Well Water in Ector County, Texas

Why a Permian Basin county has no groundwater district

It would be reasonable to assume that Ector County -- Odessa's home county, and a place where groundwater is genuinely scarce and heavily used by both households and the oil-and-gas industry -- sits inside some kind of groundwater conservation district. It does not. The Permian Basin Underground Water Conservation District (PBUWCD), headquartered in Stanton and the district most commonly associated with this part of West Texas, actually serves only Martin County and most of Howard County. Midland and Ector Counties, despite sitting immediately adjacent and sharing the same regional aquifer system, fall outside PBUWCD's jurisdiction entirely and are not covered by any other groundwater district.

The practical result is that a private well in Ector County operates under the plain, unmodified rule of capture described on the Texas state hub: no registration requirement, no production permit, no spacing rule, and no district staff tracking water levels or issuing exempt-well determinations. A landowner may drill and pump as much water as they can put to beneficial use, without needing anyone's permission -- but also without any district-level monitoring of the aquifer they're drawing from, and without the kind of institutional buffer a GCD provides if a large nearby user affects the local water table.

A separately documented water-quality risk: arsenic

Layered on top of that regulatory gap is a real, independently documented water-quality concern. Texas A&M AgriLife Extension has organized low-cost well-water screening events for Ector and Midland County residents on multiple occasions -- reporting from April 2024 and again in April 2025 describes screenings specifically motivated by naturally occurring arsenic found at elevated concentrations in West Texas groundwater. Arsenic is a known carcinogen, and AgriLife's screenings test for it alongside E. coli, nitrate-nitrogen, and salinity, with same-day or next-day results and a nominal fee (reported at around $15 per test in earlier rounds). AgriLife's stated motivation for running the program repeatedly is that an estimated 13,500 private well owners across the two counties are not subject to any water-quality regulation at all -- there is no government body that requires them to test their water, so AgriLife's extension program is effectively filling that gap voluntarily.

For a land buyer, the combination matters: because there is no groundwater district, no agency is going to flag a water-quality problem on a well you're about to rely on. That responsibility falls entirely on you as the buyer or landowner. AgriLife's screening events are periodic rather than permanent, so treat them as a low-cost opportunity when they're running rather than an ongoing service you can count on year-round -- a private certified lab test for arsenic and the other AgriLife panel (E. coli, nitrate, salinity) is the reliable fallback when no county event is scheduled.

What to do before relying on a well here

1. Do not assume an existing well's water is safe just because it has been in use for years -- arsenic contamination is often invisible (no taste, odor, or color change) and its presence can vary well-to-well even in the same area.
2. Check with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension's Ector County office for the next scheduled low-cost well-water screening event, or budget for an independent certified-lab arsenic test if none is currently scheduled.
3. Because no groundwater district monitors levels here, ask a local well driller or the Texas Water Development Board about typical well depths and any known local drawdown trends before assuming a given depth will reliably produce water long-term.
4. If you are buying land with an existing well, request any past water-test results from the seller, and do not treat "the well has always worked" as equivalent to "the water is safe to drink."