Yes, let’s hope they learn an important lesson in what NOT to do.

First of all, aquifers that are already being depleted should only be tapped as a secondary source of water for users located ON TOP OF or RIGHT NEXT TO the aquifer–AFTER conservation, efficiency, rainwater catchment and, for sunny, humid environments, CSP dehumidification catchment.

Say you’re installing a photovoltaic system–you don’t keep the avocado green fridge, the electric water heater, the electric furnace and continue to keep lights on in rooms nobody is using while expecting a photovoltaic system to be practical when your house is poorly insulated, shaded by forest canopy and the only sunny spot on your property is a quarter mile away. A completely clueless person who is in love with photovoltaics may do it anyway, even though it would be impractical and very expensive in light of the much easier, cheaper and more elegant solutions for that particular situation.

People in Dallas, like the rest of the US, continue to use drinking water to flush turds and urine down the toilet, wash cars and trucks and water their useless lawns with sprinklers that lose 80% to wind and evaporation before the water hits the grass. Water from kitchen and bathroom sinks and showers is flushed down the drain after a single use! The ogallala aquifer is already being depleted (not to mention polluted) by ignorant “farmers” and is in desperate need of good stewardship–not more depletion–especially not for the purpose of feeding a city like Dallas, governed by people who have enormous disrespect for water and every other natural resource.

If you need clarification on the CSP dehumidification reference, I was referring to using rooftop or land-based microCSP (like the systems made by Sopogy) to drive multiple simultaneous processes, like air-conditioning, refrigeration, electricity production, industrial thermal processes and dehumidification. Dehumidifiers, like the portable versions you can buy for your home, extract water from the air and, if designed properly, can provide drinking water. The amount of water produced depends on the energy used, the efficiency of the device and the relative humidity. This is not such a good idea if you’re driving the process with coal-derived electricity (unless it’s an emergency), cause it’s quite the energy hog, but it is much more efficient when driven directly with solar thermal …but even this really only makes economic sense if conservation and efficiency measures are put into place first and other processes are driven with the same thermal energy (cogeneration).

T Boone Pickens is only doing what he knows–externalizing the ill-effects of his operations onto others so that it doesn’t end up on his bottom line. His balance sheets will never reflect the grief he is causing to the 1100 landowners he has disrespected. His balance sheets will never reflect the multiple effects of accelerated depletion of the ogallala aquifer–until it affects his own extraction locations. By then, he will have made off like the bandit he is. He is ignorant and inconsiderate, to put it mildly.

“All I’m doing is selling surplus water,” Pickens tells Business Week.

Right. By that logic, I could kidnap you and have one of your kidneys removed so I could sell it on the black market. Then when you wake up, I could just say, “All I’m doing is selling a surplus kidney.”

It’s times like this I wish I had infinite time and money to do a really in-depth analysis to show an investor that it would actually be more profitable to do it the right way. With the estimated $3,530,000,000 he wants to spend on this project, he could actually supply more clean energy and water through local, distributed systems with additional side benefits and higher profits without any of the drawbacks of his current plan.