Headwaters Summer 2024: The Industrial Water Use Issue

CONSERVATION LEADER

Nonfunctional Turf Ban for new development

First municipal entity in Colorado with ordinance

Signatory to Colorado River Conservation MOU

Committing to a 30% reduction in nonfunctional turf

Nationally recognized Conservation Program

Alliance for Water Efficiency G480 Platinum Status

Prairie Waters System

First & largest potable reuse system in Colorado

INNOVATIVE

Proposed Wild Horse Reservoir (Park County) Off-channel reservoir, no direct impacts to rivers

Favorable environmental conditions

No new water rights or decrees needed for the project

WildHorseReservoir.org

Cleaner power, lower emissions

Like water, power is essential to our rural way of life.

At Tri-State, we deliver reliable, affordable and responsible power to our member electric cooperatives and public power districts across the West, all while stewarding the resources that help our communities thrive. As we advance our energy transition, our members will use 50% renewables in 2025, rising to 70% in 2030.

In Colorado, we’ll reduce our greenhouse gas emissions 89% in 2030. Cleaner power with lower emissions, all delivered reliably and affordably. That’s our not-for-profit, cooperative difference.

The Industrial Water Use Issue

From electrical generation to beer brewing, mining, oil and gas drilling, and even computing and data storage — industry in Colorado runs, in part, on water. As consumers’ sustainability demands rise, regulations tighten, and water supplies become more stretched and stressed, industrial water users are innovating to use and clean up the state’s water resources in ways that protect their product, profits and future. Are they doing enough?

Winds of Change

What's Booming?

are improving water stewardship for business success.

Colorado’s crackdown on “forever chemicals.”

BY ELIZABETH MILLER

As Colorado’s power system transforms to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, what will become of the water once used to cool coal-fired power plants? The future of electricity, though still uncertain, could mean dividends for water. BY ALLEN BEST

PLUS Data centers are surging with the rise of AI, but could these networked computer servers stress Colorado’s power grid and water resources?

As the oil and gas industry makes strides to better stretch and protect water resources, and regulations come online to protect public health and the environment, watchdogs remain skeptical.

BY ELIZABETH MILLER

PULSE

Water news from across Colorado: Dig This Regulations aim to protect Coloradans from mining impacts.

Fight For The Right

The Shoshone hydropower plant's water rights could give the Colorado River a big boost and become the largest, most influential environmental water right in state history.

Around The State

Quick updates from Colorado's major watersheds.

MEMBER'S CORNER

Celebrate the impact of WEco’s members.

A wind farm in Limon, Colorado

INTRODUCTION

A Note From The Director

With Gratitude

After 15 years, it is with a pang of sadness that I write to you, our dear readers, what will be my final letter in this magazine. In May, I announced my pending departure as Executive Director at Water Education Colorado, scheduled for mid-October.

It is time for a new challenge for me, and for new vision and leadership for WEco, and I am excited for what the future holds.

I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had here to learn and to grow, to experiment and to stretch, to contribute to informed decision making, intelligent leadership, and collaborative solutions that I hope has made a mark.

I’m proud to have led the organization through a period where we sustained and grew the reach and impact of our core programs, while launching some key initiatives: our organizational rebrand in 2017, the Fresh Water News initiative in 2018, the Colorado Statewide Water Education Action Plan in 2020, and our move to the CSU Spur campus in 2023. And somewhere in there we were weathering a pandemic and learning how to do “Business as (Un) Usual,” (the theme of our 2020 conference), as we innovated and adapted.

Before I go, I will have the opportunity to host one more President’s Reception (our 18th annual!), on Sept. 5, and one more Sustaining Colorado Watersheds Conference, on Oct. 8-10. I will celebrate one more Water Fluency class’ graduation (our 10th!) on Sept. 11, and I will sign their certificates to “speak fluent water.” But then, I will not be the one to send off our 2024 Water Leaders class (our 18th!) with a word of encouragement and affirmation as they graduate at the end of October, like I usually would. And when the Fall 2024 issue of Headwaters comes out? You’ll be hearing on this page from our new Executive Director, whomever they may be. (The search is active, and we will keep you updated!)

I’ll of course keep rooting for all of our graduates, and for each of you, which brings me to what I have realized I will miss the very most about this role: the people.

From the team I work with daily, to WEco’s Board of Trustees, to our vast community of program alumni, participants, readers, members, supporters and volunteers, you have made my years at WEco richly rewarding. You have been tremendous learners, partners, and friends. You inspire me with your passion, commitment and creativity for addressing Colorado’s water challenges. You give me hope with your deep care and concern for bettering the future for your communities, the state of Colorado, and the Western United States.

I aim to keep contributing to Colorado’s water solutions, and will remain a friend and champion of WEco. I will be forever grateful to you for the support you gave me on this leg of my journey. And I hope I see you on the next one!

STAFF

Jayla Poppleton

Executive Director

Sabrina Scherma

Programs Director

John Carpenter

Operations Manager

Tess Koskovich

Marketing, Communications and Outreach Manager

Suzy Hiskey

Administrative and Programs Assistant

Jerd Smith

Fresh Water News Editor

Caitlin Coleman Publications and Digital Resources Managing Editor

Dana Smith

Headwaters Art Director

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Lisa Darling

President

Dulcinea Hanuschak

Vice President

Brian Werner

Secretary

Alan Matlosz

Treasurer

Cary Baird

Perry Cabot

Nick Colglazier

Nathan Fey

David Graf

Eric Hecox

Matt Heimerich

Julie Kallenberger

David LaFrance

Dan Luecke

Karen McCormick

Leann Noga

Peter Ortego

Dylan Roberts

Monika Rock

Kelly Romero-Heaney

Ana Ruiz

Elizabeth Schoder

Don Shawcroft

Chris Treese

Katie Weeman

THE MISSION of Water Education Colorado is to ensure Coloradans are informed on water issues and equipped to make decisions that guide our state to a sustainable water future. WEco is a non-advocacy organization committed to providing educational opportunities that consider diverse perspectives and facilitate dialogue in order to advance the conversation about water.

HEADWATERS magazine is published three times each year by Water Education Colorado. Its goals are to raise awareness of current water issues, and to provide opportunities for engagement and further learning.

THANK YOU to all who assisted in the development of this issue. Headwaters’ reputation for balance and accuracy in reporting is achieved through rigorous consultation with experts and an extensive peer review process, helping to make it Colorado’s leading publication on water.

© Copyright 2024 by the Colorado Foundation for Water Education DBA Water Education Colorado. ISSN: 1546-0584

CSU Spur, Hydro/The Shop, 4777 National Western Drive, Denver, CO 80216 (303) 377-4433

WHAT WE'RE DOING

Annual River Basin Tour Makes a Splash

Another successful year is in the books for WEco’s Annual River Basin Tour which focused on the Upper Arkansas River Basin. This sold-out program featured engaging stops from Salida to Leadville to Pueblo and provided valuable networking opportunities for the diverse group of participants. Participants visited an array of sites including Turquoise Reservoir, California Gulch Superfund Site, Mt. Elbert Power Plant, Otero Pump Station, Pueblo Dam Hydropower Plant, Pueblo State Fish Hatchery, and more. Registration for the 2025 basin tour will open in the spring so stay tuned. We hope to see you on the next tour.

WECO GETS AN INTERN

Water Education Colorado welcomed Sidney Barbier as a Publications and Production Intern in June. Sidney is currently a junior at the University of Denver where she is pursuing a double major with a B.S in Environmental Science and a B.A in Music. In her role, Sidney will be working to support the production of publications, ranging from the “Your Water Colorado” blog to Fresh Water News to Headwaters magazine. Sidney will also assist with education and outreach activities.

When asked what she hopes to learn during her time with

WEco Sidney said, “I am so excited for the opportunity to join the Water Education Colorado team and learn more about the field of water conservation, policy, and journalism, particularly in the Colorado River Basin. Growing up in Steamboat I have a passion for conservation as a river rafter, hunter, fisher, and competitive cross-country skier. I believe in the power of education as well as the role of public policy in protecting our natural resources and am looking for an opportunity to have an active role in conservation journalism and water education.”

ONLINE

Fact Sheets Now Available!

Ready for some quick, need-to-know background info on important water topics? New additions to our fact sheet series distill some of the most critical basics in our Community Guide series using infographics, data, and easy explanations. We’re excited to offer fact sheets to Where Your Water Comes From and to Colorado Water Law both in English and Spanish. Stay tuned for a fact sheet focused on water conservation and efficiency, coming soon! Read or download them by visiting wateredco.org.

A Conversation With CARY BAIRD

There are lots and lots of users of water. One of our challenges in Colorado is to be able to figure out a way to divide that water up in a fair and equitable way while meeting the needs of people … People don't realize the amount of effort, human resource and financial resources, that companies like Chevron actually put toward water issues.

We spoke with Cary Baird, a member of the WEco Board of Trustees and Policy, Government and Public Affairs Representative at Chevron about water’s role in the oil and gas industry. Read more on the blog at watereducationcolorado.org.

BEHIND THE STORIES

From The Editor

Breaking it Down

The water that powers Colorado industry is undoubtedly important. It supplies electricity to power the computers and printers used to produce this magazine, fuels my car, and was used to brew the beer I had with dinner last night. But what do we even mean by “industry?” Which industries are using water in Colorado, which have the most significant impact, and what steps are they taking to increase sustainability?

The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) in its 2019 Technical Update to the Colorado Water Plan classified the industrial use sector as water for energy development, snowmaking, thermoelectric generation, and large industrial users.

Some of the bigger water diversions to serve that group include those for the Coors Brewery in Golden, the Henderson molybdenum mine near Empire, the power plants at Craig, as well as ditches that supply multiple users, according to data from the Colorado Division of Water Resources.

“In this issue we see efforts to reuse produced water on the oil field, conserve water in the brewery, contribute to forest health and conservation efforts within a businesses’ watershed, and much more.”

