2020 Capstone Course
► Texas A&M EERNSLP Capstone Students Expand the Future of Access to Freshwater
During the 2019-2020 school year, Texas A&M School of Law offered a year-long capstone course for second and third-year law students to research the legal and regulatory framework surrounding desalination and wastewater recycling plants, and their future role in expanding access to freshwater for urban communities. Part one of the course took place in the fall of 2019 and had the students analyze five currently operating desalination and wastewater recycling regimes in the U.S., Israel, and Australia. Each plant location was developed as a case study through which the students unpacked the various legal and regulatory barriers to implementing such facilities. The research encompassed exploration of permits, compliance, monitoring and other criteria regarding siting and operating these facilities, sourcing the input water, managing discharges, and other topics.
The fall 2019 component of the course was a special offering made possible through funding under a Texas A&M University X-Grant program as part of the multidisciplinary project “Pathways to Sustainable Urban Water Security: Desalination and Water Reuse in the 21st Century." Professor Gabriel Eckstein, director of the EERNSLP who developed the capstone course, is one of lead researchers for the project.
The second part of the capstone course was offered in the spring of 2020. While the fall course laid the groundwork via individual case studies of existing facilities, the spring semester required the students to delve into Texas’s legal and regulatory regime for setting up a new desalination plant and, separately, a wastewater recycling facility in the state. The project was developed for the Texas Water Foundation, which requested the research.
As part of their analysis, the students conducted in-depth research into federal, state, and local requirements for everything related to the siting, construction, operation, and management of these facilities, as well as identified all of the permits, monitoring, and compliance points by which a developer and operator would have to abide.
In the spring 2020 semester of the capstone seminar, the students created a legal toolkit for entities building new water desalination and water recycling facilities in Texas to help regulators, utilities, and the private sector navigate the legal and regulatory framework to build, operate, and maintain such facilities. The three-part report identifies and organizes the required federal, state, and local permits and other compliance criteria. The reports have been widely circulated in Texas and are now available as reference material for water professionals in the state.
As part of the capstone course, the students also had to present their findings and work-product to the Texas Water Foundation’s Board of Directors.