Both of the Republican lawmakers recently referenced the Centennial State’s relatively weak winter in their arguments to build more reservoirs and knock down perceived regulatory roadblocks.

At Tipton’s request, the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water and Power held an oversight hearing last week to examine bureaucratic barriers that block water storage projects.

“The natural cycle of rivers in the West is one of boom and bust, surplus and drought. But with proper water storage, economic cycles do not have to be boom and bust, recreational opportunities can be reliably provided, and water can be allocated where it is best needed to meet environmental, species protection goals and support our farm and ranch communities,” Tipton said in his opening statement.

Conservationists, however, believe the congressional hearing was nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to further undermine environmental laws. Instead of building new reservoirs, they encourage the conservation and recycling of water, and the modernization of Colorado’s aging infrastructure.

Windy Gap Reservoir in Grand County, Colo. (Photo via www.NorthernWater.org)

“Much of that infrastructure is over a century old and is in need of serious repair,” Midcap wrote. “We believe these repairs to dams, canals and diversion structures can be done in a way that provides benefits to both irrigators and the streams, as has been demonstrated in many areas of the western U.S. These kinds of projects are the most likely to win strong public support and produce the kind of benefits that will last far into the future. While new water storage may be needed in some limited situations, it must be done in a way that protects the values we all hold in common: economic efficiency and healthy rivers and streams.”

The hearing focused on storing water to grow enough food to keep up with the West’s mushrooming population, but Family Farm Alliance President Pat O’Tool noted domestic energy requires H20 too.

A new report (pdf) projects hydraulic fracturing in Colorado will spike from 4.5 billion gallons of water used in 2010 to more than 6 billion gallons of water in 2015 — a 35 percent increase. The study assumes the number of oil and gas wells in Colorado will remain relatively flat and attributes the increased water use to escalated vertical oil drilling, which sucks more water than horizontal methods. Agriculture is the biggest drain on state water supplies, accounting for more than 4.6 trillion gallons, or 85.5 percent, of water use in 2010, followed by municipal and industrial uses at 7.4 percent. Hydraulic fracturing — chemically treated water pumped into the earth to release deposits of oil and natural gas — accounts for .08 percent. Coal, natural gas, uranium and solar drink .03 percent, according to the report prepared by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and other state agencies.

Oil and gas development is prevalent in Gardner’s home district in Northern Colorado where drillers are busily flushing oil and gas from the Niobrara formation with powerful cocktails of fracking fluid.

At a town hall meeting in Berthoud last month, the congressman cited Colorado’s lean snowpack as the reason behind his latest push to build two new reservoirs, pump plants and pipelines tapping the Poudre River, also known as the Northern Integrated Supply Project (NISP).

“If we are going to have a long-term outlook for economic growth, we must have the water that is necessary to survive and grow,” Gardner reportedly said. “That’s not only to meet the needs of the population, that’s to meet the needs of agriculture and industry. That’s why I think we need to go forward with projects like NISP, and we need to go look for other new projects.”

The Draft Environmental Impact Statement, however, says that NISP “would not likely change land use or zoning plans of participant communities, increase employment opportunities, or increase other growth pressures.” Caring for the river instead of developing it could actually create more jobs.

“A strong case can be made that a well-structured no-action alternative relying on water conservation, water-sharing agreements with farmers and water recycling would provide more long-term and higher-paying ‘green jobs’ that protect the Cache la Poudre River and protect our region’s future,” Gary Wockner, director of Save the Poudre, wrote in a recent Coloradoan guest editorial.

Residents would have to fund NISP through higher water rates and tap fees, he added.

“It seems like every few months Gardner flies home from Washington D.C. and takes a quick tour of Northern Colorado to rant about NISP. And every few months, his rants have no basis in fact,” Wockner wrote. “If NISP is built, it won’t provide any more jobs than if NISP is stopped dead in its tracks. And, NISP won’t increase economic activity in Northern Colorado, but will cost Northern Coloradans more of their hard-earned dollars — about a billion of them.”

Gardner and Tipton claim environmental regulations are slowing down U.S. water storage plans but, ever since 1966, the Bureau of Reclamation has needed an act of Congress to build a reservoir.

Michael Gabaldon

“The most frequent reasons center around economics or an inadequate potential water market associated with the given facilities,” he said. “In other cases, environmental, safety or geologic challenges came to light during a project’s development, and rendered its construction, completion or operation unfeasible. Political opposition often contributed, leaving the facilities ‘on the books’ awaiting further action.”

Poudre Canyon (Jim Frazier, cc Flickr)

Ken Neubecker, president of the state counsel of Colorado Trout Unlimited and a member of the Colorado River Basin Roundtable, points out that already 64 percent of the upper Colorado River above Hot Sulfur Springs in Grand County is diverted across the Continental Divide to the Front Range population centers of the state.

