Amarillo's new pipeline

Also via B+C's Texas Water News, Amarillo has started engineering on a pipeline to bring in water from a new, 40 million gallon a day well field northeast of the city.

"People don't think about it, but north of Amarillo is downhill," Atkinson said.

That means moving a 4-foot wide column of water 170 feet higher to the city, a distance of more than 18 miles.

For scale, water towers are 120 feet tall.

When both phases are complete, production will be up to 40 million gallons a day. Running at full capacity every day, the pipeline could carry 14.6 billion gallons per year. That rate would empty Lake Meredith, at its current level, in two years.

On average, each well would be capable of pumping 1 million gallons a day, or about 700 gallons per minute.