Colorado wildlife officials are celebrating some long-awaited good news — the mountain toads are making tadpoles!
For seven years, biologists have been toting tadpoles to high-elevation bogs and ponds in a massive effort to save the inch-long boreal toad. And for the first time at a mountain wetland above Pitkin, they’ve discovered that those transplanted toads are making their own babies in the wild.
“It’s a really big deal,” native aquatic species biologist Daniel Cammack said in a Colorado Parks and Wildlife news release.
Boreal toads, which live in wetlands around 11,500 feet and spend their winters buried under multiple feet of snow, have been dying off at a rapid pace across the Rocky Mountain states. A fungus that infects the toad’s skin with a cluster of spores, then bursts and spreads through the water to other toads, is to blame.
Colorado biologists have been trying to stop the fungus by dipping the tiny toads in a wash nicknamed “purple rain” and have been taking new tadpoles from a hatching center in Alamosa and dropping them in wild ponds.
This summer, when Cammack went to check on his transplanted toads above Pitkin, northeast of Gunnison, he found they were reproducing, a discovery that Colorado Parks and Wildlife called “potentially game-changing.”
Cammack’s team has been bringing tadpoles to the wetland since 2018, which is about the length of time it takes for a female toad to reach reproductive age.
The state wildlife agency has stocked about 20,000 tadpoles at the Pitkin bog, most of which began as eggs that were collected from the backcountry and raised to tadpoles at the Native Aquatic Species Restoration Facility in Alamosa. In 2022, biologists threw in 570 tadpoles from the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance.
Before the relocation efforts, there were no boreal toads at the Pitkin bog.
“Everyone who has been involved in this project has poured their heart and soul into it,” Cammack said, calling it a “really special day.”
Now, biologists will watch to see if the tadpoles turn into toadlets and then into adult toads. It will become only the second place in Colorado where transplanted toads have had tadpoles that grew into toads. The first is near Cameron Pass, outside of Fort Collins.
Boreal toads are the only high-elevation toad in the Rocky Mountains and are an endangered species in Colorado. They live at elevations from 7,500 to 12,000 feet, just below treeline, and hibernate beneath the snow for six to eight months of the year. Researchers say that when the toads are stressed, they release a secretion that smells similar to peanut butter.
The toads were once abundant, even sitting under Buena Vista lamp posts at night in the 1960s to feast on insects that swarmed to the light, according to historical articles reviewed by CPW. Then the fungus came, killing off thousands of the tiny creatures in the 1980s and 1990s.
The fungus — Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis— is blamed for the death of amphibians all over the world, including in Australia, Asia and South America. Aquatic biologists say the toads lived in Colorado before humans and are an important part of the high-elevation ecosystem, where they eat bugs and serve as food for snakes, birds and weasels.
In Colorado, some transplanted tadpoles have received antifungal bacterial baths before they are packed into plastic bags and released into mountain bogs and ponds. The wash is called “purple rain” because of its lavender tint.
In one project, University of Colorado researchers injected boreal toads with either a spot of pink or green dye, visible through amphibian skin when they held a toad up to the sunlight. Green-spotted toads got the antifungal bath, while pink-spotted ones did not. Then they tried to capture the toads the following summer, searching for them in a pond above Buena Vista, to see whether they were infected with the deadly fungus.
A “Boreal Toad Recovery Team,” which includes biologists from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, has been working to save the toads for 20 years.
“The boreal toad is a truly unique and resilient amphibian,” said Cammack, calling the discovery of the new tadpoles a monumental day in his career. “We are up at 11,500 feet, at timberline practically. They gut out big winters covered by multiple feet of snow and experience only three to four months of warm growing season.”
]]>Colorado River officials in four states, including Colorado, are negotiating a new agreement with the federal government to conserve water and get credit to protect against possible cutbacks in the future.
Water conservation is a big issue in the Colorado River Basin, where prolonged drought, a changing climate and overuse have strained the water supply for 40 million people. Currently, water conserved on a farm simply reenters streams and can be used by anyone downstream. The negotiations aim to set up a program to track, count and store that water so it can benefit the four Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
Coloradans have asked for a conservation credit program, and this is a way of addressing that feedback, said Commissioner Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission.
“One of the things that I heard primarily was that we need to be getting credit for the work that we are doing, and we need to be getting credit for it now,” Mitchell said Monday during the commission’s meeting.
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.
