire said.

Foreman died on March 21 at age 76. Foreman’s family has not disclosed his cause of death, only saying on social media that he “peacefully departed … surrounded by loved ones.”

Born in Marshall, Texas, Foreman was raised in Houston’s Fifth Ward, one of the city’s historically Black neighborhoods.

He began his boxing career as an Olympic gold medalist in 1968, turning pro the next year.

Foreman became the heavyweight champion of the world when he beat Joe Frazier in 1973. But he lost the title the following year when Muhammad Ali beat Foreman in the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire.

Foreman then gave up boxing and after a religious awakening, became an ordained minister in 1978. He began preaching in Houston, later founding The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in 1980.

The middle-aged fighter returned to the ring after a 10-year absence and in 1994 pulled off one of the most spectacular knockouts in boxing history, flooring Moorer — 19 years his junior — with a surgical right hand to claim Moorer’s two heavyweight belts.

Foreman retired in 1997 with a 76-5 career record.

He then moved to the next chapter in his life as a businessman, pitchman and occasional actor.

He became known to a new generation as the face of the George Foreman Grill. The simple cooking machine sold more than 100 million units and brought him more wealth than boxing. A biographical movie based on his life was released in 2023.

Foreman had 12 children, including five sons who are all famously named George Edward Foreman.

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Follow Juan A. Lozano on X at juanlozano70.