It’s not exactly Perrier-pricey, but pretty damn close, according to opponents of the massive proposed Flaming Gorge pipeline project that would pump water out of the Green River in southwest Wyoming and suck it back over the Continental Divide to Colorado’s Front Range.

Fort Collins developer Aaron Million recently revised his plans for the project and re-filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), according to the Fort Collins Coloradoan. Million had been seeking approval of the project from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers but switched regulators this summer because he’s now including 550 megawatts of hydroelectric power.

His original plans called for moving 250,000 acre feet of water through a 500-plus-mile pipeline along Interstate 80 and then down the Front Range of Colorado – a private project the state estimates could cost between $7 billion and $9 billion.

The new plan is called the Regional Watershed Supply Project, and it has garnered opposition all the way from the southwest Wyoming towns of Green River and Rock Springs to Colorado’s populous Front Range, where conservation groups say it would be far too costly both economically and environmentally.

A report authored by economist George Oamek and released Tuesday (pdf) found that Flaming Gorge pipeline water would cost up to $4,700 per acre-foot compared to other proposed water diversion projects that would come in at around $700 per acre-foot.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board at its meeting in Grand Junction next week is expected to vote on whether to spend $150,000 on a task force to study the Flaming Gorge pipeline. A group of water users on Colorado’s Front Range also has proposed a similar pipeline project.

“The proposed task force would squander taxpayer dollars,” said Elise Jones of the Colorado Environmental Coalition. “The state of Colorado should be looking at projects that are affordable, viable, and collaborative, not spending money on gold-plated pipe dreams.”

Million first floated the Flaming Gorge idea in 2007, making the case that Colorado has the right to up to 250,000 acre-feet of the Green River under the Colorado River Compact because the river twists through northwest Colorado before ultimately flowing into the Colorado River in Utah.

But Oamek estimates southwest Wyoming could take a more than $58 million a year hit to its outdoor recreation industry if the pipeline is ever built. Not surprisingly, residents of that part of the state are mostly dead-set against the project. Million, however, has wooed eastern Wyoming residents, promising some of that water could come their way as it flows to the much thirstier Front Range of Colorado.

The editorial board of the Casper Star Tribune was not impressed:

“If there’s not enough water to support the current rate of population growth along Colorado’s Front Range without importing it from elsewhere, perhaps development should be slowed. At the very least, it would be nice if Colorado kept its internal water worries to itself.”

Editorial writers at the Pueblo Chieftain in southern Colorado, however, seem to love the idea.

“There’s growing support for the concept to pipe water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir across southern Wyoming and down the Front Range of Colorado. But impediments are being mounted. Various environmental groups are opposing even a study of the proposal.

“If the enviros are so concerned about the environment, let them visit Crowley County, where the loss of most of its water has turned huge swatches of formerly productive farmland into a giant weed patch. Do they want more of that? We certainly hope not.”

Follow David O. Williams on Twitter. ]]> http://coloradoindependent.com/98737/pricey-wyoming-pipeline-project-ratchets-up-water-worries-along-colorados-front-range/feed 15 http://coloradoindependent.com/82299/colorado-water-agriculture-people-and-ecosystems-compete-for-a-limited-supply http://coloradoindependent.com/82299/colorado-water-agriculture-people-and-ecosystems-compete-for-a-limited-supply#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:37:47 +0000 Allen Best http://coloradoindependent.com/?p=82299 According to speakers at a water forum last week, Colorado faces a difficult--if not a dismal--water future.]]>

According to speakers at a water forum last week, Colorado faces a difficult–if not a dismal–water future.

At the outset of the Metro Roundtable Reception held in downtown Denver Thursday evening, John Stulp, special policy advisory to Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, cited the need to come up with a win-win solution for water.

But all testimony given later in the meeting suggested such perfection is not easily attainable. If you move water to accommodate a rapidly growing population, you inevitably take it away from some other purpose.

The bigger losers in this water-soluble game of Chinese fire drill are agriculture, which currently uses 85 to 90 percent of the state’s water, and natural ecosystems, such as the vast complex of life along waterways.

Some 500,000 to 700,000 acres of agriculture are projected to be dewatered in coming decades as cities buy farms for their water rights, a process informally called “buy and dry.” That process was described by Stulp as the status quo – and one he says is unacceptable.

Already, much water originally allocated for farms in the Fort Morgan and Sterling areas has been sold to water providers in the Denver metropolitan area, said Joe Frank, executive director of the Lower South Platte Water Conservancy District.

“It’s not very visible yet because the water hasn’t been removed from the (agricultural) land,” said Frank, whose district distributes water from Fort Morgan to the Nebraska border.

