On a weedy patch of dirt in dusty West Texas, a veteran water man named Alan Murphy and Fort Stockton City Manager Raul Rodriguez were examining the product of their partnership: a lonely looking water well on a bit of forsaken city property.

Recent rains had filled up the shallow pit around the stoppered well; last time, they’d had to fish out a dead rodent.

Now the men were explaining that, if the right investor steps up, this modest well could be key to the biggest water deal in North America — one that could solve the long-term water needs of a constellation of West Texas cities, as well as communities as far as Austin, nearly 350 miles away.

In the way of Texas wildcatters past and present, they’ve collected financing interest, but the question remains open whether their plan is a moneymaker or the biggest mirage in West Texas.

Scratch a little beneath Fort Stockton, and it’s not hard to find water — a lot of it.

Just west of town grow some of the state’s biggest pecan orchards — rows and rows of neatly manicured, nut-bearing trees that taken together resemble a royal French arboretum — along with vineyards, fields of cotton and alfalfa.

But for all its water, Fort Stockton is also notorious as the place the springs went dry: In the 1940s, the combination of mechanized pumps and all that agriculture slowed to a trickle the downtown springs that had drawn Indians and then the military to this region in the first place.

For years, the city has been trying to defend against further pumping, long opposing efforts by Clayton Williams Jr., the rancher and oilman who lost the 1990 gubernatorial race to Ann Richards, to export Fort Stockton-area groundwater as far away as Midland.

But now, in a wrinkle, the city of Fort Stockton has joined forces with Murphy, a survivor of corporate bankruptcies and builder of water systems across the state, who in his spare time does electrical wiring work at the nearby state prison, in what both partners hope will boost their water fortunes.

The project, as pie-in-the-sky as it might seem, sheds light on just how wild the west of Texas is when it comes to water deals, on how wide-ranging and ambitious such projects have become, and how poor cities, singed by the oil and gas slowdown, are now looking for ways to maximize the resources available to them.

Water developers have long eyed ways to move water from beneath Fort Stockton, which sits atop a layer cake of as many as five aquifers. A meteorite that struck eons ago not far from here likely played a role in cracking up the rock sitting below the region, and pressing water up near where Interstate 10 now runs.

At the start of the 20th century, the flow at Comanche Springs was as high as 500 gallons a second — a seeming miracle in an otherwise inhospitable country. In 1938, the city built a bathhouse, swimming pool and pavilion around the springs. Bathing beauties were celebrated at the annual Water Carnival.

But the pumping of Edwards-Trinity aquifer water, about 600 feet below ground, soon robbed the bathhouse of its spring water.

In the early 1950s, the irrigation district, supported by farmers who depended on the springs, sued Williams’ father, Clayton Williams Sr. But in 1956 the Texas Court of Appeals upheld his right to pump water, under the Texas rule of capture, which holds that all the water you can pump from beneath your property is yours to have.

The Williams family’s operations expanded, and by March 1961 the springs had ceased flowing — it revives during some winter months as the agricultural growing season ends. The rare and endangered Comanche Springs pupfish lived there until the springs dried up.

Clayton Williams Jr. didn’t reply to a request for comment.

More recently, Williams has sought to sell Fort Stockton-area water to Midland. A half-dozen or so years ago, the Middle Pecos Groundwater Conservation District, with the support of Fort Stockton, denied Williams his export request. The matter remains tied up in court.

A ‘gold mine of water’

Hoping to avoid that legal snarl is Murphy, who is aiming to drill wells on Fort Stockton property to tap the far deeper Capitan Reef aquifer, one that ranges about 4,000 feet below ground.

The aquifer "contains water of marginal quality" according to the state water development board. A 2013 state report estimated the aquifer contains as much as 10.5 million acre-feet of water beneath Pecos County, of which Fort Stockton is the county seat — or about five times as much water as lakes Travis and Buchanan, the major reservoirs of Central Texas, combined are capable of storing.

It is a "gold mine of water," said Murphy, his optimism and salesmanship shining through. "We’re looking for alternative waters and leaving the freshwater alone. And why not? There’s more water underground that is brackish than fresh, and no one is touching it."