To add context, even big industrial water users comprise a small fraction of the state’s total water diversion demand: 13% of Colorado’s total municipal and industrial (M&I) diversion demand goes to industry, with M&I demands comprising just 10% of overall statewide water demands, according to the Technical Update. That means that industrial diversion demands are only about 1% of statewide water demand.

Even so, water use, efficiency, and water quality protection in the industrial sector matters — think of the public interest in topics like water for fracking, or PFAS.

In this issue of Headwaters magazine, we focus on water for some specific industries, including electrical generation, oil and gas development, mining, and manufacturing. We look at trends and innovation in those sectors – including those spurred by recent laws and regulations, as well as those motivated by companies themselves looking to protect critical inputs for their processes, or to appeal to consumers’ demand for more sustainable, safe, and water-conscious practices and products. We also hear from watchdogs and people who are pushing on industry to innovate further and do more.

We don’t spend a lot of space reporting on the important group of industrial water users who don’t have water rights and diversions of their own but rather purchase water from a water provider — this is one critical place where industrial water use and municipal use intersect. These are referred to as commercial, industrial and institutional (CII) customers. For example, Denver Water’s CII customers include entities such as breweries, universities, healthcare, restaurants, entertainment, golf courses, grocers, and others.

For many water conservation professionals, these CII customers are a next frontier where they hope to focus and encourage water conservation. The Rocky Mountain Section of the American Water Works Association, along with multiple water providers, is currently developing guidance for water utilities to work with CII customers to reduce their water demand. They have $318,625 in Colorado Water Plan Grant funding to support the effort. The grant application calls out potential savings of more than 5,000 acre-feet, impacting more than 500,000 CII customers in the state.

In this issue we see efforts to reuse produced water on the oil field, conserve water in the brewery, contribute to forest health and conservation efforts within a businesses’ watershed, and much more. It’s exciting to look at CII and self-supplied industrial (SSI) water users alike who are moving toward more sustainable ways of doing business, no matter who’s driving the change!

Caitlin, with her dog, Leon, near Glen Canyon Dam

Going for Gold

Inside: How Colorado is striving for the best environmental protections when permitting and cleaning up mines, and the pursuit of a water right change to protect Colorado River flows

A mine tailings pond near Fremont Pass, Colorado

PULSE

Water

Dig This

Regulations aim to protect water quality from mining impacts, but do protections go far enough?

BY ELIZABETH MILLER

When the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation bought a tunnel that drained water from a mine near Leadville in 1959, the federal agency thought it was purchasing an additional water source. Instead, it bought into a problem that requires ongoing cleanup. Miners dug the tunnel during the 1940s and 1950s to drain a lead and zinc mine near Leadville. What Reclamation found, in water that might have supplied Front Range residents, was lead, zinc, manganese and iron, and an acidic pH.

Aquatic life downstream in the East Fork of the Arkansas River was suffering. So in 1991, the agency built and still manages a treatment facility, the Leadville Mine Drainage Tunnel Treatment Plant. An 18-square-mile area around this and other components of the Leadville Historic Mining District had already been designated a Superfund site in 1983. Just this year, as the current treatment plant nears the end of its service life, the agency allocated $56 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for updates.

That’s just one example of about 1,400 stream miles around Colorado, generally near the “mineral belt,” which spans the state from Boulder County to Durango, with water quality impacts leftover from the state’s mining legacy. Mines dug before regulations limited pollution and other environmental impacts continue to leach contaminants into waterways.

Now, since 2019, as the state and federal government continue cleaning up legacy waste, permitting new mines comes with a stipulation to avoid situations like the Leadville tunnel: No permits or mine plans can rely on perpetual water treatment.

Before the state approves a new mine permit, says Michael Cunningham, director of the Colorado Division of Reclamation,

“ [ Now, ] before the state approves a new permit, the mining company has to demonstrate a plan for addressing environmental impacts.”

—Michael Cunningham, Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety

Mining, and Safety, the mining company has to demonstrate a plan for addressing environmental impacts both while operating and after reclamation, sometimes planning decades into the future.

“You just have to have solid technical assurance in that plan that whatever those issues are, they can be mitigated and water quality can be protected,” Cunningham says.

Most of the 1,251 mines permitted today in Colorado are for construction materials like gravel and sand, but the 130 hard rock mines, which primarily extract gold, molybdenum and silver, account for most of the division’s work and concerns, says Russ Means, director of Colorado’s minerals regulatory program.

Construction materials sites are more often “high and dry” — away from the rivers and streams, Means says. But those sites could still impact water quality, says Josh Kuhn, with Conservation Colorado.

“There absolutely should be greater oversight,” Kuhn says. “We also want to think about the future, too, and the need for lithium, cobalt, and materials needed to advance a more carbon-free economy. Those

minerals are going to be critical for our batteries and solar panels, so we want to be sure we have the proper regulations in place for the extraction of those minerals.”

In late 2022, United Lithium Corporation staked claims with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management on more than 9 square miles in Pitkin County, near Gunnison, which could become the first potential commercial lithium mine in Colorado. If the mining company’s evaluations of those claims merit exploration, they would file paperwork with the state to begin prospecting, but that step is likely years away.

Independent journalist Elizabeth Miller has written about environmental issues around the American West for publications including The Washington Post, Scientific American, Outside, Backpacker and The Drake.

Above: An abandoned gold mine near Minturn, Colorado. Although these sites are often away from rivers and streams, they could still impact water quality.

Fight for the Right

The Colorado River could get a big boost from a tiny hydro plant

BY SHANNON MULLANE

This year Western Slope leaders, led by the Colorado River District, struck a $99 million deal to buy the Shoshone hydropower plant’s water rights from Xcel Energy and lease the water back to Xcel to generate electricity. Through the deal, Shoshone’s rights would become the largest, most influential environmental water right in state history.

The change would permanently protect fish and habitat, and also beef up water security on the Western Slope by protecting reliable westward flows against any future sell off by Xcel.

Like the bottom blocks in a game of Jenga, Shoshone’s oldest water right can impact up to 10,600 other upstream water rights because of the plant’s geographic location, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources.

Western Slope water users have long worried that those flows could change if Xcel shut down the power plant or sold the water rights. Making the flows permanent is vital to the communities, economies and environments that depend on Shoshone’s flows, the district says.

“This has been a goal of the West Slope for literally decades. Questioning if, how and when to do this has long been an issue,” said Peter Fleming, general counsel for the Colorado River District. “The timing is right. The opportunity is here. What better time? That’s, in my mind, what makes it a big deal.”

If the Colorado River District is successful in changing the Shoshone water rights, the rights could become the crown jewel of the state’s instream flow program. Instream flow water rights help boost a river’s flows, creating more depth, swift currents and healthier ecosystems. The Colorado Water

Conservation Board is the sole entity that can own and operate instream flow rights.

Xcel has two water rights at Shoshone: one for 1,250 cubic feet per second that dates back to 1905, and a right to 158 cubic feet per second that dates back to 1940.

Of the 12,160 water rights upstream from Shoshone, 87% are junior to Shoshone’s senior water right and 68% are junior to Shoshone’s 1940 water right, according to the Division of Water Resources. That means the rights could protect environmental flows even in the driest of years.

Unlike some water rights that are bound to certain time periods, like the summer irrigation season, Shoshone can divert water year-round. And finally, all of the water Shoshone pulls out of the river shoots right back in after flowing through the power plant — in contrast to other uses such as agriculture, in which some water is sucked up by plants and soils.

“If the full amount of both Shoshone water rights were changed in water court, this would be the largest [instream flow] right in the state,” said Rob Viehl, chief of the stream and lake protection section at Colorado Water Conservation Board.

The district is taking steps toward “Shoshone permanency,” but there are still years of work to do, details to finalize

and approvals to secure to actually change the water right to permanently include environmental benefits.

“In water, folks like to achieve the highest degree of certainty available,” Fleming said. “Anything less than a permanent level of protection doesn’t achieve the level of certainty and protection — for not only the West Slope, frankly, it’s all of Colorado — that the Shoshone permanency effort will achieve.”

So far, partners have pledged more than $44 million of the $99 million price tag, including $20 million from the Colorado River District; $20 million from the state, approved by lawmakers in the 2024 Projects Bill; $1 million from the City of Grand Junction; and $2 million from the Ute Water Conservancy District in Grand Junction. The coalition hopes that federal coffers can help fully fund the purchase.

An extended version of this story originally appeared in Fresh Water News, an initiative of Water Education Colorado currently being published in collaboration with The Colorado Sun. Read Fresh Water News online at watereducationcolorado.org.

Shannon Mullane writes about the Colorado River Basin and Western water issues for The Colorado Sun.

The Colorado Riverin Glenwood Canyon powers the Shoshone hydropower plant.

PULSE

Around The State: Quick Updates From Colorado's Major Watersheds

ARKANSAS RIVER BASIN

The Arkansas Valley Conduit, which was first authorized in the 1960s, received an additional $90 million in federal funding in early June, bringing total federal funding for the conduit to more than $321 million. The project could cost up to $610 million. Once finished, the 130-mile pipeline will bring clean drinking water from Pueblo Reservoir to 50,000 people in southeastern Colorado whose tap water is contaminated with naturally occurring radioactive contaminants. Construction began last year and is projected to be completed by 2030.

COLORADO RIVER BASIN

Fresh Water News reports on the ongoing effort to help restore an endangered fish species, the razorback sucker to the Colorado River Basin where they have lived for the past 5 million years. The species is currently on the federal endangered species list with a population of almost 58,000 spread around the overstressed Colorado River Basin. The Palisade High School endangered fish hatchery is part of the restoration effort, where students are responsible for raising and releasing the fish back to its native habitat. The school’s hatchery released its thousandth razorback sucker in May.

GUNNISON RIVER BASIN

In early June, the Gunnison County Sheriff's Department closed a section of the Gunnison River due to high water, in an effort to protect public safety from dangerous river conditions, according to Crested Butte News. The closure ran from Almont to just north of Gunnison. Warmer temperatures leading to increased snowmelt and peaking water flows have led to a total of 18 deaths in Colorado rivers and reservoirs as of midJune, according to The Colorado Sun.

