Water, water everywhere? No, not really. Water is not forever
Water is not forever. As my old professor said, you cannot mine water.
If groundwater cannot naturally recharge, it will diminish in amount and availability. Nature quickly punishes if she is not treated well. Rabbits and humans repopulate in an active, if not exponential fashion. Aquifers do not.
I am not aware of any aquifer in the state which has had a net long-term increase in water volume in my lifetime. An aquifer needs to continually recharge if it is to be a source of water for people.
Water is the critical natural resource supporting the existence of man. In South Dakota, the state government, through its agencies and boards, is given the authority to manage public waters in non-Indian Country. Water management is the planning, managing, and protection of water resources.
How does it work? How does it not work? Let us see.
I will review an important pending water permit application by the city of Milbank. But first, the reader should consider the following examples of East River and West River aquifer issues in South Dakota:
East River
The state water report in 2025 stated in part, “The estimated average annual recharge to the Tulare: East James aquifer is 6,800 acre feet per year …. The estimated average annual withdrawal from appropriative water rights (all authorized for irrigation use) is 8,165 acre feet per year. Therefore, based on the hydrologic budget, there is not unappropriated water available in the Tulare: East James aquifer.”
The report also stated, “Assuming the 0.83 inches per year recharge applies to the entire area of the aquifer, recharge to the Tulare: Western Spink-Hitchcock aquifer is approximately 18,000 acre feet per year. The estimated average annual withdrawal from the Tulare: Western Spink-Hitchcock aquifer is 12,153 acre feet per year.
West River
In a 2025 USGS report, the agency stated in part, “Total appropriations, mean annual well withdrawals, and maximum annual well withdrawals all exceeded mean annual recharge for the Inyan Kara aquifer in subarea 4 (Rapid City area) …. Total annual appropriations for the Deadwood aquifer were more than two times greater than mean annual recharge in subarea 9 (Jewel Cave area) and mean and maximum annual well withdrawals were nearly equal to recharge.”
Milbank’s permit application
The city of Milbank recently applied for a future use water permit, requesting water rights from the Antelope Valley Aquifer. A future use permit is the legal right to appropriate water for use in the future.
The permit, if approved, grants a legal “reservation” of a definite amount of water with a specific priority date. A future use permit does not grant current authority to construct works or put the water to beneficial use.
Milbank serves more than 3,200 water customers, an average of 1,017,000 gallons of water per day. The city’s public water source is groundwater from local wells. Not all of the existing city wells access the aquifer for which the city currently requests this new pending future use permit.
The city’s pending permit application tells the state that its purpose is to address the anticipated growth in the city and that a successful permit would also secure an additional water source to blend with its current source, which has high total dissolved solids.
The South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources filed a technical report recommending approval of the future use permit. The engineer’s report concluded that the Antelope Valley Aquifer’s estimated average annual recharge is ~6,700 acre feet per year. The aquifer’s total appropriated (committed) water, including that approved for future use, is 3,524 acre feet per year.
This means all current and reserved water rights under state water permits equal 3,524 acre feet per year. As of Milbank’s pending application, more than half of the estimated recharge ability of the aquifer is legally committed to current or future use permits. Milbank’s request consists of 1,120 acre feet per year. Milbank’s request would constitute 35% of the remaining available rechargeable water from the aquifer.
Opposition
The Milbank application is contested by another established large water system. This neighboring rural water system uses an average reported withdrawal over the last 10 years of 1,069 acre feet per year. While this contesting party, Grant-Roberts Rural Water System, Inc., did not provide evidence with its filed papers, the water system nevertheless timely and properly filed objections to the city’s permit application.
A rural water system is a state recognized system that delivers water to users and customers in rural areas or to an unincorporated township. A rural water system is considered a utility by the state.
Grant-Roberts asserts that the withdrawal of an additional 1,120 acre feet per year will have a unique and detrimental effect on the water system’s existing permitted wells and on the recharge of the Antelope Valley Aquifer. The water system also argues that the DANR engineer’s report on the Milbank application is flawed and that an additional investigation is needed.
East Dakota Water Development District
The East Dakota Water Development District also intervened in the permitting process but does not oppose the permit application. The development district in its submission stated, “… the comments contained herein do not in anyway reflect opposition to the City of Milbank seeking to secure additional water resources. The District has long encouraged public water supplies to consider not just their current and near-term water needs, but to consider securing reserves through future use permits to address the entities long-term needs.”
The district reported that “Although additional observation well data would be needed to create a detailed map, the limited data presented on Figure 4 strongly suggests that groundwater flow in the Antelope Valley aquifer is from the northwest to the southeast.”
The district went on to state, “As such, it is highly unlikely that "recharge" to the aquifer in the southern part of the aquifer would actually be available for withdrawal in the northern end of the aquifer, although this is the clear implication of the simple recharge calculation presented in the text. For that to happen, this groundwater would have to flow uphill, against the water table gradient, in order to “replace” water extracted. ln that the majority of current permits appear to have been issued (to date) for the northern third of the aquifer, this could be a problem for yet another well in this region.”
My comments
The DANR uses hydrologic budgets to examine permit applications. A hydrologic budget is done by the technical water staff of the state’s DANR. Such a budget would tell one how much water is conceptually available for use from a water body. The principal test for the hydrologic budget of an aquifer is based on the estimated average annual recharge of water back into the aquifer, as against the estimated average annual water withdrawal from existing water rights.
The total estimated withdrawal includes withdrawals reserved for future use and held or deferred applications. Future use permits are assumed to be fully developable; in other words, when determining available water, the DANR includes the reserved amount found in authorized future use permits even if the permits are not active water permits.
None of the parties — not the state, the objecting party, nor the applicant — have considered the use of a test well. Test wells are different than established observation wells, which South Dakota manages throughout the state.
An aquifer performance test, commonly conducted using a test well (and also known as an aquifer pumping test), is a process using a new well in which groundwater elevations measuring how the aquifer responds to the stress of pumping a high capacity well or wells. Milbank did not offer to do such a test.
The objecting party, the rural water system, did not recommend such a test. The state DANR did not recommend, require, or offer to do such a test. Water drawdown in an aquifer can best be determined with an aquifer performance test.
I explored this missing link in a prior piece, A decision to approve a large permit such as the Milbank permit should not be in great part based on “observation well analysis” when three of the four relevant observation wells are not near the proposed site. Further, it is important to understand that observation wells are not designed to test stress which may arise from pumping a high capacity well or wells.
The USGS recommends using an aquifer test. In Basic Ground-Water Hydrology, the agency states, “One of the most important hydrologic studies involves analyzing the change, with time, in water levels (or total heads) in an aquifer caused by withdrawals through wells. This type of study is referred to as an aquifer test and, in most cases, includes pumping a well at a constant rate for a period ranging from several hours to several days and measuring the change in water level in observation wells located at different distances from the pumped well.”
David L. Ganje is an attorney who practices natural resources, environmental and commercial law. The Ganje Law Office website is lexenergy.net.
Photo: Lake Oahe, public domain, wikimedia commons
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