The trick to Murphy’s plan is the state’s topography: Fort Stockton sits about 3,000 feet above sea level, putting it far above Austin, as well as marginally above Odessa and Terlingua — all mentioned as potential destinations for the water by Murphy during a recent tour of his facilities.

In other words, they are downhill from Fort Stockton, and it’s much cheaper to allow gravity to pull water down than it is to build and operate pumps to drive it uphill.

Despite recent rains across the state, Murphy says that drought has made people look for long-term solutions to water shortages.

And "one of the best solutions they have is not more reservoirs, and not depending upon rain which we cannot control," but to drill for deep brackish water "that no one else has been going after because of the depth to drill, the cost to drill or maybe the cost to treat," he said.

Murphy and Rodriguez have made the rounds to try to scare up financing: Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are among the investment names they drop.

"We’ve talked to big people," said Murphy, who shows off on his phone a photo of the view from a high-up floor in a Manhattan office building.

This fall, the pair drove to San Diego, a roughly 30-hour round trip, to entice investors.

Murphy said that in the past, working under a different company, he has won letters of intent from Blackstone and another private equity firm, but no one has yet committed to financing the early stage of the proposed project — which could cost as much as $9 million and is key to securing customers. A second stage, involving laying out heavy infrastructure, could cost an additional $50 million, he said.

The city of Fort Stockton, with a population of about 8,300, would get royalties from the sale of water and would be able to improve its own infrastructure, say the partners.

"City and county residents will benefit by keeping local entities involved in the production of water from Pecos County," Rodriguez said. "City residents will benefit from the new revenue source in the form of lower tax and utility rates."

Shipping the water to Austin, though, appears far-fetched: Despite a march of newcomers, the city has shaved off new demand by pushing water conservation measures; meanwhile, through a long-term deal with the Lower Colorado River Authority, Austin has water sewn up through 2050.

That water has tended to be cheaper, and less politically complicated, than groundwater.

And when the city is, eventually, forced to look for alternative sources of water, local groundwater, from counties just east of Travis County, appears to be a far more likely bet than anything west of the Hill Country, which presents major water infrastructure costs.

Greg Meszaros, Austin Water Utility director, shot down any prospect of Fort Stockton water making its way to Central Texas. "We have no activities or interest associated with this water source," he told the American-Statesman.

Struggling economy

Fort Stockton, however, could use the help. One of its chief concrete water mains is in dire need of long-term repairs, and depressed oil and gas prices have hit the community hard. Jobs in natural resources and mining are down nearly 16 percent since 2015 in the Permian Basin, which includes Pecos County, according to the Texas Workforce Commission.

In Pecos County alone, such jobs are down by nearly half since 2014. Wages in the sector dropped from $14.7 million in Pecos County in the second quarter of 2014 to $7.6 million in the second quarter of 2016.

In October 2016, Pecos County recorded an unemployment rate of 5.9 percent; it was 4.4 percent in Texas as a whole.

Those kinds of numbers make the city more interested in alternative sources of income — like water.

Murphy wants to run a roughly 190-mile pipeline through the Permian Basin to San Angelo and provide water to nine communities along the way. Another prospect is a pipeline north to Midland and Odessa.

Murphy says a monitoring well proves the aquifer is capable of yielding plenty of water.

Fort Stockton has requisitioned surplus military equipment — including some housing units and a 7-ton truck, repaired by Murphy’s son, a former Marine — from Fort Bliss in El Paso and stationed them by a test well. One day, they hope, the units will house waterworks workers; for now, it’s where cops convene and where, in the surrounding brushlands, off-duty city workers can hone their bow-hunting.

The Texas Water Development Board, essentially a bank that lends money for water projects, has grown increasingly interested in brackish water as a source for the future.

"Before, we were looking at typically shallower, better-quality water," said Larry French, director of the agency’s groundwater division. "As there have been increasing demands for water, we’re stretching our boundaries to look at other sources that we may have not been looking at before."

But no production applications for the Capitan Reef aquifer are on the books, said Paul Weatherby, the Middle Pecos Groundwater Conservation District general manager.

Weatherby said the Murphy-Fort Stockton wells faced technical problems, despite the success of the monitoring well.

But none of that has stopped Murphy from dreaming of that first investor: "The table is set, the menu is drawn up, and now it’s a question of who’s going to pay for the cooking."