NORTH PLATTE RIVER BASIN

The North Platte Basin, which ran the only aerial cloud seeding effort in Colorado, has decided to shift away from aerial seeding and instead use ground-based cloud seeding, says Barbara Vasquez, who represents the North Platte Basin on the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The North Platte’s seeding operations began in 2018 and wrapped up in spring 2024. Ground-based cloud seeding will be used for the next few years because of the limited availability of aircraft from Wyoming. Through cloud seeding, water managers stimulate snowfall by spraying silver iodide particules into mositurerich clouds. Water freezes around the particles, becoming heavy enough to fall as snow.

RIO GRANDE BASIN

Alamosa News reports that a team, driven by the Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project, is developing a community-led plan to shape Alamosa’s riverfront. The project team is soliciting community input this summer. The riverfront project will include recreational opportunities along the river at Cole Park, infrastructure improvements on aging ditches, and aquatic and riparian habitat enhancements. The project has received funding from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, City of Alamosa, and others.

SAN JUAN/DOLORES RIVER BASIN

According to the Durango Herald, the Town of Bayfield is upgrading its water treatment plant to make it more effective and reliable during any future wildfires. The town is purchasing a permanent backup generator which will run on natural gas and will be able to supply the primary treatment systems in the event of a natural disaster. The backup

generator installation will help the facility produce 1.5 million gallons of water per day. The new generator could be installed as soon as spring 2025.

SOUTH PLATTE RIVER BASIN

Fresh Water News reports that the City of Aurora plans to develop a new 200-acre site high in scenic Park County to build the largest reservoir in its system. Wild Horse Reservoir would be able to store 93,000 acre-feet of water, providing Aurora opportunities to store water it already owns in the Upper Colorado, the Arkansas and the South Platte river basins, and to move that water around. Pre-permitting discussions on the project have begun and are expected to take at least two years. This reservoir is part of a larger water supply strategy that includes a recent $80.4 million purchase of farm water in the Arkansas River Valley.

YAMPA RIVER BASIN

Fresh Water News reports that a century-old headgate on the Maybell Ditch will receive a $6.8 million upgrade. The headgate opens to divert water from the Lower Yampa River into the ditch for farmers and ranchers in Moffat County, providing water to 18 agricultural producers and about 2,300 acres of irrigated land. For decades, the aging structure caused problems for boaters, fish and irrigators. The upgrade has united environmental and agricultural interests, with a win-win situation that can help ensure water for irrigation and increased water regulation for wildlife and for recreation.

Sidney Barbier

invited to the

18th Annual President’s Reception

Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024 6pm at Balistreri Vineyards, Denver

“Many Streams” You’re

Celebrate a special evening with friends and colleagues at the annual awards banquet and fundraiser benefiting Water Education Colorado. Enjoy a cocktail hour, dinner, and live music, plus friendly competition to win exciting auction items while supporting WEco’s mission.

Join us in honoring our 2024 awardees: Diane Hoppe Leadership Award: Doug Kemper Emerging Leader Award: Lorelei Cloud

Individual Tickets, Tables and Sponsorships Now On Sale: wateredco.org/2024-Presidents-Reception

MANUFACTURING ’S NEW BOTTOM LINE IS

BLUE

Companies work to reduce their water footprint and care for their source watersheds, improving consumer perception and protecting profitability in the process

BY EMILY PAYNE

Denver-based Leprino Foods Company generates some of its own water. In fact, the company holds a water right for water developed at its Greeley manufacturing facility.

“We actually are contributing more water to the river than we take in from our municipal source,” says Erik Nielsen, associate general counsel at Leprino Foods, which is the world’s largest producer of mozzarella cheese and a global producer of whey protein and other dairy ingredients.

Leprino has been a net contributor to Colorado watersheds since at least 2017. In 2020, the company was granted a water right associated with the quantity of water that it conveys to the Poudre River after deducting the amount of water that it takes in from municipal sources.

Milk is about 87% water. The process of evaporating or concentrating milk products produces condensate of whey water. Leprino recovers this water and stores it on-site in silos, often reusing it multiple times. Later, it is cleaned to stream quality standards and discharged. This, in addition to other water efficiency and recovery projects, generates about 600 acre-feet per day, or enough water to supply around 1,000 homes for a year. Leprino licenses most of this byproduct water to the City of Greeley for municipal uses, says Nielsen.

These water-saving processes not only reduce the company’s environmental footprint but are also critical to Leprino’s manufacturing future in Colorado.

“It seems like you shouldn't be doing business in Colorado if you're not thinking really deeply about water,” says Nielsen. “You've probably heard the saying, you never think about the value of water until the well runs dry.”

Water is required for cooling, heating, washing, diluting and other processes at nearly 6,000 manufacturing facilities in Colorado. As historic droughts threaten water availability across the state, consumers increasingly demand water-smart practices, and inflation continues to squeeze the private sector, many manufacturers are shifting their approach to water use and conservation.

“Manufacturers are increasingly becoming good stewards of water,” says JC Ye,

corporate business director of water reuse at Veolia, a global water services company. “Many have a strong incentive to implement water stewardship practices and invest in improving the reliability of water supply. In most industrial processes, disruption of water availability has an immediate, acute impact on manufacturing operations.”

But water is highly contextual. Every river and stream has a unique ecosystem and different needs depending on the season. Solutions to protect and restore these resources are just as complex. Companies are taking a variety of approaches to water stewardship,

invest in water-use reduction and watershed protection.

“[People] need to have confidence that we are serious about our water use, that we're serious about protecting the watershed,” says Ben Moline, director of water resources and environmental policy for Molson Coors Beverage Company.

The entire state of Colorado has experienced severe to extreme drought on and off for more than two decades. The public is watching water use more closely as resource scarcity becomes a more serious concern. Recently, some communities

“ WE ARE ACTUALLY CONTRIBUTING MORE WATER TO THE RIVER than we take in from our municipal source.” —ERIK NIELSEN, LEPRINO FOODS

from investing millions in local conservation work to making small but impactful infrastructure upgrades.

A REPUTATIONAL IMPERATIVE

The original Coors brewery was built in Golden specifically for Clear Creek’s remarkable water quality. The company has a history of conducting projects aimed at protecting this water, which ends up in its product. As a founding member of the Clear Creek Watershed Foundation, the Molson Coors Beverage Company has helped to clean up some of the estimated 1,600 orphaned mines in the watershed, which threaten water quality by overflowing and discharging heavy metals and mine drainage into the river.

These days, water stewardship is about both public perception and product quality: Consumer-facing brands like Coors know that they face a reputational risk if they don’t

have pushed back against water consumption for manufacturing.

BlueTriton — the owner of major U.S. bottled water brands, including Poland Spring — has been embroiled in legal battles with water boards, environmentalists, and other activists across the country for years. The company pumps water from Colorado’s Upper Arkansas River Basin, a semi-arid region particularly impacted by historic drought. In July 2021, about 20 community members protested outside of the Chaffee County Courthouse, opposing the renewal of a permit that allows BlueTriton to export 65 million gallons of water per year. After negotiating more than $1.25 million in community contributions from BlueTriton, county commissioners approved the permit the following month.

Veolia found in a 2023 study that fewer than 30% of surveyed companies had set water conservation goals, with water lagging behind carbon and waste as the environmental priority for companies. But Ye notes a recent shift in the way companies approach sustainability. Water scarcity concerns, public pressure, reputational risk, and cost-saving opportunities are leading to the proliferation of water initiatives across the private sector.

Michael Kiparsky, founding director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, sees this as an opportunity: “Can we use transparency coupled with some degree of public

Facing page: Coors brewery and Clear Creek, which runs through the facility and supplies its water.

At right: Leprino Foods processing facility

awareness of water as a resource to put pressure on corporate entities to do something that might not be strictly in their economic interest otherwise?”

SMALL CHANGES, BIG IMPACT

The Coors brewery in Golden uses an estimated 2.7 billion gallons of water from Clear Creek each year: about 782 million gallons for its products, and 2 billion gallons for brewing processes, including production and malting. Of those 2 billion gallons of process water, 95% is cleaned and returned to Clear Creek. This is representative of manufacturers at large: According to the Colorado Water Plan, industrial users account for only 3% of Colorado’s total annual water consumption, or water that is permanently removed from its source.

“We are diversion heavy, but depletion light,” says Moline, noting that Molson Coors is actively working to bring its water consumption rate even lower, while continuing to work with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) to ensure wastewater discharged back to Clear Creek after treatment meets permit requirements.

Molson Coors treats wastewater from its operations as well as much of the City of Golden's wastewater. The company entered into a consent order with CDPHE earlier this year to address permit exceedences for total suspended solids, metals, oil and grease, and whole effluent toxicity in its discharge water. Even before the consent order, the brewery began upgrading its wastewater treatment plant in preparation for meeting tightening water quality limits. Water treatment improvements are big changes with big impact, but small infrastructure changes also lead to big results — for example, fermentation tank design.

A few times per month, depending on the type of beer, the brewing team empties each fermentation tank through a valve on its side, leaving a small amount of beer just below the valve’s opening. The team clears the excess beer and thoroughly cleans the floor of the tank to prepare for the next batch, using water and a squeegee multiple times over. Across more than 100 fermentation tanks of varying sizes, which produce approximately 9.7 million barrels of beer per year, a portion of beer is lost in the cleaning process.

Molson Coors Beverage Company is updating its fermentation tanks to a new, vertical design with a cone-shaped bottom, through which a valve completely empties the

INDUSTRIAL WATER USES IN COLORADO

Water for industry accounts for 13% of Colorado's total municipal and industrial water use. The majority of that industrial water, 64%, is diverted by "large industry" — manufacturing falls into that category.

SOURCE: 2019 TECHNICAL UPDATE TO THE COLORADO WATER PLAN

beer directly below the tank. Now, the brewery can produce the same number of barrels for less, because beer — and water — isn’t left on the tank floor. This means less water used for malting, heating and cooling beer that ultimately doesn’t make it to consumers, and less water used in the cleaning process.

