YOUR-VOICE

Through grandmother’s house it goes - Kinder Morgan’s pipeline, that is

Ashley Waymouth
A Hill Country pipeline?

Pipeline giant Kinder Morgan would very much like to route a pipeline over the aquifer and through the woods, grandmother’s house be damned. Or condemned, as the case may be.

We are talking about KM’s planned Permian Highway Pipeline, a 430-mile-long, 42-inch-diameter natural gas pipeline planned to run through the heart of the Texas Hill Country and over the extraordinarily sensitive Trinity and Edwards Aquifers, the water supply for millions of Texans, including residents of San Antonio.

The Trinity Edwards is not just any old, run-of-the-mill aquifer. It’s a karst aquifer. Spill some natural gas liquids or condensate full of benzene or toluene into it and we’ll never get the poison out.

The Trinity Edwards is not a bowl of water that can be rinsed and cleaned. It’s full of caverns and sinkholes. It’s a limestone sponge riddled with pathways running hither and yon.

Leak some benzene into the Blanco River south of Kyle, and it may well show up in Austin’s Barton Springs.

KM’s plan has attracted considerable opposition from across the political spectrum. A group of landowners has joined the city of Kyle and Hays County in a state court lawsuit against the Texas Railroad Commission and the pipeline company. The suit points to the RRC’s failure to follow legislative mandates to oversee the routing of such pipelines.

The state’s Utilities Code “has mandated that the Railroad Commission must establish rules for the ‘full control and supervision of the pipelines…in all their relations to the public.”

According to the lawsuit, “Rather than establishing rules for the “full control and supervision” of pipelines in their private route-selection, the Commission has chosen to establish no control at all and impose no standards whatever.”

Pipeline companies have been handed the power of eminent domain. When their representatives knock on your door to tell you a pipeline is about to run through your kitchen, under today’s law there’s not much you can do besides cook over an outdoor campfire.

Oh, you’ll get an offer and, theoretically, you can “negotiate.” But, it’s a negotiation between the absolute eminent domain power that’s been given private pipeline companies and more or less powerless landowners and homeowners under today’s laws.

Those laws are so tilted against property rights that many Republicans and Democrats in the Texas Legislature have joined together in a bipartisan effort to reform them this session. There aren’t many issues that attract this kind of consensus in today’s polarized political environment.

So, to sum up, Kinder Morgan wants to run a very big gas pipeline over an aquifer that’s a source of water for millions of Texans, the Texas Railroad Commission is ignoring legislative mandates to protect the health and safety of Texans by controlling the routing of such pipelines, and the state’s eminent domain laws, granted to private pipeline companies, provide even fewer protections.

Everyone grants the importance of the oil and gas industry to Texas and the nation. It’s also understood that getting the natural gas resources of the Permian Basin to market will benefit all of us.

There are other routes for the pipeline, including one that runs further south and closer to the border, a route that already contains similar pipelines. The Trinity Edwards Aquifer does not have to be put at risk.

KM says the opposition is just another “Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY)” effort. But, in this case, it’s a backyard big as Texas.

If the Edwards and Trinity Aquifers are poisoned, the consequences to the health, safety and welfare of millions will be put at risk. The potential costs to the Texas economy are beyond calculation.

Waymouth is the managing director for the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association, which works to protect the waterways of the Hill Country.