Original article can be found at Daily Camera
Originally published on July 20, 2019 By Sam Lounsberry
Could water providers take a page out of the oil and gas industry’s book and build a pipeline to the Mississippi basin?
While advocates for building the value and quality of Colorado’s water and energy assets are generally from quite different backgrounds, with sometimes conflicting goals, experts in each realm are emphasizing the increasingly similar economies for each resource.
To start, the marketplaces for both are changing rapidly, albeit for separate reasons.
Local water prices are skyrocketing, reflecting the limited supply for a growing demand to support the Front Range’s booming housing construction market, a trend threatening the future prospects of keeping farmland productive as agriculturalists become more tempted to give up their water to developers for big profit.
Meanwhile, traditional energy companies extracting fossil fuels from northern Colorado’s mineral-rich subsurface are facing an industry shift driven by technological advancements favoring renewable energy generation and louder public sector calls for a fast transition to non-carbon power grids.
When the prospect of current water rights holders on the Front Range losing value on their property with such an influx of product was raised, Haren answered the concern by saying there could be some flux of those local water shares initially, but he doubted a devastating price decrease would take place with the amount of population growth and associated water demand the state is projected to experience.
Another point of nexus between the economies of water and energy was touched on by both Haren and Patty Limerick, faculty director and chair of the board of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center of the American West. They both predicted water owners, meaning farmers, would increasingly look to energy partnerships through leasing minerals to drillers, or land to wind and solar power harvesters, to buoy their finances, and thus the viability of keeping water in agriculture.
Water owners’ leases to fracking has yielded up to five times more revenue, around $2,500 an acre-foot, than other types of leases for water, Kevin McCarty, owner of McCarty Land and Water Valuation, said.
“For the people fortunate enough to get in on it, (fracking) has been good for water owners,” McCarty said.
Limerick cautioned against opponents of fracking attacking the industry for the volume of the state’s water it uses, stating while the figure is often a big number, it is usually expressed in gallons rather than acre-feet, much larger units, as an acre foot holds nearly 326,000 gallons.
She urged both opponents and proponents of drilling to give up their respectively extreme stances of labeling oil and gas operations as extremely, or even fatally, dangerous to public health and, on the other side, that it is absolutely safe without risk to homes nearby wells.
Meanwhile, traditional energy companies extracting fossil fuels from northern Colorado’s mineral-rich subsurface are facing an industry shift driven by technological advancements favoring renewable energy generation and louder public sector calls for a fast transition to non-carbon power grids.
But a radical idea was pitched on Thursday before an audience of dozens of at a BizWest-sponsored event at the Larimer County Fairgrounds that could solve Colorado’s water woes by taking a page out of the energy sector’s book — vast interstate networks of pipelines — to establish a water supply to support more growth without sacrificing farmland in the process.
According to Thomas Haren, CEO of Greeley-based AGPROfessionals, building a 42-inch pipeline to bring in water from the Mississippi River basin — where water supply is hardly a concern — to the Front Range would cost about $1 billion, a comparable, and perhaps lesser price tag to Northern Water’s two-reservoir Northern Integrated Supply proposal that would stockpile water for 15 providers.
While the notion of water transported by man-made infrastructure over such a great distance, rather than from off the local mountains and into the tap, might sound ludicrous to Front Range residents at first, Haren quelled skepticism by showing a map of the country overlaid with all the oil and gas pipelines moving energy material at various stages in the development process. The graphic showed a network of pipes spanning areas over a similar, if not further, reach as the hypothetical water pipeline.
“We’ve done some math, and it is scary how feasible this actually could be,” Haren said, adding a 42-inch pipe could deliver 100,000 acre-feet of water a year — an acre-foot is about enough to supply two suburban Colorado homes for a year, according to estimates.
“We have to look at how we’re thinking,” Haren said. “Where is the water? Why don’t we get it from where the water is, instead of taking such a finite resource? Potentially, long-term, the public will have to look somewhere else.”
When the prospect of current water rights holders on the Front Range losing value on their property with such an influx of product was raised, Haren answered the concern by saying there could be some flux of those local water shares initially, but he doubted a devastating price decrease would take place with the amount of population growth and associated water demand the state is projected to experience.
Another point of nexus between the economies of water and energy was touched on by both Haren and Patty Limerick, faculty director and chair of the board of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center of the American West. They both predicted water owners, meaning farmers, would increasingly look to energy partnerships through leasing minerals to drillers, or land to wind and solar power harvesters, to buoy their finances, and thus the viability of keeping water in agriculture.
Water owners’ leases to fracking has yielded up to five times more revenue, around $2,500 an acre-foot, than other types of leases for water, Kevin McCarty, owner of McCarty Land and Water Valuation, said.
“For the people fortunate enough to get in on it, (fracking) has been good for water owners,” McCarty said.
Limerick cautioned against opponents of fracking attacking the industry for the volume of the state’s water it uses, stating while the figure is often a big number, it is usually expressed in gallons rather than acre-feet, much larger units, as an acre foot holds nearly 326,000 gallons.
She urged both opponents and proponents of drilling to give up their respectively extreme stances of labeling oil and gas operations as extremely, or even fatally, dangerous to public health and, on the other side, that it is absolutely safe without risk to homes nearby wells.