The New Gold Rush: Groundwater Sparks Fierce Battles Across Texas

Increasing water demands in Texas cities are creating significant conflict over shared groundwater resources. Texas’s unique legal framework, particularly the “rule of capture,” and the limitations of current regulatory mechanisms, is creating a new gold rush among public and private entities that wish to utilize the increasingly scarce resource.

The rule of capture, established in a 1904 Texas court case and reaffirmed in 2012, allows landowners to pump as much groundwater as they can capture from beneath their property, regardless of the impact on neighboring wells or the overall aquifer level. This principle has been described as “He Who has the Biggest Pump gets the Water.” The Texas Supreme Court adopted this rule based on the then-limited scientific understanding of groundwater and the belief that regulating it would be "hopeless."