International Paper’s departure creates water challenges, opportunities

After guzzling more than 12.5 billion gallons of water just last year from the Floridan aquifer and the Savannah River to produce its paper products in Savannah and Riceboro, International Paper announced last week that both plants will be shuttered by October. Turning off those giant taps will take pressure off the overstressed Floridan aquifer, but for Savannah, the loss of a big surface water customer could mean rising costs for remaining customers, including residential ones.

About half of the water used at International Paper’s Savannah plant comes from the Savannah River. The City of Savannah processes it at the Industrial & Domestic surface water treatment plant — the only such facility in Coastal Georgia — and sells it directly to big industrial users at a rate that covers its production costs. When the city loses a big customer, the costs shift to the remaining buyers.

And IP was a big customer. Last year the I&D plant produced an average of 42.5 million gallons of water a day. International Paper’s Savannah plant used about 30% of that, 12.8 million gallons a day, so it paid 30% of the cost of running the plant, about $3.6 million, the most recent audit of the city’s Industrial and Domestic water supply fund shows.

Without IP or another company taking its place, the facility won’t need to process so much water. But the city won’t save much money on reduced production because most of the plant’s operating costs are fixed.

“You got to have the same number of operators,” said John Sawyer, who managed the I&D plant and later headed up the city’s water supply system before he retired in 2019. “That’s a 24/7 operation. You got to pull the same maintenance on it. You got to do the same reports, the same testing. So all your other costs are essentially fixed. So it costs, with the exception of additional electricity and chemicals, it costs the same thing to produce 60 million gallons a day as it does to produce 20 million.”

The remaining I&D direct customers typically have had to ante up to keep I&D running. That’s what happened in the late 1990s when Stone Container shut down. It was using close to half the surface water the city processed, Sawyer recalled.

“Before Stone Container went down, the cost of water was somewhere in the $350 per million gallon range, something like that,” he said. “Okay, as soon as Stone Container went down, the cost of water went to between $650 and $700 a million (gallons). That’s what everybody was paying. So however much you use, you were paying almost double.” The crisis lasted about 18 months, until the plant re-opened as Smurfit-Stone Container.

The surface water plant’s other industrial customers in 2024 were BASF Catalysts, Savannah Acid, Savannah Foods, Arizona Chemical, and “Weyerhaeuser,” a former name of the Port Wentworth pulp mill that International Paper operated under its Global Cellulose Fibers business and is selling to AIP. A city ordinance prescribes that the plant’s customers cover its costs.

“On the one hand, that may sound fine — ‘well, it’s just the industry’s bad,'” Sawyer said. “But if the industries can’t absorb that, if you’re not real careful, you could find yourself with a domino effect.”

Costs increases in Savannah could drive companies to favor other locations, he said.

“They compete with one another throughout the corporation,” Sawyer said. That’s true in IP’s case where the closure of the Savannah and Liberty plants is coupled with an increased investment in its Selma, Alabama, location.

The City of Savannah itself is also one of the I&D plant’s direct customers, buying an average of 11.3 million gallons of water a day from its own surface water treatment plant. The city then sells that water to other municipalities and counties and to its residents to recoup the cost of its production. In this way, the loss of water revenue from IP could increase residential rates.

In an interview with The Current on Friday, Savannah Mayor Van Johnson said city officials were grappling with the ramifications of losing one of its biggest customers for water. That was still the case Tuesday.

“City staff are assessing the impact of International Paper’s closure on our utility system,” spokesman Josh Peacock wrote in response to an inquiry about water costs from The Current. “When the pertinent details are understood, the City will provide an update to the public when appropriate.”

More water to share?

Together, the soon-to-be-shuttered Liberty County and Savannah IP plants use more than 22 million gallons of Floridan aquifer water a day. Both plants are among the largest groundwater users on the coast. Both have their own water withdrawal permits. And both sit in counties where groundwater use is fraught.

The Floridan aquifer is one of the most productive sources of groundwater in the world. But it has its limits. Heavy pumping in Savannah, largely from IP and its predecessors, reduced pressure in the aquifer and allowed salt water to begin seeping into existing wells on Hilton Head Island. That triggered stricter state regulations on groundwater pumping. In Chatham County, part of the state-designated “red zone,” big users including IP have reduced their use of the Floridan aquifer over the last decade or so. In Liberty County, part of the “yellow zone,” Floridan aquifer withdrawals have been restricted.

IP’s departure could allow thirsty communities to increase their water resources cheaply, but only if no new paper mill took over IP’s permits and state regulators were willing to re-allocate the water IP was using.

