That's enough water to meet the needs of Raleigh and several other Wake County towns most days of the year.

Lappala's company, Eagle Water, owns the rights to water being pumped from a giant phosphate mine near Aurora, in Beaufort County about 120 miles east of Raleigh.

Lappala would love to connect the source of this water, the Castle Hayne Aquifer, to the booming Triangle, where supplies grow tight during droughts. "It makes all kinds of sense," he said.

Running a pipeline to a distant aquifer is among several creative ideas tossed around by experts and nonexperts eager to solve the Triangle's long-term water needs. Others include dredging reservoirs to make them deeper and building coastal desalination plants to treat seawater.

Connecting the phosphate mine to the Triangle would involve running a pipeline more than 120 miles uphill along a not-yet-determined route. Construction costs alone would total tens of millions of dollars. While the idea may have seemed far-fetched several years ago, nothing appears to be off the table these days. City engineers plan to visit the mine.

"We're going to have to start thinking outside the box," said Dale Crisp, Raleigh's utilities director. "There's no easy solution to the water issues in North Carolina."

Perfectly good water

Raleigh is not the first utility to covet the water being taken from the Castle Hayne, which sits under the open pit phosphate mine. Since 1965, mining companies have been pumping out perfectly good drinking water and dumping it into the Pamlico River and, ultimately, the Pamlico Sound.

The current owner, PCS Phosphate, draws 68 million gallons a day from the aquifer to relieve pressure on the walls and floor of the mine. If the company didn't remove the groundwater, it would burst through the surface during mining operations.

PCS uses just 10 million gallons of water a day for its operations and discards the rest. More than a dozen wells reaching 250 feet into the Castle Hayne limestone remove about 3,000 gallons per minute each. The water is discharged into a canal that flows into the Pamlico River.

In 2001, Eagle Water signed an agreement with PCS and the state's Division of Water Quality allowing it to sell water to retail customers. Six years into the venture, Eagle has yet to sell a drop, largely because it needs 20 million to 25 million gallons of demand a day to make the project profitable.

"The minute we sell one drop of water we have to pay all the pumping costs," Lappala said. "We can't just have some guy with a fish farm who wants 1,000 gallons of water. That's not going to cut it."

A proposed deal between Eagle and a group of utilities around Kinston fell through after the communities decided to draw water from the Neuse River.

Need and economics

John Morris, director of the state's Division of Water Resources, said he's confident the water pumped from the mining operation will eventually be tapped.

"I think it's just a matter of economics," Morris said.

And necessity. With its relatively rainy climate, the Southeast has not traditionally worried about water the way more arid parts of the country do. But the region's tremendous population growth has begun to strain the reservoirs and small rivers that provide drinking water, particularly during the droughts that have become common in recent years.

Crisp, Raleigh's public utilities director, said the city has known about the aquifer for years and acknowledged that it is one of many long-term alternatives the city is exploring.

Crisp said doing nothing is not an option, since Raleigh's maximum summer water demand is expected to exceed its supply by 2040.

"The city will have to do something," he said.