Do state’s new water studies answer the LEAP pipeline question?

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DO STATE’S NEW STUDIES ANSWER THE LEAP PIPELINE QUESTION? A Q&A WITH PURDUE’S KEITH CHERKAUER

A handful of bills dealing with statewide water supplies, at a time when Indiana is still coming to grips with fallout over a pipeline concept aimed at feeding industry at the 9,000-acre LEAP district near Lebanon from wells drilled in western Tippecanoe County, face the General Assembly this session.

Central in that conversation likely will be a pair of Indiana Finance Authority regional water studies, released last week and directly prompted by the LEAP pipeline debate, that say counties largely along the Wabash River have the supply to meet demands for the next half-century, but that with expanded industrial development coming, Indiana “is rapidly approaching a crossroads in water management.”

Keith Cherkauer, a Purdue professor of agricultural and biological engineering and director for the Indiana Water Resources Research Center, provided some of the data for the North Central Indiana Water Study and the Wabash Headwaters Region Water Study. Both studies started in late 2023, after Gov. Eric Holcomb called for a pause in the Indiana Economic Development Corp.’s controversial investigation of aquifers along the Wabash River, in favor of regional look at water management.

In a conversation late last week, Cherkauer talked about what the studies say and what they don’t and how well they set up the ongoing debate about water and who controls it in Indiana. Here are excerpts.

Question: Your name pops up in the study many times. What was your role?

Keith Cherkauer: They asked specifically for the climate change data that we generated as part of the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment that rolled out over the last several years. So, I shared data.

Question: Were you satisfied with the way it came out, in context of your data?

Keith Cherkauer: I think they used it correctly. I haven’t seen anything that I disagree with as far as what they’ve done with it.

Question: What was your takeaway from this report? Were there any kind of big takeaways from an expert standpoint that should be shared with laymen who have been trying to follow this whole LEAP pipeline question?

Keith Cherkauer: I think the general findings are that we have been getting generally wetter, especially in the winter and a bit in the spring, that summers have been about the same or drier, which results in deficits in the fall. They’re using the same data set, so they found the same things. In the future, we see some increase in both those trends, so it continues to get wetter in winter-spring and drier through the summer and into the fall. That we’re going to see more years with extremes where we might get substantial flooding, but also have drought or dry conditions at the end of the year. For the Impacts Assessment, we looked at the entire state. They looked at things a little more fine scale. There are still fairly large sub-basins and at the county level (in the region), and they looked at that a little bit more. So I found it was interesting that they found some of those sub-basins responding more quickly or more dramatically. They spend a lot more time on kind of the fine-scale demand than we had done before, previously. That’s interesting.

Question: The thing that even the consultants in these studies seem to be saying is there’s a lot more that needs to be done to understand this situation. Is that a correct way to read it? Or am I misreading that, as someone who is just trying to keep up with water use and aquifers enough to put the LEAP pipeline situation in context?

Keith Cherkauer: Yes, we don’t know enough. And I’ve been sitting through meetings since this LEAP stuff emerged. Prior to that, nobody wanted to talk water resources in the state. And now there’s a whole lot more interest. But I think there’s general agreement on that. We do, in fact, have decent monitoring. There are some other states that have headed down the regulatory pathway without the amount of data that we have. Am I going to say that we have enough data? No. But we did, in the ‘80s or ‘90s, when we passed the laws, say that the significant water withdrawal facilities have to report, and so we do have reasonably good data on what they’re doing. Now, I don’t know that there’s a lot of fact checking on that. It’s a self-reporting system.

Question: The concern had been, and maybe it’s in this report as well, that people still don’t have a great sense of what the aquifer really is around here – how the interconnectedness of the aquifers really work and all those kinds of things. The study seems to be hedging some bets, saying maybe we need regulation that talks about wells in a five-mile radius of proposed large groundwater withdrawal facilities and talking about things that we didn’t necessarily hear during Intera’s specific study of supplies in the Granville area in Tippecanoe County.