“Our county governments in the yellow and red zone need to get their P’s and Q’s together and start applying for that allocation,” said Phil Odom, a Liberty County representative on the Coastal Georgia Regional Water Planning Council.

When St. Marys Gilman/Durango paper mill closed in the early 2000s, Odom recalled, other permit holders in Camden County filed to increase the amount of water they could pump.

“It’s like, if you can show a need, then you can get reallocated,” he said.

But Sawyer, who represents Effingham on the Coastal Georgia Regional Water Planning Commission, would prefer to see the water stay in the ground.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do with IP’s groundwater,” Sawyer said. “But with the problems that we know we have in the aquifer today, and all of the efforts everybody has put in, to go out now and basically just bail out everybody that is making the efforts to save groundwater would be a travesty. Because you’re just spitting on everything that everybody’s done and all the money that’s been put out there.”

He allowed there could be an unusual circumstance where an increase in a permit would be justifiable. Tybee, where there are no easy alternatives to groundwater, is one example. But he doesn’t want to see the groundwater spent.

“They need to just keep it in bank,” he said.

Regulators will weigh in eventually. Large permit holders in the red zone had been expecting additional permit reductions in 2027.

“EPD is in the process of developing an updated strategy for groundwater withdrawal permitting in preparation for the 2027 reissuance of coastal groundwater withdrawal permits,” EPD spokeswoman Katie Bloomfield said. “EPD does not currently have any proposals for future groundwater withdrawal permit limits. Any such proposals will be developed and considered through the strategy update process.”

Spurred by the Bryan County Hyundai plant and the intense development associated with it, plans are already underway to increase the treatment of surface water in the Savannah area. The bulk of a $501 million water infrastructure package approved by the state legislature in March is headed to Effingham, to fund a new surface water treatment plant there. Savannah is updating the I&D plant.

“The $146,000,000 Georgia Fund loan will finance updating the Industrial and Domestic Water Plant, repairing the raw water pipeline, and constructing an elevated storage tank and pump stations,” the Georgia Environmental Finance Authority said Tuesday in announcing the loan. “Due to unprecedented industrial and residential development, the demand for water has significantly increased and continued growth is anticipated.”

Stress off the aquifer

Geology professor Jim Reichard expects to be able to see the effects of the IP wells shutting down. It happened before when the Durango (Gilman) paper mill shut down more than 20 years ago and water flowed to the surface nearby.

“When they shut down the ones down in St. Marys, there was a pretty immediate rebound in head, and we start getting artesian leakage in Cumberland,” said Reichard, a professor of geology at Georgia Southern University who researches groundwater flow in aquifer systems.

This time he’ll be looking on a Liberty County island.

“I work in St. Catherines, just within the edge of the cone of depression, and one of the Floridan wells I have been monitoring only needs to climb another seven feet or five feet before we’d have it at the surface again,” he said. “So there may be enough to tip the balance, and we may see some artesian conditions in places that for decades we haven’t seen.”

He’ll also be monitoring online data from the U.S. Geological Service about water supply wells in the region. (See this document for Reichard’s links to wells to monitor.)

“They’ve got that whole network of wells throughout the coastal area, and that head should show up right away,” he said. “I’ll be looking at that when they when it happens.”

From a hydrologic point of view the combined total of 20 million gallons a day is going to make a difference, Reichard said. “Yeah, it’s going to help the state’s efforts in the red zone,” he said.

The aquifer’s recovery could have big benefits for the ecology of the area, Ogeechee Riverkeeper Damon Mullis said. As Reichard anticipates, a healthy aquifer could allow groundwater to seep to the surface as it did before so many wells were drilled. That water that flows to the surface can supplement wetlands, including the salt marsh, and alter water temperature, Mullis said.

“Think about how fresh water input is so important for oyster reefs and Spartina grass,” he said. “So there definitely could be some some environmental benefits if we allow the aquifer to continue to recover. This is a great opportunity to do that with some of this water budget it looks like we might get back.”

The Ogeechee Riverkeeper, like the Savannah Riverkeeper, continues to advocate for prioritizing the use of the relatively pristine aquifer as drinking water and shifting industry to surface water. Aquifers protect water from pollutants like fertilizers and sewage spills that plague surface water.

“You know, use the aquifer for drinking and human uses and put industry on the surface water,” Mullis said. “If we could do that, in addition to, you know, setting it up where the aquifer continues to recover, as it has done since 2006, I think that’s a win-win for human health, water supply and the environment.”