The upgrades are a part of Molson Coors Beverage Company’s G150 project, in honor of the 150-year anniversary of the Coors brewery’s inception. The company has invested “several hundred million dollars” in the project, which is expected to save 80 million gallons of water annually after its completion by the end of 2024. Moline says that upgrading its fermentation tanks is contributing a large part of these water savings.

Other food and beverage manufacturers are updating infrastructure to save water: Swire Coca-Cola, which produces, sells, and distributes Coca-Cola and other beverages in 13 states across the American West, says that it installed a new filtration and recovery system at its Denver plant to reduce water usage by about 20%. And Bellvue-based Morning Fresh Dairy, a fifth-generation dairy

farm that produces the nationally popular Noosa Yogurt brand, installed an automated clean-in-place system to clean the interior of food and beverage process pipes, reducing water consumption by 30%.

CORPORATE MANDATES

PepsiCo, Amazon, Google and Facebook have all committed to being water-positive, or replenishing more water than they use from natural systems, by 2030. In addition to water-efficiency projects, much of this work is done through cross-sector partnerships, which have provided critical support to local water stewardship efforts.

“Corporate support has been very important to our ability to staff project work and, even more so, to purchase water for streamflow restoration,” says Kate Ryan, executive director of the Colorado Water Trust.

For example, the tech giant Intel relies on the Colorado River and the Rio Grande to supply water downstream to its Arizona and New Mexico manufacturing facilities. The company has partnered with the Colorado

Water Trust and Trout Unlimited on multiple projects to support the Colorado River watershed. Intel reports that 120% of the water it used across the U.S. in 2023 was either returned to the source or restored through investment in water stewardship projects.

The Colorado Water Trust has received more than $421,000 in corporate funding from companies like Intel, Coca-Cola, MCBC, Seltzer, and Niagara Cares, a philanthropic arm of Niagara Water, since 2019. This money, in addition to foundation funding, individual contributions, and water donations, has enabled the organization to lease well over 10,000 acre-feet of water, which would typically cost $400,000 to $2,500,000, depending on the water right, says Ryan. The projects improved flows on the 15-Mile Reach of the Colorado River — a critical stretch of river for endangered fish species near Grand Junction, Colorado — as well as on the Yampa River and tributaries to the Fraser River.

And while BlueTriton has received pushback from community members on its water use, the company has partnered with Colorado Parks and Wildlife to dedicate a conservation easement to preserve 122 acres of wildlife habitat and protect groundwater resources along the Arkansas River.

“These sustainability programs work well, and Western rivers would benefit from more of them,” says Ryan. “The amount of water they have made possible for streamflow res-

toration in recent years is significant.”

But experts agree that the pathway to meet water-positive goals, or even water-neutral goals, is not straightforward.

CONTEXT IS KEY

"Being ‘water neutral’ in an honest way requires a great amount of thought and engagement with people who have direct interest or represent the interest of the communities and environment that might be affected,” says Kiparsky.

In 2023, the nonprofit Ceres published a benchmark analysis of 72 companies from four water-intensive industries — apparel,

program director for water at Ceres. “We also noted a lack of commitment around protecting freshwater ecosystems and clean water supplies for communities.”

Where and when water is replenished makes a significant difference for water systems. Simply measuring the amount of water a company uses and returns to its source each year, for example, does not account for when that water was used or returned. If most water is pumped during the summer and returned during the winter, these activities could still be disruptive to wildlife, ecosystems, and overall river flow rates.

“Unlike in sustainability efforts involving carbon offsets, there is no single atmosphere

“ WE FOUND THAT WHILE MANY COMPANIES ARE SETTING GOALS AIMED at using less water, most are not setting strong targets to reduce water pollution." ” —KIRSTEN JAMES, CERES

beverage, food, and high-tech — and found that only 35% consider contextual factors such as local watershed conditions, regulatory dynamics, and community water needs when assessing water use risks. Only 14% consider contextual factors when assessing water quality risks.

“[We] found that while many companies are setting goals aimed at using less water, most are not setting strong targets to reduce water pollution,” says Kirsten James, senior

to improve. Every river has different needs at different times of the year,” says Ryan.

Implementation of corporate water goals requires detailed reporting and independent validation to ensure the efforts are sustaining or restoring and not damaging ecosystems.

“It's a simple concept, becoming water neutral, but putting it in practice is not simple,” says Kiparsky. "A lot of the implications are going to rely on analysis by third parties that are experts in understanding water impact.”

This year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began requiring most public companies to disclose climate-related information, including water-related financial risks, so investors can consider how companies are managing climate risks when making investment decisions. James says this is an important step that will help raise the bar with U.S. companies on water-related disclosures.

“As water risk continues to escalate, investors and companies need full transparency to be able to manage and adapt to these threats,” says James. H

Emily Payne is a writer covering the intersection of food, agriculture, health and climate. She is editor of the global nonprofit Food Tank.

Below: Beer bottles are washed on a conveyor belt in a microbrewery. Less water used in the cleaning process is one way factories are trying to increase water savings.

Stopping PFAS At The Source

BY ELIZABETH MILLER

As the City of Thornton’s water treatment plants have found themselves at times outmatched by the task of stripping PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, from drinking water, the city has undertaken some of its own investigations to determine the sources for that contamination. Yes, says Martin Kimmes, water treatment and quality manager for the City of Thornton, there’s PFAS from Suncor, a petroleum refinery, running into Sand Creek, but that’s downstream from where Thornton draws water. Yet elevated PFAS levels also appeared at every municipal wastewater treatment plant upstream of the city — those treatment plants don’t put PFAS in the water, rather the chemicals enter the wastewater stream from homes and businesses.

“It’s just in so many different products — we’re washing it off our bodies into the showers, we’re washing our clothes and everything has [durable water] repellent on it these days,” Kimmes said. “We have to get PFAS out of consumer products before we’re going to see it decline in our water.”

PFAS, a family of chemicals linked to serious health issues ranging from certain types of cancer to developmental and reproductive effects, taint drinking water supplies around the world, including in more than two dozen Colorado communities. These “forever” chemicals break down very slowly, perpetually posing concerns for people and wildlife.

PFAS has leaked into Colorado’s groundwater and waterways from use around industrial businesses, military bases, airports and landfills. But the chemicals are also found in water-repellant and grease-proofing treatments used for clothing, carpet, upholstery, non-stick cookware and food packaging. PFAS has been commercially produced since the 1940s but its toxicity wasn’t publicized until the late 1990s, and regulations to protect public health are only now coming online.

Colorado is taking strides to address PFAS on multiple fronts, limiting certain consumer products known to be laden with the chemicals. And also, in a rare step, the state is looking at industrial sources of contamination and asking polluters to cut back and clean up. Plus, with new federal regulations, adopted in April 2024, water providers, including Thornton, must take action to reduce PFAS levels in drinking water by 2029.

for the first time — restricting its PFAS discharge to 70 ppt.

“We’re really focused on making sure that we’re not continuing to add to the problem, so cutting off any additional contributions to PFAS getting out into the environment, and then where it is, really working on addressing that on a case-by-case basis,” says Trisha Oeth, CDPHE's environmental health and protection director.

In contrast, most wastewater treatment plants with permits to discharge water to a stream do not yet operate under a PFAS limit but instead must monitor for PFAS and investigate the sources of PFAS that feed into their treatment facilities.

Environmental groups have appealed the Suncor permit.

“It doesn’t really require Suncor to clean up its act far enough or fast enough,” says Michael Freeman, an attorney with Earthjustice.

The appeal raises concerns that Suncor's discharge permit relies on an outdated PFAS limit of 70 ppt from a 2016 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) health advisory level for drinking water. The permit also gives Suncor more than six years to comply. And while the facility’s limits will be set on a daily maximum, the state only required water testing once a week. Earthjustice hired a hydrologist to monitor PFAS levels upstream and downstream of Suncor, and that data suggests Suncor is responsible for 18% to 27% of the PFAS in Sand Creek.

“We’re glad they’re adding PFAS limits for the first time to Suncor’s permit, but they’re doing so in a way that’s not strong enough to protect local communities and people’s drinking water and public health,” Freeman says.

“We have to get PFAS out of consumer products before we’re going to see it decline in our water.”

— Martin Kimmes, City of Thornton

Colorado's House Bill 1345, passed in 2022, restricts the sale of certain products that contain intentionally added PFAS, including carpets, cosmetics, fabric treatments, food packaging, and furniture. The bill takes a phased approach — cookware restrictions began in January 2024 and additional restrictions will come online in 2025 and 2027. The bill banned the most products of any PFAS bill to date in the U.S., according to Safer States, an alliance of environmental health organizations. That bill also included a first-in-the-nation prohibition on the use of PFAS to extract oil and gas. The measures aim to protect consumers from exposure, and to reduce sources of PFAS contamination.

While major water contamination in Colorado from PFAS has been traced to the use of firefighting foam, industrial sources of PFAS include sites that manufacture paint and coating, plastics, or electronics; process petroleum; or fabricate metal.

Suncor, the state’s only major petroleum refinery, sits along Sand Creek in Commerce City, just north of Denver. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) has found PFAS levels in the water discharged from Suncor as high as 2,500 parts per trillion (ppt). Suncor attributes the PFAS in nearby groundwater to firefighting foams historically used at the refinery, and the company says it is working with CDPHE to test surrounding groundwater and streams. It has also stopped using firefighting foam that contains PFAS, and will try to contain all foam used in the event of an emergency. When CDPHE renewed Suncor’s discharge permit in March, it set limits on how much PFAS the facility can release into nearby waters

Suncor also contested the permit, saying the treatment will be expensive, take time to construct, and offer limited gains. Research commissioned by Suncor counters that non-refinery sources comprise 89% of the PFAS. In correspondence, company staff contend that contamination in Sand Creek “reflects the widespread historic use of PFAS by companies and individuals at large — and is not a Suncor specific issue.” In their tests, PFAS concentrations were routinely above 70 ppt upstream of Suncor.

