Texas water crisis exposes billion-dollar race for groundwater, private plans to extract billions of gallons, growing local resistance, and an outdated legal system that allows scarcity to be turned into financial profit.

Amid a water crisis in Texas, a billionaire manager wants to pump 15 billion gallons a year from the aquifer in rural eastern Texas and sell it to rapidly growing metropolitan areas, while farmers, local politicians, and groundwater districts struggle to prevent their wells from simply drying up over the next few decades.