At Tuesday’s joint meeting of two local water planning councils, International Paper was the thirsty elephant no longer in the room.

The company last month announced the impending closure of its Riceboro and Savannah paper mills that in total used more than 22 million gallons of Floridan aquifer water a day. The Savannah plant also used about 13 million gallons a day of treated Savannah River water it purchased from the city.

Council members were eager to hear what would become of those huge water allotments, especially with both mills in counties operating under state-imposed restrictions on water withdrawals. But Wei Zeng, water supply program manager at the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, said it’s too soon to say what will happen.

“EPD does not have in-house a request to modify the permit, to reduce the permit or to revoke the permit,” Weng said. “We don’t have that information at this moment, and we will be happily working with the industry or the successor.”

EPD can transfer the permit to a successor that does the same type of business. But if it’s a different use, the new company would have to apply for a new permit, Weng said.

Weng said a partial or total reduction in demand would likely result in a benefit in the “cone of depression” — the cone-shaped area in Savannah where water pressure is reduced because aquifer water has been pumped out faster that it’s naturally replenished. Pumping in Savannah has affected wells on Hilton Head Island, making them salty, and leading to the state-required withdrawal restrictions to protect the aquifer.

Benji Thompson, chair of the Coastal Georgia council, said interest in re-allocating the water has been high.

“We were in the Georgia Environmental Conference when the news came out about the IP shut down,” he said. “And that was around 7:30 that morning. By 9 o’clock, I had about a half a dozen calls from people asking me how are we going to give this water away.”

Despite the IP shutdown, Bryan and Effingham counties and Savannah are moving forward with a plan to expand the use of water from the Savannah River, Weng said. The state has provided $500 million in funding to advance that plan, which includes the expansion of Savannah’s existing surface water treatment plant and the construction of a new treatment plant in Effingham County.

Members of the Coastal Georgia and Savannah-Upper Ogeechee regional water planning councils, which advise the state on water planning in their respective regions, met together at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro on Tuesday.

Hyundai wells

Along with the IP discussion, the councils also heard an update about Hyundai’s planned water supply. Four wells are being drilled in Bulloch County near the intersection of I-16 and Ga. 119 to supply 6.625 million gallons a day of water, with about 4 million gallons a day earmarked for the Hyundai plant and associated development. Bulloch residents, including farmers who rely on private wells to irrigate, opposed the Hyundai wells fearing they would reduce the production of their own wells. As a result, the EPD required Bulloch and Bryan counties to develop a plan to provide mitigation for local private wells impacted by the Hyundai wells.

“That program is now fully active,” Trent Thompson, vice president of infrastructure at Thomas & Hutton, told the councils. “Both counties have on-call well drillers set up and ready to respond if anybody does have any issues with their existing wells.”

Thompson said he’s optimistic that mitigation won’t be necessary. The first of the four wells, the easternmost one, is expected to come on line next month. The second one is expected before year’s end. The last two, the westernmost ones, are scheduled to be completed before April 2026.

EPD’s modeling of the effect of the four wells showed a possible drawdown of 10 to 19 feet in existing wells within a five-mile radius. But a real world test indicates the effect could be much less dramatic, Thompson said. Engineers drilled a monitoring well 180 feet from well number 4. When they ran the pump on that well at 150% of design capacity for 24 hours, the level of the monitoring well dipped 4.4 feet, Thompson said.

“Remember, in the previous modeling we were anticipating as much as a 10 foot drawdown, five miles away,” Thompson said. “So the results very promising.”

The test was not an apples-to-apples comparison to the state’s modeling, which assumed conservatively that all four wells were running at the same time for 24 hours. But that’s also not the way the system is set up to run, Thompson said.

“I think what we’re going to see based on these results are certainly, hopefully, a lot less impact, maybe no impact, on these existing wells,” he said.

Hyundai is expected to rely on the wells only until about 2030, when surface water will begin to be provided to the plant.

The Tide brings regular notes and observations on news and events by The Current staff.

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