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, " 0 CUd'", -PI or purchase payments fOf the water right trans' ferred. A second and related alternative is to rely on pooling and unitization agreements as is commonly done for oil and gas extraction. In oil and gas law. pooling refers to bringing together of small tracts of land sufficient for the granting of a permit under existing well spacing rules. Unitization, on the other hand, refers lathe joint operation and management 01 a producing reservoir. Most states. including Nebraska, permit compulsory pooling and unitization agreemenls.44 Pooling prevents economic waste that would accompany the drilling of a large number of small wells while unitization allows an entire reservoir to be managed without regard to surface boundaries. Thus. by analogy, il minimum well spacing requirements had the effect of prohibiting extraction 01 groundwater, contiguous tracts could be pooled tor purposes 01 marshalling the necessary number of over- lying acres with private negotiations used to allocate the benefits 01 water extracted Similarly, if agreement could be reached. the groundwater reservoir could be unitized with wells placed on the most productive ground and owners of less productive ground sharing in the benefits of groundwater use. A wide number of varialions on the above theme could be developed. The importance of the twin concepts o~ pooling unitization, however, is that they enable all landowners to share in the benefits of groundwater use while helping to ensure that groundwater is put to the most productive use possible. Case Study Oklahoma adopted a groundwater regulatory statute in 1972 that comes within the scope of this alternative.45 The 1972 act is described in detail in Jensen, The Allocation of Percolating Water Under the Oklahoma Groundwater Law of 1972.46 The act required that: groundwater basins be identified, that the maximum annual yield from each water basin be determined by hydrologic studies. that tne amount and location of land overlying such groundwater basin be determined. and that the maximum annual yield from the basin be divided among the owners of land above the basin in proportion to the surface area owned.47 Special provisions of the act exempt domestic wells from permit requirements (with domestic use encompassing household uses. livestock watering for animals up to the normal grazing capacity of the land. and irrigation of lawns, orchards, and gardens not to exceed three acres) and allow municipalities to claim all the water allocated to platted land as long as the municipal- ity supplies water to the platted land. The law also establishes a minimum aquifer life by providing that the depletion schedule used cannot exhaust the basin before July 1, 1993. Nothing prevents the state from establishing a longer aquifer life or even from limiting withdrawals to natural reo charge. The system is thus quite flexible. One of the significant problems faced in a general quantification of groundwater rights is the difficulty of determining the maximum annual yield of the aquifer, even after an aquifer life has been selected. Water may be recoverable at some points overlying the basin lor a longer period of time than at other points. Thus, a state must decide whether all of the water in storage should be used to calculate maximum annual yield or only that portion down to a depth where substantially all of the overlying points can continue to extract water. Furthermore, the annual yield can be determined either with re- ference to the total amount of water in storage or with reference to the economically recoverable portion of water in storage. If total water is used, the aquifer will be economically depleted earlier than the date suggested by the selected aquiler life. If economically recoverable water is used. the maximum annual yield will change over time as economic conditions change. Oklahoma has attempted to deal with these problems by cal- culating maximum annual yield for subbasins within basins and by opting for an economically recoverable test. The difficulties, of course, are complicated considerably if there are presently existing private groundwater rights that must be incorporated into the new system. Under the Oklahoma law, groundwater property rights are defined by the number of acres of overlying land owned by the ground- water user. To the extent that some landowners do not use their annual allocation, the effective life of the aquifer is increased. Although overlying landowners do not lose their right to pump through lack of use, there is no provision that permits landowners to save their allocation for a future period. This is so because Oklahoma regulations restrict only the annual amount that can be pumped. No provision restricts the total amount of water that can be pumped over time. Thus, early pumpers can use more than their proportional share of water in storage. It would, of course, be possible to set a maximum limit on the total amount of water which could be withdrawn over time from a particular tract of land. Maximum limits would result in a true proportional alloca. tion of groundwater rights but would require additional expenditu res for administrative record keeping and reporting. 3-15