For context: Preliminary results released in September 2023 from a set of test wells drilled that summer on 70 acres near Granville Bridge had consultants with Texas-based Intera, hired by the Indiana Economic Development Corp., confident that the Wabash River aquifer in Tippecanoe County would be sufficient to feed millions of gallons of water a day to the massive LEAP District development 35 miles away near Lebanon. Here’s coverage from September 2023:

• IEDC study: Tippecanoe Co. water more than enough for LEAP, other state projects

• IEDC defends tapping Tippecanoe Co. water, but says pipeline not a done deal. As critics mount, IEDC official and hydrologist say Lafayette area is ‘sitting on a very large asset’ that Indiana needs as it develops the LEAP district near Lebanon, other com

Keith Cherkauer: The Intera study was focused on whether or not the aquifer would support pumping at the rates they wanted to know, in order to support the LEAP Lebanon project. I guess I would say I was not surprised. It was a very nice sand, gravel aquifer. I’m not surprised that it can support that. Really, the Wabash on an annual average basis can support that. That’s never been the concern. The concern is: Once you turn it on, industry is just going to use the water every day, every year. But we know that it gets dry, and the Wabash River levels get low. That tends to be in the summer, and that’s when the farmers want to irrigate and they’re using groundwater. People may be watering their lawns. I don’t know that that’s a huge water consumption, but out in that rural area, you would now have the LEAP wells, the irrigation wells and the personal homeowner wells all competing with each other. That was not a question asked of Intera (in its study). Intera has gotten themselves thrown into the middle of this thing.

Question: Intera has its thumbprints all over other regional studies by the state, as a consultant, right? Isn’t it true that what changed with (the LEAP water study) was that they were paid by the IEDC, who wanted this pipeline to come true? Hasn’t that been a barely veiled assumption of this whole thing?

Keith Cherkauer: They asked Intera questions that would lead to an answer that, yeah, the aquifer can support that level of pumping.

Question: Does this report, from what you’ve read so far, refute that or put some kind of context to that finding? Or is there just so much more that needs to be done? I guess I’m trying to get a sense of, is this the kind of study that undercuts that answer or bolsters it, either way?

Keith Cherkauer: I will caveat this one: I need to go in and dig into more of some of the results. … But this pair of studies, they didn’t look at what happens if we’re pulling 50 (million) or 100 million gallons a day extra out of the river. They were looking at what internally happens. We have the water coming in, we know what the demand is now, we have information on what climate could look like in the future, and we have projections about what we expect demand to change. I think all of that is in line with the things that we’ve been saying in the water resource community. I think those are all valid things. I don’t think that it directly addresses the question of whether this particular project is sustainable.

Question: The study does mention the Intera study of the test wells near Granville in 2023 and estimating that as much as 57 million gallons a day could be produced from three collector wells tested there.

Keith Cherkauer: One of the bigger concerns, I would say, is, could we support 100 million gallons a day from this aquifer to Lebanon or from somebody somewhere else in the state? I still think that we probably could. But my bigger concern is that there are no controls on this. There’s no regulation. The state will not come back at some point and say, Well, they can’t have 200 (million) or 300 (million). Just like the reports were saying, sometime in the future, as demand increases and we get this range of conditions in a given year because we’re going from wetter to drier in a given year, all of that kind of comes together and causes problems. And we don’t know what that threshold is. As soon as you start drilling and piping water from one part of the state to another part of the state, that’s compounding it.

I think also there were some bullet points that we should have conversations about reservoir management in the region. Well, Salamonie (Lake), Mississinewa (Lake near Peru) and (Cecil M. Harden/Raccoon Lake in Parke County) are all U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood control reservoirs. So that becomes a federal question. They all have their own stakeholders. That’s not an, Oh, we’ll just have them release more water. We need to bring in a whole new group of people who live in that area, and we’re going to find out what they say about it.

Question: Have you seen some of the questions about potential regulations that have been filed at the Statehouse this session? This report seems to say we need to think about those regulations now. Do any of these take the correct approach?

Keith Cherkauer: I think Indiana has to have a conversation about what regulations we want. It’s something that I would say in the water resources community we’ve talked about for years. But there’s been no incentive to do it. We are still a water rich state for the most part. We get plenty of precipitation in a given year. But we don’t get the precipitation when we need that rain. It’s dry in the summer when we’re trying to grow crops, and that’s a major industry in the state. We have to grow the crops. People have to have water. Industry has to continue to use water. Some of those things are nonconsumptive uses. For example, if you’re generating electricity and you’re pulling that water, say, from the Wabash River, then most of that water goes back to the Wabash River. … The issue here is that we’re talking about taking water from here and piping it to another part of the state.

