Two Reservoir Projects to Watch: Allens Creek and the Colorado County Study

Nothing teaches project stages like real projects. Below are two current Texas reservoir efforts, the Brazos River Authority's Allens Creek Reservoir and the Lower Colorado River Authority's Colorado County study, profiled side by side from their sponsors' own records. They are deliberately paired because they sit at different stages, and confusing the two stages is exactly the mistake this resource center exists to prevent.

Project profile 1: Allens Creek Reservoir

According to the Brazos River Authority, Allens Creek Reservoir is a proposed pumped-storage water-supply reservoir in Austin County, just north of the town of Wallis, near where Allens Creek meets the Brazos River. Rather than damming the Brazos, the design calls for building the reservoir beside the river and filling, and refilling, it with pumps at an intake structure, taking river water into storage when flows are adequate and releasing it to downstream customers when needed.

BRA estimates the completed reservoir would provide an annual firm water supply of approximately 99,650 acre-feet to support current and projected growth in the Brazos River Basin. BRA already owns the roughly 9,600-acre Austin County property intended to hold the embankment dam, impoundment, associated flowage easements: outlet control structure, spillway, and administrative facilities, and BRA states that it holds the water-right permit for the project.

On May 13, 2026, at a special-called meeting, the BRA Board of Directors unanimously authorized an $18.8 million work plan and approved a professional-services engineering contract with GFT Infrastructure, Inc. to advance the project's development, a strong public signal of intent to build. BRA announced the action in a project update dated May 15, 2026.

What remains ahead, per BRA's own description: federal Clean Water Act Section 404 authorization from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, extensive environmental, flood, cultural, and historic-resource evaluation during permitting and design, mitigation of impacts identified in that process, detailed design, financing, and construction. The reservoir footprint itself is described as being in the early stages of development. As of the review date above, official sources do not describe the reservoir as fully permitted or under construction, and this page does not either.

Project profile 2: Potential Colorado County reservoir

In February 2026, LCRA announced it was moving forward with a feasibility study to determine whether a roughly 2,000-acre property it already owns northwest of Eagle Lake in Colorado County would be suitable for a large new water-supply reservoir, a possible off-channel design, near an existing river intake and pump station.

The study connects to LCRA's long-term water-supply goals: a new off-channel reservoir is one of the strategies in LCRA's Water Supply Resource Report, which the LCRA Board approved in November 2025, and the potential project could help LCRA meet its stated goal of adding about 60,000 acre-feet of water supplies by 2040. LCRA's early figures suggest such a reservoir could potentially hold between 48,000 and 80,000 acre-feet, larger than the Arbuckle Reservoir in Wharton County, which came online in October 2025 as LCRA's first water-supply reservoir in the lower basin.

What is unknown or unsettled, by LCRA's own account: whether the site is suitable at all, the project's cost, its funding, its timetable, its final configuration, and its technical, environmental, and permitting constraints. LCRA has said those specifics will be developed only after the feasibility study is complete. Until then, this is a study of a possibility, not an approved project.

Reading the two projects together

Both are off-channel concepts pursued by river authorities on land the sponsor already owns, and that is where the similarity ends. Allens Creek has a water right, a defined yield estimate, a named engineering contractor, and an authorized development budget; its open questions are federal permitting, design, mitigation, financing, and construction. The Colorado County effort has none of those yet; its open question is the most basic one, whether to pursue a project at all. Describing them as being at the same stage would misinform readers about both.