In April 2024, the EPA established new drinking water standards for five PFAS and some combinations of the thousands of PFAS variants. The goal is to see levels at zero, but the enforceable levels for PFOS and PFOA are set at 4 ppt. Up to 10% of public drinking water systems may need upgrades to comply with new rules, and nearly $1 billion in federal money through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will fund testing and new treatment facilities at public water systems.

To consistently meet this new standard, Thornton will need to build a new $40 million to $150 million treatment plant, Kimmes says. The city is still exploring whether it will pursue federal support.

Though the EPA has worked on setting industry limits, the process will take years. States can address PFAS sources more quickly.

“Colorado is actually a leading state in terms of thinking about PFAS discharge from industry into waterways, water systems, and wastewater,” says Sonya Lunder, director of community science for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The state efficiently set standards, and required wastewater testing and source identification, Lunder says, but if this is what leading looks like, that’s “bonkers.”

“It’s happening in reverse order,” Lunder says. “It’s kind of wild to think about the really intense and ambitious goals for drinking water, and they’re happening well in advance of any conversation about prevention.” H

Independent journalist Elizabeth Miller has written about environmental issues around the American West for publications including The Washington Post, Scientific American, Outside, Backpacker and The Drake.

Winds of Change

What does a clean energy future mean for water?

BY ALLEN BEST

A wind farm in Limon, Colorado

Use it or lose it. That’s a basic premise of Colorado water law. Those with water rights must put the water to beneficial use or risk losing the rights to somebody who can. It’s fundamentally anti-speculative.

But Colorado legislators this year created a major exception for two electric utilities that draw water from the Yampa River for coal-burning power plants. They did so through Senate Bill 24-197, which Gov. Jared Polis signed into law in Steamboat Springs in late May.

The two utilities, Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, plan to retire the five coal-burning units — two at Hayden and three at Craig — they operate in the Yampa River Basin by late 2028. These units represent Colorado’s largest concentration of coal plants, 1,874 megawatts of generating capacity altogether. That’s 40% of Colorado’s total coal-fired electrical generation. Together, they use some 19,000 acre-feet of water each year.

What will become of those water rights when the turbines cease to spin? And what will replace that power? The short answer is that the utilities don’t know. That’s the point of the legislation. It gives the utilities until 2050 to figure out their future.

While the legislation is unique to the Yampa Valley, questions of future water use echo across Colorado as its coal plants — two units at Pueblo, one near Colorado Springs, one north of Fort Collins, and one at Brush — all will close or be converted to natural gas by the end of 2030.

Both Xcel and Tri-State expect that at least 70% of the electricity they deliver in 2030 will come from wind and solar. The final stretch to 100%? That’s the hard question facing utilities across Colorado — and the nation and world.

Natural gas is expected to play a continued role as backup to the intermittency of renewables. Moving completely beyond fossil fuels? No one technology or even a suite of technologies has yet emerged as cost-effective. At least some of the technologies that Xcel and Tri-State are looking at involve water.

Fossil fuel plants use less than 1% of all of Colorado’s water. Yet in a state with virtually no raw water resources left to develop, even relatively small uses have gained attention. Colorado’s power future will have implications for its communities and their water, but how exactly that will look remains unknown.

EMISSIONS GOALS

The year 2019 was pivotal in Colorado’s energy transition. State lawmakers adopted legislation that specified a 50% economywide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100% by 2050. A decade before, that bill would have been laughed out of the Colorado Capitol. Even in 2019, some thought

it unrealistic. But proponents had the votes, and a governor who had run on a platform of renewable energy.

Something approaching consensus had been achieved regarding the risks posed by climate change. Costs of renewables had plummeted during the prior decade, 70% for wind and 89% for solar, according to the 2019 report by Lazard, a financial analyst. Utilities had learned how to integrate high levels of renewables into their power supplies without imperiling reliability. Lithium-ion batteries that can store up to four hours of energy were also dropping in price.

Tied at the legislative hip to the targets adopted in 2019 were mandates to Colorado’s two investor-owned electric utilities, Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy. By 2030 they must reduce emissions by at least 80% compared to 2005 levels. Both aim to do even better.

Xcel, the largest electrical utility in Colorado, was already pivoting. In 2017, it received bids from wind and solar developers in response to an all-sources solicitation that caused jaws across the nation to drop. In December 2018 shortly after the election of Gov. Polis, Xcel officials gathered in Denver to boldly declare plans to reduce emissions by

SOLAR 101

Solar power utilizes the radiant light and heat from the sun to generate electricity through the use of solar panel technology.

Solar panels don’t consume any water during operation. However, solar energy uses approximately 22-33 gallons of water per MWh for the maintenance of the solar panels. Solar panel manufacturing also relies on semiconductors which require thousands of gallons of water per day.

PROS

• Low greenhouse gas emissions

• Low water consumption

• Getting more inexpensive over time

• Sunlight is available everywhere

CONS

• Dependent on the availability of sunlight

• Can use a lot of space

• Requires developments in technology to increase efficiency and storage capability

• Without the capacity to store solar energy efficiently, we are still reliant on natural gas, coal or other energy sources for baseload power

A solar field at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo, Colorado

80% by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, the provider for Fort Collins and three other cities in the northern Front Range, later that month adopted a highly conditioned 100% goal. In January 2020, Tri-State announced its plans to close coal plants and accelerate its shift to renewables — it plans to reduce emissions by 89% by 2030. In December 2021, Holy Cross Energy, the electrical cooperative serving the Vail and Aspen areas, adopted a 100% goal for 2030. It expects to get to 91% by 2025.

Colorado’s emissions-reduction goals are economy wide, not just for power production. In practice, this means replacing technologies in transportation, buildings and other sectors that produce greenhouse gas emissions with low- or no-emissions energy sources. As coal plants have closed, transportation has become the highest-emitting sector. Colorado had 126,000 registered electric vehicles and hybrids as of June but hopes to have 940,000 registered by 2030. Buildings pose a greater challenge because most of us don’t replace houses the way we do cars or cell phones. Solutions vary, but many involve increased use of electricity instead of natural gas.

A final twist that has some bearing on water is Colorado’s goal of a “just transition.”

House Bill 19-1314 declared that coal-sector workers and communities were not to be cast aside. Efforts would be made to keep them economically and culturally whole.

POSSIBLE WATER DIVIDENDS

Where does this leave water? That’s unclear and, as the 2024 legislation regarding the Yampa Valley spelled out, it is likely to remain unclear for some time. The law prohibits the Division 6 water judge — for the Yampa, White and North Platte river basins — from considering the decrease in use or nonuse of a water right owned by an electric utility in the Yampa Valley.

In other words, they can sit on these water rights through 2050 while they try to figure what technologies will emerge as cost competitive. Xcel Energy and Tri-State will not lose their water rights simply because they’re not using them during this time as would, at least theoretically, be the case with other water users in Colorado.

Conversion of the Cherokee power plant north of downtown Denver from coal to natural gas provides one case study of how energy shifts can affect water resources. Xcel convert-

WIND 101

Wind power uses the energy of the wind to spin turbines and generate electricity.

Wind energy does not use or consume water to generate electricity. However, some water is used to produce steel and cement for turbines.

PROS

• Doesn’t generate any pollution or emissions

• Very abundant

• Affordable resources and very cost effective

CONS

• Turbines require a large use of space

• Turbines can impact wildlife and habitat

• Turbines are limited to specific locations

• Intermittent and dependent on the wind blowing

ed the plant to natural gas between 2010 and 2015. Its capacity is now 928 megawatts.

Richard Belt, a water resources consultant for Xcel, says that when Cherokee still burned coal, it used 7,000 to 8,000 acre-feet of water per year; since 2017, when natural gas replaced coal, it uses 3,000 to 3,500 acre-feet per year. Does that saved water now flow downstream to farmers in northeastern Colorado?

“If the wind is really blowing, there could be some water heading downstream on certain days,” Belt answered. In other words, there’s so much renewable energy in the grid that production from the gas plant at times is not needed.

A more concrete way to look at this conversion, Belt says, is to step back and look at Xcel’s water use more broadly across its system. It also has the Rocky Mountain Energy Center, a 685-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant along Interstate 76 near Keenesburg that it bought in 2009 and began operating in 2012. With the plant came a water contract from Aurora Water.

Xcel has been renegotiating that contract, which it projects will be effective in early 2025. The new contract will allow Xcel to take water saved at Cherokee and instead use it at the Rocky Mountain Energy Center. That will allow it to use 2,000 acre-feet less of the water it has been leasing from Aurora each year. Belt says it will save Xcel customers around $1 million a year in water costs.

“Another way to look at this dividend is that we’re going to hand [Aurora] two-thirds of this contract volume, around 2,000 acrefeet a year, and they can use that water within their system,” Belt explains.

Other coal-burning power plants have also closed in recent years, with water dividends of their own. One small coal plant in southwestern Colorado at Nucla, operated by Tri-State, was closed in 2019. In 2022, Xcel shut down one of its three coal units at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo.

Colorado Springs Utilities stopped burning coal at its Martin Drake coal-fired plant in 2021, which is located near the city’s center, and replaced it with natural gas. It used some 2,000 acre-feet of water per year in the early 2000s,

The Cherokee Generating Station north of downtown Denver is now a natural gasfired power plant.

and was down to only 14 acre-feet per year in 2023. Colorado Springs Utilities — a provider of both electricity and water — delivers 70,000 to 75,000 acre-feet of water annually to its customers. Whatever water savings were achieved in that transition will be folded into the broader operations. The city’s remaining coal plant, Ray Nixon, burns both coal and natural gas. The city delivers about 2,000 acre-feet per year to Nixon to augment groundwater use there.

The 280-megawatt Rawhide coal-fired power plant north of Fort Collins is to be shut down by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, which owns and operates the plant, had not yet chosen a replacement power source as of June 2024. Platte River delivers electricity to Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont and Loveland.

That leaves just the 505-megawatt Pawnee among Colorado’s existing coal plants. The plant near Brush is to be retrofitted to burn natural gas by 2026. The water dividend? Xcel is trying to keep its options open.