With the State Demography Office forecasting Colorado’s population to jump 50 percent over the next 25 years from current levels of around 5 million to more than 7.6 million, Neubecker and others say there needs to be a major shift in land-use planning, water conservation efforts and energy policies to head off looming disaster for the Colorado and other state rivers.

Drought by a thousand cuts

“In the long run, especially if you’re going to take the climate change thing seriously, the fossil fuels have got to just come to an end,” Neubecker said of commercial oil shale production and its potential impacts on the Colorado River basin. “[Former Vice President] Dick Cheney made the comment that the American way of life is not negotiable. Well, in a hundred years it’ll be drastically negotiated if we don’t do something now.”

Residential development alone has dramatically impacted the upper Colorado, Neubecker said, referring to a plan by the Denver Water Board to divert even more of the Fraser River in Grand County through the Moffat Tunnel to the Front Range. A key tributary of the Colorado, the Fraser already sees about 60 percent of its flow diverted east of the Continental Divide.

“They’re sort of making light of the true nature of the cumulative impacts on the whole Colorado basin,” Neubecker said. “Essentially, the whole upper Colorado, from Dotsero up, is suffering a death from a thousand cuts, and everybody who makes a cut says, ‘Oh, mine won’t hurt; mine’s too small to be significant.’”

But all the cuts are condemning the river to a permanent drought-year status that adversely impacts riparian areas, degrades aquatic habitat and results in too much sediment building up in the river’s channel, Neubecker said. Couple those impacts with contamination from natural gas drilling and other industrial and agricultural uses, and the Colorado and other Western Slope rivers are in big trouble, others say.

People get to drink that stuff

“That’s one thing in this whole oil and gas industry that kind of gets short shrift is these drinkable or potable aquifers,” said Bob Elderkin, a biologist and retired oil and gas specialist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management who now lives near Silt.

“When something happens and you have [a chemical spill] — and you’re going to have it because we’ve got people involved with [drilling] and people are fallible — that aquifer is polluted with a bunch of stuff, and unless they’re required to go in and pump that out and mitigate the problem, that stuff stays in that aquifer until it eventually surfaces wherever it’s going to surface.

“Most of that stuff either ends up in the White River or the Colorado River, and either way a lot of people are going to get to drink it.”

Routt County Commissioner Doug Monger, whose northwestern Colorado county sits at the epicenter of any future oil shale boom, applauds Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for recently tightening Bush administration research and development leases and requiring more accountability.

Oil shale and nuclear industry water gulpers

He said residents of impacted communities and Americans in general need to know if oil shale is economically and environmentally realistic. The former president of Colorado Counties Inc. has his doubts.

“I hope America can’t come here and trash out my country here to support the current industry,” Monger said of existing oil shale technology, which requires between three and five barrels of water per barrel of oil. “They talk about 500-megawatt power plants to commercially extract this oil shale with Shell’s technology, and all of the rest of the water out of Yampa and White river systems, as well as some further water out of the Colorado River system, which basically obligates all of the rest of the water in the Colorado Compact that we have.”

The 1920s Compact that Arizona Sen. John McCain last year so famously — and disastrously — suggested should be renegotiated, dictates Colorado must send 3.88 million acre feet downstream a year no matter how the state divvies it up for local use. Oil and gas companies have been snapping up water rights in the Colorado basin since the 1940s, but the big knock on oil shale has been how much power it takes to extract petroleum from shale rock and sand.

Some have suggested nuclear reactors could solve the energy demands of full-scale commercial oil shale production, but Neubecker scoffs at that notion.

“[Nuclear] uses twice the water [of fossil-fueled-based power plants], and I don’t think Sen. [Mark] Udall gets it, because he’s a big proponent for nuclear power,” Neubecker said. “I’m all for nuclear power east of the Mississippi because they have the water, just so long as they have to store the waste in their own backyard, not ship it out here for storage. We’re not the country’s trashcan.”

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State water officials, in conjunction with the Western States Water Council, are trying to sort out conflicts between growing residential development, agriculture, recreation and the thirsty industrial sectors such as energy production, the Herald reported Tuesday.

Gov. Bill Ritter was scheduled to speak Tuesday, but Colorado Department of Natural Resources director Harris Sherman, who prompted the water confab, was unable to attend because he’s prepping for his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing for an undersecretary of agriculture post that would have him overseeing the U.S. Forest Service for the Obama administration.

“He’s the one who kind of got us – how do I put this nicely? He kicked us in the butt and told us to get these conversations going,” Jennifer Gimbel, director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, told the Herald.
Conspicuously absent Monday, however, were representatives of the residential development and planning sectors, the paper noted.

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