But while these transfers have occurred in the free market of willing buyer and sellers, he called for a step back to question “whether it is really the best way to find new water supplies.” A better answer, he suggested, was to detain lingering spring runoff, which last year was estimated at 500,000 to 600,000 acre-feet.

But John Sanderson, water program director for The Nature Conservancy, pointed out that free-running rivers during spring also have value. “Those high flows are important to maintaining habitat,” he said.

Sanderson noted that 15 percent of aquatic species found in and along Colorado’s creeks and rivers by the first settlers have been extirpated form this region, while another 40 percent are now endangered, threatened or otherwise at risk.

“If we don’t get this right, we run the risk of this figure being much higher 40 more years from now,” he said.

Everybody, of course, also cites the economic contributions of their sector. Agriculture, by some definitions, is the second most important industry in Colorado. But Sanderson said studies have found that water in streams also has significant economic benefit to the state.

Sanderson pointed to the need to raise money to preserve water and riparian habitat similar to Great Outdoors Colorado, the initiative that uses proceeds from the lottery to preserve open space.

And, like Stulp, The Nature Conservancy sees benefits from collaboration. Sanderson pointed to benefits accrued to multiple constituencies in the planning of Elkhead Reservoir, near Craig, and now to similar efforts to meet multiple needs in management of the Dolores River below McPhee Dam, in southwestern Colorado.

Many of these issues had been evident in the 1990s, but the drought of 2002 triggered new efforts at collaboration. Responding to the drought, Colorado released a broad study called the Statewide Water Supply Investigation in 2004, with a second iteration in 2007.

Then, in 2005, Russell George, a former water lawyer from Rifle who then headed the Department of Natural Resources, explained his vision of a new process, which has led to the formation of roundtables of people from the various river basins in Colorado, and then discussions among the various basins, with the statewide body called the Interbasin Compact Committee.

While any true success from that long, laborious process has yet to be seen, most participants concede benefits of what Stulp described as the bottoms-up approach.

“It doesn’t mean we all agree. It just means that we’ll sit in the same room and talk,” said Stulp at Thursday evening’s meeting. “Five years ago, they didn’t want to even talk.”

Jennifer Gimbel, director of the state’s leading water policy agency, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, noted several recurring questions in the water world. Stopping growth is not an answer, she said, as half of the population increase is expected to come from in-state, with births outpacing deaths. “It’s more a question of how we grow,” she said.

Improved water efficiency and conservation alone are “not the silver bullet,” she said. And as for removing water from farm lands, the vast majority of which is used to grow corn to be fed to cattle in feed lots, Gimbel cited the need for “food security.”

Instead, speakers said Colorado needs a portfolio of solutions that includes reuse of existing supplies, limited ag transfers, and new water storage projects to hold back spring runoff.

Among the new ideas to emerge since the 2002 drought was development of water in the Green River in either Wyoming or Utah. The water later passes through Colorado for about 20 miles, giving Colorado an arguable right to water in the river even if it is diverted to another state.

Aaron Million, a Fort Collins-based entrepreneur, came up with the idea and continues to pursue it. But the South Metropolitan Water Supply Authority later proposed a similar idea, drawing on either Flaming Gorge Reservoir or Fontenelle Reservoir, both located on the Green River.

Rod Kuharich, executive director of the South Metro group, said his group has met with people from the Wyoming cities of Cheyenne, Casper, Torrington and Green River, but he ultimately sees the deal being a state-to-state transaction, if it ever occurs.

“I subscribe to the all-of-the-above energy policy, which means nuclear should be a big part of our future, and the benefit of nuclear power is its green footprint,” freshman U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz said. “I recognize it comes with great risk, but if you’re serious about greenhouse gasses, then you should be a serious supporter of nuclear development.”

That sentiment echoes those of Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, a Democrat, who has introduced a bill aimed a sparking a nuclear power revival in the United States despite serious trepidation about potential accidents and waste storage nightmares among both environmentalists and the general populace.

Nuclear power currently accounts for about 20 percent of the electricity in the United States (mostly on the East Coast), but following accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in the Ukraine in the 1970s and 80s, no new nuclear plants have come online in the U.S. in decades.

Chaffetz wants to see 100 new nuclear plants built around the country in the coming years, and he’s confident technology can mitigate past contamination problems linked with mining and milling uranium – historically a big industry in far western Colorado and eastern Utah – as well as waste-storage issues associated with spent fuel rods.

Utah is currently embroiled in a storage controversy related to trainloads of depleted uranium from Cold War-era weapons production being stored at an Energy Solutions facility in Clive, Utah. And communities in Colorado have banded together to fight both a uranium mill proposal near Montrose and a uranium mine plan near Fort Collins.

