Day: July 7, 2022

By Letters to the Editor
The Dallas Morning News, July 3, 2022

Is this our plan?

Re: “Crusade against the drought — Texas oil baron’s descendant is working on technology to reclaim industry’s ‘produced water’,” by Richard Parker, June 26 Opinion.

Perhaps the best way to summarize Parker’s essay is this (his) statement; “Water, to be blunt, is the new oil. It can be drilled, piped, cleansed and shipped anywhere a pipeline goes.”

Parker does more than give us the dreary facts. He highlights what a Texas oil man (Ira Yates) wants to do to help solve the coming scarcity problem. It comes down to cleaning the water used for oil and gas production. New Mexico is already doing this. So is Saudi Arabia. And Chevron.

But Texas has outlawed reclaiming, cleaning and reusing this water. The coming solution for the North Texas area? Flood 20,000 acres northeast of Dallas. What is this land now? Roads, homes, churches and creeks, and acres of hardwood forest. Why? We seem not able to limit either population growth or water usage. Is this really the future we want?

-Ellen Taylor Seldin, North Dallas

Read the full letters to the editor on The Dallas Morning News