Question: The initial Intera report (for the IEDC) suggested you can do that. Do you have a sense, or is there any kind of consensus out there, about whether that’s sustainable? And for how long?

Keith Cherkauer: I don’t know the consensus. I think where we’re coming to a consensus is that we need more observations and we need more study. I think the state would like to move faster than that. So, there will probably be some places where the state moves faster than that. But I’ll have to say, some of the industries we’re talking about internationally already do a lot of water reuse. If you put a chip manufacturing plant down in Lebanon, it doesn’t need 50 million gallons of fresh water every day. They need some local storage, and they need to be able to reuse the water. When I mentioned that to IEDC, they were a little surprised that that was something that happened. … If you read the newspaper articles that have been published the last time Taiwan had a major drought, the government asked the semiconductor industry to not pull water from the reservoirs. And they said, Fine, we’ll just use recycled water until we can pull fresh water. So, they went on. They probably had to reduce a little bit. They already have to purify that water to a really high degree, and then it’s not that much dirtier after it’s gone through. And so reprocessing and reusing that water is actually easier.

Question: With all this conversation intensifying over the past two years, with IEDC’s LEAP pipeline plans kind of getting smoked out, is the state smarter right now about these conversations that you said nobody wanted to have in the past? Is the state truly smarter, or is it some sort of surface level smarter that might get us in more trouble in some fashion?

Keith Cherkauer: It’s a very good question, because I don’t know how much we’re just backing off and hoping that this dies down and we can just push forward in the future, and how much is, let’s really think about this and put together a better system. I would say right now that we’ve had some bills in the Indiana legislature in the last couple of years that haven’t gone anywhere. They’ve shared some support, but never had the votes. I don’t know, but all the states around us are all considering how to do this, and they’ve got similar precipitation and similar spatial variability in aquifers and other things. They’re starting to look at it. We should probably start to think about it, too.

Question: You’ve seen how these conversations go – and don’t go. With these new studies, how do you see them playing out at the Statehouse this year, where they’re actually going to be making some decision about water – even if the decision is to not vote on anything? Sen. Spencer Deery has one bill, and he predicted there would be others. Are you cynical or hopeful that state leaders will make the right choices on this?

Keith Cherkauer: I could see support for pushing it off for a couple of years. I still don’t see that we have the support we need to actually start thinking about what a regulatory environment looks like that Indiana wants. There’s a lot of finger pointing – we don’t want to do what Ohio does, we don’t want to do what Michigan does. Well, fine, but let’s have a conversation about, what does Indiana do? Because we have a good resource base. We should do more to figure out what’s sustainable and how it’s sustainable.

Question: Is it possible that we have too good of a resource, that there’s no real pressure to make those calls?

Keith Cherkauer: Maybe. Maybe we need some conversations about, say, why should Lebanon be doing development that requires lots of water? Why wouldn’t you put that in Lafayette-West Lafayette? Why don’t we put it up in the Gary-Hammond area? Because there you could pull from the Great Lakes. And we’ve got lots of brownfields up there that we really should do something to clean up and make lives better up there. But that’s a whole different thing.

Question: I guess the question is, as you’re looking at this, are there takeaways from these studies that you see that really will drive the conversation? Or is it just so technical that people will see it and go, Man, 250 pages … Do you see this having an impact? Is it just a nice stall situation for now? Is it a resource base, if not for now, for someday?

Keith Cherkauer: I think it’s a resource base. And I think it’s a resource base for right now. I’ve already had visions of things about what we should be investing in to move toward being able to answer these questions better, but there’s been no great movement on finding funding for some of those things. I think there are opportunities. I think people in Tippecanoe and surrounding counties should probably start looking at how they can monitor the water level in their own wells, because the state may be mandated to do it, but they will be restricted by how much funding and how much manpower they have, which is not huge, because we don’t have a regulatory environment.

• For more about the studies:

Tips, story ideas? I’m at davebangert1@gmail.com.