New uranium claims have been filed across the West in anticipation of another nuclear power boom, as the industry finds more and more bipartisan support because of lower greenhouse gas emissions and a growing rep as an alternative to dirtier-burning coal, oil and natural gas. But opponents are concerned about impacts on national parks and other wild places and the risks of transporting yellowcake and nuclear waste across state lines.

Even though his Third Congressional District doesn’t include Green River or the historic uranium-mining hotbed of Moab, Chaffetz supports a statewide push to revive the industry. He said fears of increased mining impacting tourism in and around the state’s great national parks in southeastern Utah – a frequent recreation destination for Coloradans – are overblown.

“That’s a scare tactic that’s more rooted in hyperbole than it is reality,” he said. “The reality is we have borders for these national parks. These environmentalists argue there needs to be some big buffer zone, and I don’t buy into that. If we don’t want to be left beholden to the terrorist nations around the world, we’re going to have to get serious about nuclear development.”

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The 150-mile stretch of Interstate 70 between Rifle, Colo., and Green River, Utah, sits atop the world’s largest known reserves of oil shale, not to mention huge quantities of natural gas and significant supplies of uranium. Under the headline “Road to riches,” the Sentinel’s Gary Harmon explores how developers and local governments along the alley are looking to cash in on the nation’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for new energy sources.

But the series takes a much more statistical, business-oriented approach to the topic – to be expected from the leading news source in the conservative stronghold of Mesa County – and gives little play to environmental concerns likely to shape the debate over how best to exploit the vast mineral resources in Energy Alley.

Water is the great limiting factor when it comes to oil shale development, an industry that has yet to prove its commercial viability. And water, or the lack thereof, will also play a huge role in any revival of the nation’s nuclear power industry – long dormant but still supplying 20 percent of the country’s electricity needs.

A proposed nuclear power plant near Green River is currently working to sew up its water rights, while uranium mining and milling is seen as a panacea by some in economically depressed sections of western Colorado. Environmentalists, however, are working hard to remind Colorado residents of uranium’s toxic history in the state.

The Sentinel points out two of the top uranium sources globally have stopped production recently, with the Cigar Lake Mine in Canada flooding and the Olympic Dam Mine in Australia shut down because of an accident. Supply factors and growing support for nuclear as a virtually carbon-free power source have energy companies speculating on a uranium boom in the United States that some experts, according to the paper, aren’t sure will materialize.

“The bigger issue for uranium is: Will a significant portion of the world choose nuclear power as the clean fuel of choice?” Dr. Rod Eggert, director of the division of economics and business at Colorado School of Mines, told the Sentinel. “Right now, there’s a lot of speculation, but exactly how large demand will grow, no one knows.”

As for oil shale, opponents argue it would consume far too much water in the already endangered Colorado River Basin and that the billions of dollars in research and development needed to make it commercially viable would be better spent on proven renewable energy technology.

Still, despite those concerns and the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar putting the brakes on Bush administration policies meant to boost oil shale speculation, many proponents remain convinced the Green River Formation is the future of America’s energy independence.

“The public doesn’t realize what we have here,” Jeff Williams, a Mesa County developer, told the Sentinel. “I’ve had engineers call this the OPEC of the United States.”

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is already on the record questioning the proposed leasing of up to 24,000 acre feet of the Green River to Blue Castle Holdings Inc., which proposed the power plant. The federal agency said taking so much water out of the Green could lead to several fish species being listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Two conservation groups — Living Rivers and Uranium Watch – filed protests Tuesday, according to the Sentinel, which reported another water conservation district is considering leasing 30,000 more acre feet for the project. But the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation also questioned the diversion, arguing the Green River may already be “over-appropriated.”

Recent calls for a revival of the nation’s nuclear power industry as a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels in order to combat global warming – including a controversial pro-nuclear stance by Colorado Sen. Mark Udall – have been met with skepticism by some in the environmental community who worry about long-term waste storage and water consumption in the arid West.

The call for a nuclear revival has also led to rampant uranium-mining speculation in and around iconic public lands such as the Grand Canyon and divisive battles over mining and processing yellowcake for fuel rods, including recent hearings in Montrose County.

In calling for an investigation of oil shale lease amendments in the waning days of the Bush administration, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar Tuesday questioned just how much electrical power would be needed for full-scale commercial oil shale production.

Super heating and squeezing kerogen from shale rock and sand in the Green River Formation of northwestern Colorado, eastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming could tap into an estimated 1 trillion barrels of oil, but some analysts say at least 10 new coal-fired power plants would be required in Colorado alone.

That’s led to speculation about nuclear power as a means of providing enough electricity to power full-scale oil shale production. A nuclear power plant in Green River, Utah, would be at the epicenter of any future oil shale boom.

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