The one commonality among all the possible power-generating technologies that Xcel may use to achieve its goal of emissions-free energy by 2050 is that, with the exception of some battery technologies, they all require water, says Belt. And that, he says, means it would be unwise to relinquish water without first making decisions about the future.

That’s why this year's bill was needed. Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers, Xcel

and Tri-State, both with coal plants retiring in the Yampa Valley, have questions unanswered.

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY

What comes next? Obviously, lots more wind and solar. Lots. The graph of projected solar power in Colorado through this decade

HYDROPOWER 101

Hydropower uses falling or fast-moving water, including water stored in dams or flowing in rivers, pipes or canals, to turn a generator and produce electricity. While a steady stream of water is required to turn hydropower turbines, very little water is consumed in the process of generating electricity. Studies have found that on average 9.85 gallons of water is consumed to produce a kWh of electricity in hydroelectric power plants in the U.S. PROS

• Renewable energy source without greenhouse gas emissions

• Relatively low operating costs

• Reliable

• Plays a major role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions

CONS

• High investment costs

• Dependent on availability of water resources

• Hydroelectric dams can negatively impact ecosystems

net electricity generation.

looks like the Great Plains rising up to Longs Peak. Construction of Xcel’s Colorado Power Pathway, a 450-mile transmission line looping around the Eastern Plains, will expedite renewables coming online. Tri-State is also constructing new transmission lines in eastern Colorado. The plains landscape, San Luis Valley, and other locations could look very different by the end of the decade.

Very little water is needed for renewables, at least once the towers and panels are put into place.

You may well point out that the sun goes down, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Storage is one holy grail in this energy transition. Lithium-ion batteries can store energy for four hours. That works very effectively until it doesn’t. Needed are new cost-effective technologies or far more application of known technologies.

One possible storage method, called ironrust, will likely be tested at Pueblo in 2025 by a collaboration between Xcel and Form Energy, a company that proclaims it will transform the grid. It could provide 100 hours of storage. Tri-State’s electric resource plan identifies the same technology.

Other potential storage technologies involve water. Pumped-storage hydropower is an old and proven technology. It requires vertical differences in elevation, and Colorado has that. In practice, finding the right spots for the two reservoirs, higher and lower, is difficult.

Xcel Energy’s Cabin Creek project between Georgetown and Guanella Pass began electrical production in 1967. In this closed-loop system, water from the higher reservoir is released through a three-quarter-mile tunnel to the second reservoir 1,192 feet lower in elevation. This generates a maximum 324 megawatts to help meet peak demands or to provide power when it’s dark or the wind stops blowing. When electricity is more freely available, the water can be pumped back to the higher reservoir. Very little water is lost.

Near Leadville, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has a pumped-storage hydropower project at Twin Lakes, the Mt. Elbert Power Plant, with a more modest elevation difference. The plant can generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity.

Left: Strontia Springs Dam and Reservoir, located on the South Platte River within Waterton Canyon. It is ranked #32 out of 45 hydroelectric power plants in Colorado in terms of total annual

A private developer with something similar in mind has reported reaching agreements with private landowners along the Yampa River between Hayden and Craig. With private landowners, the approval process would be far easier than if this were located on federal lands. Cost is estimated at $1.5 billion.

Belt points out that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has streamlined the permitting process for pumped-storage hydro but that technology remains expensive and projects will take probably 10 to 12 years to develop if everything goes well.

“During that 10 to 12 years, does something new come along? And if you’re committed to pumped storage, then you can’t pivot to this new thing without a financial impact,” he says, explaining a hesitancy around pumped storage.

Green hydrogen is another leading candidate in the Yampa Valley and elsewhere. It uses electrolysis to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water. Renewable energy can be used to fuel the electrolysis. That’s why it is called green hydrogen as distinct from blue hydrogen, which uses natural gas as a catalyst.

A news story in 2023 called it a “distant proposition.” Costs remain high but are falling. Tax incentives seek to spur that innovation.

Gov. Polis' administration remains optimistic about hydrogen. It participated

PUMPED STORAGE HYDROPOWER 101

Pumped storage hydropower is a specific type of hydroelectric power that requires two reservoirs, one at a higher elevation. To generate power, water is released from the higher reservoir, as it flows to the lower reservoir it passes through a turbine. Energy is then used to pump the water back up to the upper reservoir. This acts as a battery as it can store power and release it when needed.

PROS

• Reliable technology with high efficiency

• Great way to store energy

• Can quickly generate electricity to match demand

• No direct greenhouse gas emissions

CONS

• Infrastructure can be expensive to build

• Needs specific geography to work

• Environmental concerns related to dams and altering ecosystems

in a proposal for federal funding that would have created underground hydrogen storage near Brush. That proposal was rejected, but Will Toor, the chief executive of the Colorado Energy Office, has made it clear that green hydrogen and other emerging technologies remain on the table. Xcel says the same thing. “It’s not something we are going to give up on quite yet,” says Belt. The water savings from the conversion of coal to natural gas could possibly play into those plans.

Polis is bullish on geothermal, both kinds. The easier geothermal uses the relatively constant 55 degree temperatures found 8 to 10 feet below ground to heat and cool buildings. The Colorado Capitol has geothermal heating, but the most famous example is Colorado Mesa University, where geothermal heats and cools about 80% of the campus. This technology may come on strong in Colorado, especially in new construction.

Can heat found at greater depths, say 10,000 feet or from particularly hot spots near the surface, be mined to produce electricity? California generates 10.1% from enhanced geothermal, Nevada 5.1%, and Utah 1.5%. Colorado generates zero. At a June conference, Polis said he thought geothermal could produce 4% to even 8% of the state’s electricity by 2040. Geothermal for electric production would require modest water resources.

Nuclear? Those plants, like coal, require water. Many smart people believe it may be the only way that civilization can reduce emissions as rapidly as climate scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic repercussions. Others see it as a way to accomplish just transition as coal plants retire.

Costs of traditional nuclear remain daunting. Critics point to projects in other states. In Georgia, for example, a pair of reactors called Vogtle have been completed but seven years late and at a cost of $35 billion, more than double the project’s initially estimated $14 billion price tag. The two reactors have a combined generating capacity of 2,430 megawatts.

New reactor designs may lower costs. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023 certified design of a small-modular reactor by NuScale. It was heralded as a breakthrough, but NuScale cancelled a contract later that year for a plant in Idaho, citing escalating costs.

Greater optimism has buoyed plans in Wyoming by the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower for a 345-megawatt nuclear plant near

GREEN HYDROGEN 101

There are various ways to produce hydrogen but green hydrogen uses an electrical current to break apart water molecules, separating hydrogen from oxygen. The electricity to fuel this process is generated with renewable power sources. Once this hydrogen is obtained, it can be used as a clean energy source in the form of a fuel cell that essentially combines the hydrogen with oxygen from the air to create electricity.

Green hydrogen requires a water supply. On average, a little more than 2 gallons of water are required to produce 1 kilogram (kg) of hydrogen via electrolysis. However, adding in the water needed for purification and cooling, green hydrogen consumes 5-8 gallons/kg of water. A 20 megawatt electrolyzer in Germany from Siemens Energy produces 335 kg of hydrogen per hour.

PROS

• No emissions during combustion or production

• Hydrogen is easy to store

• Hydrogen is a versatile fuel that can be used for commercial, industrial or transportation purposes

CONS

• Hydrogen electrolysis is very expensive

• The production of hydrogen requires a lot of energy

• Hydrogen is highly reactive and flammable and causes many safety concerns

the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. It has several innovations, including molten salt for energy storage and a design that allows more flexible generation, creating a better fit with renewables. Ground was broken in June for one building. An application for the design is pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Gates has invested $1 billion and expects to invest many billions more in what he estimates will be a $10 billion final cost. He also hopes to see about 100 similar plants and reduced costs. Other companies with still other designs and ideas say they can also reduce costs. All these lower-cost nuclear solutions exist in models, not on the ground. Uranium supply remains problematic, at least for now, but more difficult yet is the question of radioactive waste disposal.

INTO THE FUTURE

The potential for nuclear is balled up in the issue of just transition. Legislators in 2019 said that coal communities would not be left on

NUCLEAR 101

Nuclear power plants create energy by breaking apart atomic bonds of uranium or plutonium and using that energy to heat water, which creates steam. The steam turns a generator to create electricity.

Nuclear power uses water in three major ways: extracting and processing uranium fuel, producing electricity, and controlling waste and risks. Nuclear power can use anywhere from 270-670 gallons of water/MWh, depending on operating efficiency and site condition.

PROS

• Clean energy source that has the ability to generate power independent of the sun shining, wind blowing, or water flowing

• Generates zero emissions from the power plant

• Potential for small-scale modular nuclear power plants that may be more affordable on a local level

CONS

• Relies on the mining of uranium and results in toxic waste products

• Large nuclear power plants are often very expensive

• Potential for large-scale disasters and radiation exposure seen in incidents like Fukishima and Chernobyl

that coal communities would not be left on their own to figure out their futures. What this means in practice remains fuzzy.

Consider Pueblo. Xcel Energy on August 1 is scheduled to submit to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission what is being called the Pueblo Just Transition Electric Resource Plan. Through that plan, Xcel must determine to what extent it can, through new generating sources, leave Pueblo economically whole after it closes the coal plants. Existing jobs will be lost, although others in post-closure remediation of the site will be gained. What, then, constitutes a just transition for Pueblo?

A task force assembled by Xcel Energy in January delivered its conclusions after nearly a year of study: “Of all of the technologies that we studied, only advanced nuclear generation will make Pueblo whole and also provide a path to prosperity,” concluded the task force. They advised that a natural gas plant with carbon capture would be a distinctly secondary choice.

What will happen with the water in Pueblo? Xcel Energy has a take-or-pay water

contract with Pueblo Water for 12,783 acrefeet per year for the Comanche Generating Station. It must pay for the water even if it does not take it. Pueblo Water has a similar take-or-pay contract for 1,000 acre-feet annually for the 440-megawatt natural gas plant operated by Black Hills Energy near the Pueblo airport.