Farmers, ranchers and other water users are already being paid to cut back their use of Colorado River water. Last year, taxpayers paid farmers and ranchers $16 million to cut their water use through the System Conservation Pilot Program.
The program led to water savings, but it did not require tracking and storing the water. Theoretically, water conserved in the Upper Basin could simply flow downstream to be used on farms, ranches and cities in the Lower Basin, according to critics of the program.
After years of debating and studying possible water credit programs, the commission ramped up its efforts to set up a program in July.
The commission hasn’t explicitly defined how credits will be used yet beyond saying they will benefit Upper Basin states. One possible use is to save up the credits and use them to fulfill the Upper Basin’s interstate water sharing obligations if river conditions worsen drastically and trigger mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin.
Commissioners and officials from the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the basin’s vital storage reservoirs, aim to draft a conservation-for-credit agreement by the end of September.
It will identify general criteria for projects that could potentially conserve water for credit, like where conservation is taking place, who can participate, how the program would be regulated and how they plan to calculate conserved water.
If the commissioners approve the draft agreement, they will also have the option to move forward with accepting project proposals. The goal is to have applications in by October and to launch conservation projects in 2025, said Chuck Cullom, the commission’s executive director.
The process aligns with a highly anticipated funding announcement from the federal government in October, which follows a flood of $450 million in federal funds for environmental projects announced in July.
Establishing a conservation-for-credit program won’t be simple.
Building a long-term program to track and store conserved water raises questions about equity, funding, economic impacts and whether the idea is feasible at all.
The devil is in the details, said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, a public water planning and policy agency that spans over half the Western Slope (which is part of the Colorado River Basin).
He wants to make sure a future program will not disproportionately impact one region, like the Western Slope. Farmers and ranchers in western Colorado have made nearly all of the water cuts through the conservation pilot program, even though communities across the state use Colorado River water.
“It’s a complex accounting world, and it takes time,” he said Monday after tuning into the virtual commission meeting along with about 100 other participants. “We do think they’re moving in the right direction.”
The potential program also has to coordinate with a set of high-stakes negotiations among all seven Colorado River states to decide the rules for storing, releasing and cutting back on water in the river’s main reservoirs, like Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These new rules won’t go into effect until after 2026.
Any credits gained before the end of 2026 will be counted but won’t be able to be used by the Upper Basin until after that process is complete, Cullom said.
The Upper Basin promised to conserve water in a proposal outlining how the four states envision future Colorado River management. Setting up a new conservation program shows the entire basin that the Upper Basin is taking action to cut back on water use, the state commissioners said.
“We all know that we have a supply and demand imbalance in the Colorado River system. We can’t control supply, so the only lever that we have to work with is demand,” said Anne Castle, the federal representative on the commission. “But if we’re reducing demand — and using taxpayer money to do it — then we have to make sure that it’s meaningful.”
]]>A controversial plan to drill up to 166 oil and gas wells near Aurora Reservoir was approved by the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission on Wednesday with the caveat that the operator, Crestone Resources, electrify its operations.
The requirement to electrify the company’s drilling and production operations would cut down on air emissions and noise — two concerns raised by area residents — making the plan “much more approvable from a comprehensive cumulative impacts perspective,” ECMC Chairman Jeff Robbins said.
Crestone, which is a subsidiary of Denver-based Civitas Resources, had submitted a so-called comprehensive area plan, or CAP, for 166 wells on 32,000 acres, including the state-owned Lowry Ranch.
CAPs were added to the state regulations to allow for regional planning and better assessment, and coordination and management of cumulative impacts from large-scale drilling plans.
The Lowry Ranch plan, however, drew strong local opposition. A May commission hearing at the Arapahoe County fairgrounds drew about 300 residents, who gave more than three hours of testimony — almost all in opposition.
When Crestone received an oil and gas lease from the Colorado State Land Board for Lowry Ranch’s 26,000 acres in 2012, there were hardly any homes in the area. Now, there are an estimated 12,000 homes.
Crestone has already drilled and fracked 17 horizontal wells on the ranch and plans to drill the new wells from two existing pads and eight new ones by 2029.
A group of more than 500 residents formed Save the Aurora Reservoir. The group was granted the right to participate in the commission’s hearings as an “affected person” and hired an attorney to make a presentation and question Crestone witnesses.
Jaime Jost, Crestone’s attorney, called STAR “an activist group trying to stop oil and gas drilling in Colorado.”
