The New Republic

The New York Times ran an interesting editorial
last week about Colorado entrepreneur Aaron Million’s plans to build a private water
pipeline, running 560 miles from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir to Denver and other cities on Colorado’s Front Range. From a legal perspective, the water being pumped is there for the taking, even if it sounds a bit unfair
for a private developer to take free water out of a river
and then sell it to thirsty municipalities. But the project itself would be an environmental
disaster, leaving the Green River basin with seriously reduced flows for fish
and wildlife, not to mention boaters, farmers, and fishermen. The fact that it’s
getting even halfway-serious consideration shows just how worried the Front
Range cities in Colorado are about meeting their future water needs.

And according to a
new study
by Western Resource Advocates, the Front Range will have
even more reason to worry if oil-shale development ever takes off in Western
Colorado. The process of turning shale rock into usable oil involves a huge amount of
water (somewhere
between one and four units of water per unit of oil produced), a fact that
environmental groups use as an argument for why oil shale is untenable.

Still, the water-intensity of the oil-shale process is
unlikely to stop oil-shale development if the Bureau of Land Management decides
to grant the appropriate leases. That’s because energy companies interested
in oil shale have been slowly accumulating water rights in Western Colorado—some of them original
claims that the energy companies made back in the 1960s, some of them purchased more recently
from area farmers. Many of these rights—especially the agricultural water rights—are senior to the water
rights that allow Front Range cities to pump water out of the Colorado basin into their municipal water systems. And when
there’s not enough water to go around, Colorado, like other Western states,
allocates water on the basis of seniority. So this means that if oil shale ever
really got going, the Front Range could be in serious trouble.

How much
trouble? Western Resource Advocates calculates that energy companies hold the
right to divert more than 7.2 million acre-feet per year from the Colorado
River and its tributaries in Western Colorado. That’s more than the state’s
entire allocation under the Colorado River Compact, the 1922 agreement that
governs the use of the river’s water. This doesn’t mean that oil-shale
development would completely dry out the Front Range, because not all energy-company water rights are senior to the water rights of various municipalities. But it gives a rough idea for just how much of a water-squeeze
the state of Colorado would find itself in if it had to support an oil-shale
industry. And it would take more than a pipeline from Wyoming to alleviate the situation.

--Rob Inglis

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