The draw of these water leases from the Arkansas River isn’t that notable, says Chris Woodka, president of the Pueblo Water board, even in what he describes as a “small year,” with low flows in the river. These water leases constitute some 5% or less of the river’s water, Woodka says. Xcel could tap that same lease for whatever it plans at Pueblo. And if it has no use? “We haven’t had many conversations around what we would do if that lease goes away, because it is so far out in the future.”

Xcel and Tri-State both own considerable water rights in the lower Arkansas Valley, near Las Animas and Lamar. Neither utility has shared plans for using the water, as the ideas of coal or nuclear power plants that initially inspired the water purchases never moved forward. Water in both cases has been leased since its acquisition to Arkansas Basin agricultural producers in order to maintain an ongoing beneficial use.

Why don’t Tri-State and Xcel lease their water in the Yampa River as they do in the Arkansas? Jackie Brown, the senior water and natural resources advisor for Tri-State, explains that there is no demand for additional agricultural water in the Yampa Basin. About 99% of all lands capable of supporting irrigated agriculture already get water. This is almost exclusively for animal forage. This is a valley of hay.

However, the Yampa River itself needs more water. The lower portion in recent years has routinely suffered from low flows during the rising heat of summer. Some summers, flows at Deerlodge, near the entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, have drooped to 20 cubic feet per second. Even in Steamboat, upstream from the power plants, fishing and other forms of recreation, such as tubing, have at times been restricted.

One question asked in drafting the legislation this year was whether to seek protection with a temporary instream flow right for some of the 45 cfs that Tri-State and Xcel together use at the plants at Craig

and Hayden. The intent would have been to protect the delivery of some portion of that water to Dinosaur National Monument through 2050. That idea met resistance from stakeholders.

Instead, a do-nothing approach was adopted. Those framing the bill expect that most of the time, most of the water will flow downstream to Dinosaur anyway. In most years, no demands are placed on the river from November through the end of June. The challenge comes from July through October. The amount of water, used formerly by coal plants, that reaches Dinosaur will depend upon conditions at any particular time. Have the soils been drying out? Has the summer monsoon arrived?

“Even if you’re adding even half of that [45 cfs], it is a big deal," says Brown. “If you can double the flow of a river when it’s in dire circumstances it’s a big deal.”

A study conducted by the Colorado River Water Conservation District several years ago examined how much water released from Elkhead Reservoir, located near Hayden, would reach Dinosaur. The result: 88% to 90% did.

Brown says river managers will be closely studying whether the extra water can assist with recovery of endangered fish species and other issues. “There’s a lot of learning to be

NATURAL GAS 101

To generate electricity, natural gas is burned to heat water and create steam, which spins a turbine.

The majority of the water is used in the cooling process which cools the steam back into water in order to generate more electricity. Natural gas plants are more energy efficient and waterefficient compared to coal plants. In 2021, natural gas power generation used an average of 2,803 gal/MWh, compared with 19,185 gal/MWh for coal.

PROS

• Lower emissions than coal

• Reserves found within the United States

• Inexpensive and abundant fuel

CONS

• Still a fossil fuel with emissions

• Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" and gas leaks lead to the emission of methane, a potent greenhouse gas

• Fracking consumes water and has the potential to contaminate groundwater

COAL 101

Coal power is considered the “dirtiest” form of energy generation. Coal is burned which releases energy to boil water and create steam. This steam then turns a turbine which generates electricity.

Coal mining is highly water intensive, with water used to extract and wash the coal. Water is then used in the electricity generation to cool the steam back into water. Water withdrawals from coal-fired power plants depend on the method of cooling but can range from 500 to 50,000 gallons of water per MWh.

PROS

• Inexpensive energy source

• Easy to access raw materials

• Simple storage

• Reliable technology

• Independent of weather conditions

CONS

• Releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere

• Contributes to pollution and acid rain

• Harmful waste products

• Highly water intensive

• Dependence on foreign countries

done. My key takeaway is that that’s really going to contribute to the volume of knowledge that we have and the future management decisions that are made.”

A larger takeaway about this new law is that it gives Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers time. Xcel and Tri-State don’t know all the answers as we stretch to eradicate emissions from our energy by mid-century. Many balls are in the air, some interconnected, each representing a technology that may be useful or necessary to complement the enormous potential of wind and solar generation now being created. All of these new technologies will require water. Some water in the conversion from coal is being saved now, but it’s possible it will be needed in the future.

No wonder Xcel’s Belt says its “imprudent in a very water-constrained region to let go of a water asset that you may not get back, until you know how some of these balls are going to land.” H

Allen Best is a frequent contributor to Headwaters magazine. He publishes Big Pivots, an e-journal that chronicles the energy and water

amped up

Data centers — the banks of interconnected computer servers that store Facebook photos, bank records, health records, and all else in the digital 21st century — use huge amounts of electricity. Colorado already has at least a dozen.

More can be expected as the rise of artificial intelligence expands global annual growth a projected 11.3% through 2026. Electricity prices lagging national averages make Colorado an attractive destination along with its location in the nation’s interior.

But could data centers pose problems for Colorado’s electrical grid and its water supplies? That was the argument that John Gavan made last winter after SB24-085 proposed giving state sales and use tax breaks to data center operators. Gavan is a veteran of the IT industry who later turned his attention to energy. He warned that too many large data centers might cause Colorado to fail to attain its decarbonization goals.

Water is also a concern. It can be the primary cooling method for data centers. The Washington Post in 2023 said that a large data center can gobble up 1 million to 5 million gallons of water a day — enough to serve some 3,00017,000 households for a year.

Water managers in Colorado are conscious of demands from this expanding sector. “Large users are always part of our conversation,” says Vern Adam, deputy director of engineering services for Aurora Water.

QTS Aurora-Denver has the most high-profile data center in Colorado. It sits on a 67-acre campus in Aurora. To attract the industry, Aurora rebated sales and use taxes and Arapahoe County agreed to a 50% refund of the company’s property taxes.

As for the water needs? Adam declined to identify specifics. A data center using 10,000 gallons daily would pay a $1.1 million one-time tap fee. A large warehouse for food products that uses “a fair amount of water,” says Adam, would pay fees using the same formula.

Adam said in March that he was aware of three data centers already operating in Aurora and three more that had been proposed. Microsoft in 2022 reportedly purchased 260 acres in Aurora with plans to build its first hyperscale data center in the area.

Colorado Springs has seven large data centers and many small data centers embedded in almost every large business. “When we are contacted by prospective data centers looking to relocate here, they are more interested in power availability [than in water],” reports Jennifer Jordan, senior public affairs specialist for Colorado Springs Utilities, which delivers both energy and water to its customers.

Data centers have been low on Denver Water's radar. “We haven’t seen a big influx of data centers into our service area,” says Greg Fisher, the utility’s manager of demand planning. “If we hear an industry is coming in, we would take a very specific view of that and make sure that we understand their new demands and fold them into our long-term planning. But right now, we don’t have any indication that’s coming.” —Allen Best

WHAT’S BOOMING?WATERPROTECTIONSFOROILANDGAS

Colorado’s oil and gas regulatory agency overhauled itself to prioritize protecting public health and the environment. But as the industry continues to make strides to better stretch and protect water resources, watchdogs remain skeptical.

BY ELIZABETH MILLER

Organic farms fill the valley around the North Fork of the Gunnison River, one of the largest concentrations of them in the state, but Natasha Leger, executive director of the nonprofit Citizens for a Healthy Community, looks upstream — at 100,000 acres of federal land where oil and gas leasing could take off. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated shale deposits there could hold the second-largest natural gas reserve in the state.

Just 40 oil and gas wells exist in Gunnison County, but future development could bring that near 1,000, she says, “and that would completely industrialize the watershed.”

North Fork Valley farmers speculate about the potential for an oil spill, or losing their customers’ confidence that their food is safe, should energy development take off.

But, oil and gas operators stand confidently behind their practices to protect water and the environment. “Especially here in semi-arid Colorado, every drop of water counts,” says Dan Haley, president and CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA). “We are committed to the protection and responsible use of water resources at every stage of operations.”

In recent decades, Colorado lawmakers have updated rules for the oil and gas industry and even issued a “mission change” for the state agency that permits oil and gas well development. The actions include requiring groundwater testing before and after drilling and boosting financial requirements for cleaning up orphaned wells, all to better protect water from potential contamination. In the last year, the state also started working with stakeholders to reduce freshwater consumption. Through this string of updated rules, Colorado is touted as a national leader. From an industry perspective, it’s been a dizzying string of new rulemakings, but environmental watchdogs see a need for more work yet to be done.

PROTECTING WATER QUALITY

Several state agencies monitor water use, public health, and potential contamination around the oil and gas industry, but the Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC), formerly the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, manages the bulk of industry oversight. The commission’s name changed, effective July 2023, to expand the

agency’s regulatory authority beyond oil and gas. This came four years after a shift in the agency’s overarching responsibility from fostering the industry to regulating it — referred to as the “mission change”— which was the result of 2019 legislation, Senate Bill 181.

With that change, says John Messner, ECMC commissioner, the state also made a big regulatory stride for water quality with new requirements for the cement and steel used to encase well holes drilled thousands of feet underground to access fossil fuels.

These new wellbore integrity rules include water quality monitoring and health checks at wells, isolating fluids to protect groundwater, and increased transparenancy.

Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking,” releases oil and gas from underground geological formations by injecting high-pressured water, sand and chemicals into those formations to create cracks. While

those formations lie much deeper than groundwater aquifers tapped for drinking water and irrigation — some 8,000 feet of solid rock separates oil and natural gas from the water table, says COGA’s Haley — drilling fluid, water, and oil and gas move to and from the surface, passing through layers where drinking water contamination could occur.

“From a water quality standpoint, I think we’re still leading the nation in how we look at water quality, and how we look at oil and gas activities associated with proximity to water,” Messner says.

In 2012, Colorado became one of the first states to require companies to disclose the chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing.

