Stakeholders plan Coastal Georgia’s water future

This time last year, Coastal Georgia community leaders were fretting over water quantity, pondering how to balance the needs of the newly opened Hyundai plant with concerns from Bulloch County farmers that their irrigation wells could run dry. 

But since then, the tide has shifted dramatically on water supply. At least on paper. In the spring, Gov. Brian Kemp championed a $500M plan to increase the amount of drinking water available from the Savannah River. Then in August, one of the largest industrial water consumers on the coast, International Paper, announced the closure of two of its mills, potentially reducing the water drawn from the Floridan aquifer by more than 20 million gallons a day.  

Tasked with charting out water management practices to meet future needs, the Coastal Georgia Regional Water Planning Council met in early December to begin taking these and other new realities into account in its planning. Water withdrawal permits in the four-county area of Chatham, Effingham, Liberty and Bryan are set to expire at the end of 2027. The group’s goal is to create a comprehensive strategy document by mid-2027 to help guide the reissuance of these permits.

The 27-member council is made up of representatives from local governments, industries and private water suppliers from the six coastal counties plus Effingham, Long and Bulloch. They advise state officials but do not set policy. To aid the planning council, the EPD has formed a 19- member Coastal Permitting Advisory Committee, essentially advisors to the advisors. It has some overlap with the planning council membership, but also includes the Ogeechee and Savannah Riverkeepers as well as representatives from forestry, agriculture and the state’s largest monopoly utility, Georgia Power.

Officials from the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, which regulates water usage and ultimately issues water withdrawal permits, briefed both groups on what they called “pillars” to be minded while developing their recommendations.

Surface water supply increasing

First up was the increased availability of surface water supply, made possible by the $500 million water infrastructure package approved by the state legislature in March.

With a combination of state grants and low-interest loans, Effingham County is building a new surface water treatment plant that will provide 12-28 million gallons a day of drinking water.  The state funding also allows Savannah to expand its existing treatment facility, the Savannah Industrial & Domestic plant, and take its production from 60 million gallons of water a day to 88.3 million gallons a day in the mid-term and 103 million gallons a day long-term.

Decisions are needed about who gets to use groundwater, which is generally considered higher quality than surface water because groundwater is better protected from pollutants. 

“Can we decide collectively which parties need to be on surface water?” EPD Water Supply Program Manager Wei Zeng said. “Which parties will need to be on groundwater? So the general idea is surface water is available to those entities who are closer to the treatment facilities, where there is an easier conveyance.”

The environmental impacts have been evaluated, Zeng said.

“We know the impact is very low on the Savannah River, and it’s doable from a water quality perspective,” he said. “And we just need to resolve the issue, or address the issue, of any impact on dissolved oxygen in the lower Savannah River, in the Savannah Harbor. And that is part of our potential permittee consideration as well.”

The last harbor deepening project resolved concerns about depleted oxygen by requiring systems to inject oxygen into the water to be stationed along the river. Environmentalists, including the Savannah Riverkeeper Tonya Bonitatibus, have criticized this solution as an “iron lung” for the waterway. 

Spreading out the pumping

EPD’s Zeng also called attention to a strategy to spread out where pumping occurs to mitigate localized effects on the Floridan aquifer, an underground layer of rock that stores and releases water.

In Savannah, nearly a century of high volume pumping from International Paper and its predecessor, along with municipal and other industrial use, has created a “cone of depression” — a cone-shaped area in the aquifer where water pressure is reduced because water has been pumped out faster than it’s naturally replenished. Pumping in Savannah has affected wells on Hilton Head Island, making them salty, which is what triggered the existing state-required withdrawal restrictions to protect the aquifer.

An ongoing study is examining the effect of keeping overall water withdrawal steady but varying pumping levels in the city of Savannah’s 47 wells. EPD used computer models to simulate the effects of moving pumping away from the center of the cone of depression. 

“We did see a quite substantial beneficial effect on the hydraulic head at Hilton Head Island and it is the basis of the pilot study,” Zeng said. The study is now in its second stage, using field observation to verify what the models predicted. 

Freed up water 

Another pillar to ponder was the fate of groundwater no longer needed by International Paper, a major user of groundwater on the coast, which announced in late summer its shutdown of two plants. 

IP Savannah averaged a withdrawal of 11-12 million gallons a day in  recent years. That dropped to 5.2 million gallons a day in October 2025. IP Riceboro (known also as Interstate Paper) averaged  10-11 million gallons a day in the past few years. That dropped to 3.2 million gallons a day withdrawal in October.

Aquifer levels showed a dramatic increase almost immediately. 

Former Savannah Mayor Eddie DeLoach, who sits on the Coastal Georgia Regional Water Planning Council, had questions about what would happen to IP’s permits. He pointed to rapid development in Bulloch County. 

“I come off of I-16, and I hit 67, and every farm on the right-hand side that I can see, all the way down, is for sale, for development, all in that area and all there. And I’m wondering if these items that are, quote, not being used now, because the plants are down, were permitted. Who will secure those water permits in the future?” 

Georgia regulates the use of “waters of the state” including the Floridan aquifer and surface water drawn from streams, rivers and lakes, Zeng explained.

 “So when a citizen ceases to use water, they can surrender the permit to the state. The state will revoke it and put it in reserve,” he said. “And if there is another business buying that facility having the same type of water use, there could be a transfer of an existing permit to the buyer of the facility. We don’t know the answer to that at this point, whether or not there’s a buyer who’s going to do exactly the same kind of business.”

EPD wants stakeholders to weigh in. 

“We don’t have an application for any changes at this point, but what we can say is the question of, if there is freed up water, what do we do about it?” Zeng said. “Even though the state decides how to use it in a beneficial way, we’d like to have the stakeholders’ input. We’d like to have your input on how we deal with what’s freed up and what criteria we have in utilizing that.”

What’s next

Along with these major issues that the water council and its committee discussed at length, numerous other water quantity and quality issues were brought to the table, including the use of septic in the fast-growing region, industrial reuse of treated wastewater, new ways to assess the impact of Georgia wells on Hilton Head Island, and consideration of the salt water plume in the aquifer in Glynn County.  

The Georgia Water Planning and Policy Center at Albany State University supports the regional council and its new advisory committee with stakeholder facilitation, technical assistance, and planning support. Representatives from the center are developing next steps for the advisory committee, which they expect to reconvene in February. 

While the Coastal Water Planning Council is now working with a new Coastal Permitting Advisory Council of 19 members, the State Water Planning Council met in December and agreed to trim its membership as well as the number of representatives in each of the 11 regional councils. The recommendation is expected to be approved by the state legislature in the session that begins Jan. 12, 2026.