"Conflicts, big or little, should never happen; someone always gets licked - 99 times of out of 100, yes, 999 times out of 1,000, both sides get licked." 

Industrialist H.L. Doherty's prescient statement nearly 100 years ago could easily be attributed to the conflicts over water resources and climate change of today, but instead he was focusing on the conflicts over the conservation of oil and gas fields. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of conflicts over the race of the pumps to extract the most oil and gas from the nation's oil fields, which in the 1920s were considered of paramount importance to national security, Doherty was arguing against wasteful haste, the notion that unbridled extraction of oil and gas would lead to damage of the reservoir rock, thus ultimately reducing the quantity of oil and gas that could be recovered.  Could Doherty's idea of Unitization, or the joint operation of oil or gas reservoirs by all the owners of rights that has been in practice for over 100 years be the savior of aquifers used not only for groundwater recovery, managed aquifer storage, green energy solutions like geothermal, and storage of wastes such as carbon capture and sequestration outlined in the Draft Articles of Transboundary Aquifers?   

My colleague Jakob Wiley, University of Oregon JD and concurrent MS in Water Resources from Oregon State University, and I explored the concept of unitization as applied in the oil and gas industry as one avenue to get in front of conflicts over the use of groundwater and aquifers. Rather than responding to conflicts, unitization employs a dispute prevention process that uses different stages of agreements that evolve as new knowledge is captured about the storage, recovery and boundary conditions of oil and gas reservoirs. One of the more important lessons for groundwater and aquifers is the process of regular redetermination, or revisiting agreements on how to "divide the oils and waters" as new knowledge is acquired about the reservoir and aquifer storage properties during the course of capturing the stored resources. 

Collective Aquifer Governance explores the continually evolving legal subsurface landscape and asks the question - are we moving from water diplomacy to pore space diplomacy to meet the world's water and storage needs?