“That was one of the easier rulemakings just because everyone agreed that there were certain things that could be done and should be done to alleviate those concerns about different chemicals associated with hydraulic fracturing

FRACKING

or contaminating water,” Messner says.

For those disclosures, Colorado joined a nationwide database, FracFocus.org, now used by 27 of 34 oil-producing states. In 2022, lawmakers revised disclosure rules to prevent companies from deeming some frac fluids trade secrets and declining to publish their ingredients, clarifying that only the mixture, not its components, can be proprietary. That move was heralded as a first in the nation achievement for transparency. But public databases haven’t yet been updated with those missing chemicals.

Colorado’s program for groundwater testing before and after drilling was also a first of its kind, according to ECMC. Other oil and gas producing states also now require similar baseline water sampling. Oil and gas operators in Colorado began collecting water samples even before it was required, and the state rules, also finalized in 2012, closely followed what the industry proposed. Still, regulations have extended the time required to secure drilling permits to the longest in the nation, says Grant Tupper, who works with oil and gas organizations on industrial water use as director of operations and business development in the Rocky Mountain region for Select Water Solutions. A new well permit in Texas might take two weeks, he says, but in Colorado, it can take 18 months. COGA has estimated new

regulations add at least $590 million annually to the costs of doing business in Colorado.

“The state itself is ahead of the curve in some of the regulatory models they’re setting up and what they’re doing, and the companies are coming along,” Tupper says. “I think some of it is unnecessarily burdensome, but there’s that balance you have to strike.”

Colorado is the only state to require operators to test for and publicly share the chemical composition of leaked fluid found in the pipes around an oil and gas well. That disclosure allowed for researchers with the University of Colorado, National Energy Technology Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, and Dalhousie University to answer a long-debated question: When nearby household water wells are contaminated by gas, did the gas naturally drift through the ground, or was it leaked from a well? Their research, published in 2023, used the geochemical composition of leaks around northern Colorado's Wattenberg Field to link the gas to failed well pipes or casings, not natural distribution.

The fraction of contaminated residential water wells — about 4.5% of those sampled — is small enough it hasn't prompted major changes, says Joe Ryan, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Colorado, who worked on that research. But

it did spur the state to re-examine some older wells’ casings, particularly if nearby drinking water wells had been drilled deeper into aquifers since the oil well was established. “One thing to be careful about is, groundwater moves slowly, and contamination that we’re actually seeing show up at somebody’s water well could be contamination that happened a decade or two or three ago,” Ryan says. His latest research aims to pinpoint which oil well is the source of a concern if it does arise.

Among environmental NGOs — and their communities — there’s still frustration with how long it took to make those gains, how much pollution continues, and skepticism around whether what looks good on paper is being practiced in the oil field. Particularly given that oil and gas operators self-report water use, spills, and failed equipment, says Andrew Forkes-Gudmundson, senior manager for state policy with Earthworks, “It takes a lot of trust, and leaves a lot of uncertainty.”

Tupper frames it as an education gap that leaves people suspicious of what happens on well pads. “Hydraulic fracturing has been around since the 1950s,” he says. “It’s not new technology and it’s not top secret.”

TRACKING IMPACTS

The “mission change” legislation also mandated that the ECMC issue a “cumulative impacts” report annually. The 2023 report says the agency’s more stringent approaches are showing results. New oil and gas wells are farther from waterways and wetlands, among other measures intended to protect surface water. But this doesn't speak to the 40,000plus existing oil and gas wells in Colorado. And while the legislation required assessing cumulative impacts from the oil and gas industry, regulatory rulemakings have yet to determine if and how Colorado will have to address or reduce impacts to water.

The state has also increased financial bonds to cover the costs of cleaning up oil and gas wells abandoned by defunct or bankrupt companies. Those wells can become lingering sources of water contamination, as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s progress, says Barbara Vasquez, who has watchdogged the industry since 2006, when well drilling picked up near her home in Jackson County. “But we can still do better,”she says. Vasquez also sits on the Colorado Water Conservation Board where she

An aerial view of a fracking drill rig on the side of a mountain in Colorado

represents the North Platte River Basin. Enforcement and routine visits remain a challenge, with many oil fields an hours-long drive away from the federal or state offices where inspectors are based. The last year has seen fewer spills reported — which looks like “moderate progress,” says Kate Groetzinger, communications manager for the Center for Western Priorities, who compiles the nonprofit’s annual report on spills. But with more than 750,000 gallons of contaminated water and oil spilled through 414 spills across Colorado in 2023, “it’s still too much,” she says.

REUSING PRODUCED WATER

Oil and gas operations have used water to lubricate and cool drill bits for decades. But since the advent of hydraulic fracturing, most of the water used is injected to open up formations, allowing oil and gas to be pumped to the surface. If water is naturally present in the formation, it also comes to the surface with the mix of injected water and hydrocarbons. While statewide estimated water use per oil and gas well decreased between 2022 and 2023, over the longer-term, water use has risen. Colorado operators doubled their use of water to prepare wells for fracking between 2013 and 2023, according to a 2023 report from the nonprofit Fracktracker Alliance. And completing a single oil and gas well can still require an average of 5 acre-feet to 33 acre-feet of water

or more, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That’s enough water to meet the annual needs of some 10-100 households. Surface and groundwater provided 89% of the water used at oil and gas wells in Colorado in 2023 — a total of about 10.5 billion gallons, or 32,200 acre-feet.

Roughly 1% of Colorado’s total annual water diversions goes to oil and gas, but most of the water used to develop a well, combined with any additional water emerging from the geologic formation with oil or gas, is so contaminated that the industry typically disposes of it by injecting it deep underground, completely removing it from the water cycle.

“That water is taken out of the hydrological cycle because most operators dispose of it by injection,” Vasquez says. “So when you compound that over time, it becomes anything but de minimis.”

With that in mind, in 2023, Colorado’s legislature set up a new Colorado Produced Water Consortium through House Bill 1242. The bill requires the ECMC to adopt rules by December 2024 for reducing freshwater use and increasing use of recycled water.

Some companies have already made headway. Occidental Petroleum is operating a facility in Colorado’s Denver-Julesberg (DJ) Basin that processed a record-setting 889,076 barrels of liquid and slurry waste for reuse in 2022. That recycled waste offset the need for 696,480 barrels of freshwater for well completions. In other states with basins that yield more water, Occidental has been able to stop withdrawing from freshwater sources. Chevron is also working toward a zero-freshwater goal for well completions. But recycled water supplied just 11% of the water used at Colorado’s oil and gas wells last year.

“All of the customers in the oil and gas space are making a concerted effort to reduce freshwater use, and a good step toward that is being able to reuse the water that we do get back,” Tupper says. But geology constrains these efforts, with the formations in the DJ yielding far less produced water than other basins, Tupper says. “It’s far more expensive to do this in the DJ than it is most places, and it’s far more expensive than freshwater.”

Regulations also disallow large storage pits, which makes it hard to pool enough recycled water to frack a new well. As a workaround, companies could share water among their operations, but there’s no legal system yet for being cleared of liability during transit of that water in the event of an accident.

The Colorado Produced Water Consortium, an advisory body of 31 stakeholders from state agencies, oil and gas companies, environmental organizations, and affected communities has been meeting since September 2023 to identify and suggest solutions for these limitations. Through 2030, this group must submit annual reports to state lawmakers, through which they’ll identify existing infrastructure for storing and treating produced water, the estimated volume of produced water across the state, and the changes needed in rules and laws to boost the recycling and reuse of produced water in Colorado.

Initial reports on their findings were published in March, May and July.

Technology exists to treat reusable water, but questions remain on what to do with byproducts, which can include toxic hydrocarbons, salt, heavy metals, naturally occurring radioactive materials, and chemicals used to drill or maintain wells, and how to incentivize the practice, which is more expensive than purchasing municipal drinking water. The consortium will also look at the feasibility, both technically and financially, of using that water outside the oil field.

“Right now, there’s many opportunities,” says Hope Dalton, the consortium’s director. “As we have more data and information, that can tell if all of those opportunities will be fruitful or not.”

Nikie Wells, environmental justice director for Black and Brown Parents United Foundation, was appointed to the consortium to represent disproportionately impacted communities. Her family suffered from poor water quality in Texas before moving to Colorado, which is why she took this opportunity to help the state make smart choices.

“You don't think about where [water] comes from, and how we’re using it, and how we should preserve it or any of that until you’re sitting in that seat and you have to make decisions for all of Colorado, and not just yourself," Wells says. "And then you think about it like, what’s working, and what’s not working, and making sure that what’s working doesn’t get broken in the process.” H

Independent journalist Elizabeth Miller has written about environmental issues around the American West for publications including The Washington Post, Scientific American, Outside, Backpacker and The Drake.

Barbara Vasquez, an industry watchdog and member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, sits on the Colorado Produced Water Consortium.

MEMBER'S CORNER

A Community Of People Who Care About Water

Meeting New Members at Blooms and Boocha

WEco welcomed nearly 50 people to the Blooms and Boocha event at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in mid-July. The event was part of our Social Water Series, where we offer free events to connect with the public, bring our members together, and grow our membership community.

These low-pressure outreach events are meant to be both fun and informative, and over the years have featured everything from author talks to rainbarrel building workshops to a water reuse and recycling festival.

Blooms and Boocha focused on saving water outdoors on residential properties. It included talks from Denver Water and CSU Extension, covering irrigation techniques plus landscape transformation using ColoradoScape principles of droughtresilient but wildlife- and pollinatorfriendly plantings that add beauty and function while saving water.

The talks were followed by tours of CSU Extension's demonstration gardens, led by master gardeners. Participants gathered in the shade at the end of the event to sip kombucha, donated by Rowdy Mermaid, and discuss ways they plan to apply what they learned.

Keep an eye out for our next Social Water Series event. We hope to see you there!

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Misson: IMPACT

Water Education Colorado is the leading organization for informing and engaging Coloradans on water. Through leadership training, educational resources, and programming, we are working toward a vibrant, sustainable and water-aware Colorado.

112

Number of legislators and county commissioners who attended specialized Water 201 workshops led by WEco over the past year

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