STAR argued, using expert witnesses, that gaps in the plan left residents unprotected and that it did not properly calculate the cumulative impacts of all the drilling, wells, truck traffic and ongoing operations.
“We are devastated by the commission’s decision,” Marsha Goldsmith Kamin, STAR’s president, said. “This is without doubt the wrong decision for the health, safety and environment of our community.”
Despite STAR’s challenge, the commission found Crestone had substantially complied with the CAP requirements, even as commissioners expressed frustrations with gaps in the plan.
“I still do think that it does meet our rules and is approvable,” Commissioner Mike Cross said. “I hope it would be clear to the operator doing this, that minimum checking the boxes is not what we are looking for.”
Commissioner John Messner disagreed, saying that “on many fronts” the plan lacked the “commitments and evidence” to show that it avoided, mitigated or minimized potential cumulative impacts.
In July, Julie Murphy, the commission’s director, had recommended approval of the drilling plan saying it had met “all applicable requirements.”
Commissioner Brett Akerman voiced concerns about gaps in the plan. “Make no mistake about it, I do think there is an approvable CAP, if not immediately, before us nearby,” he said. Ackerman proposed sending the plan back to Crestone for more work.
Robbins, however, said that the commission could not send the plan — which substantially complied with the state and local regulations — back to Crestone unless it could give the operator detailed guidance on what additions would be required.
Akerman said that one of his concerns was that the proposed line of pad developments — even though well beyond the state’s required 2,000-foot setback — remained “very close to residences.”
The comprehensive area plans are not a final approval, Robbins said. For each well pad Crestone will have to seek approval of an oil and gas development plan, OGDP, and that would be the appropriate time to take up pad location, as well as other issues raised in the hearing, including noise mitigation, fire safety and wildlife protections.
“At this point we are feeling the ECMC is going to scrutinize every one of the OGDPs so we are not giving up,” STAR’s Goldsmith Kamin said. “We are going to keep pushing.”
]]>A sudden-onset drought in northern Colorado helped prime the region’s forests for wildfires, showing how quickly conditions can change even after a “miracle May” of snow.
Colorado experienced a typical snow year, and some regions even saw a favorable bump of precipitation in May. But some of the wettest conditions on record could not stand up to the sudden swing into hot and dry conditions in June and July in northern Colorado. Those conditions laid the foundation for three wildfires that ignited at the end of July, climate and water experts said.
“Sometimes they call these flash droughts, when it turns so radically like that. That’s what we’ve done late in spring and the summer,” said David Barjenbruch, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Boulder. “The lack of precipitation, the dry fuels — all that makes, obviously, a more dangerous wildfire season.”
North-central Colorado, around the Laramie and North Platte river basins, has been enduring the driest period on record since 1893, according to Barjenbruch while looking at the period from May 1 through Aug. 6. During that period, Fort Collins only received 1.64 inches of precipitation.
This region is the site of the 9,700-acre Alexander Mountain fire, which erupted west of Loveland in Larimer County at the end of July. Leading up to the fire, the area was experiencing low humidity levels — 9% to 11%, Barjenbruch said.
That’s a big difference from the January through April period, which was the fifth-wettest on record with 6.14 inches of precipitation, Barjenbruch said.
The Laramie and North Platte river basins saw big boosts of snowfall in May, according to Natural Resources Conservation Service records. In fact, the region’s snowpack this year was well above-average, although it melted quickly in the second half of June. Precipitation was 101% of the 30-year median as of May 1.
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.
The region did not show any signs of drought at the end of April, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. By the end of July, it was in moderate to severe drought.
“Now everything is browned out. The fine fuels are dry. The forest conditions are deteriorating,” Barjenbruch said. “There’s not as much moisture, which allows fires to grow faster and hotter and spread more quickly.”
Dry weather also laid the foundation for the 1,600-acre Stone Canyon fire, which is 100% contained near Lyons in Boulder County. The area experienced the same sudden onset of drought: It went from the second-wettest period on record for January through April to the driest on record for May 1 through Aug. 6, Barjenbruch said.
Cooler temperatures, scattered showers and storms are in the forecast for the weekend and next week, which helped fire crews fully contain the Quarry fire in Jefferson County Thursday and should help with the ongoing containment efforts for the the Alexander Mountain.
Storms can also come with an increased risk of flash flooding, so residents and travelers near the burn scars or in flood-prone areas should stay alert for road closures and local alerts, Barjenbruch said.
A flash flood warning was issued Wednesday afternoon for the Alexander Mountain burn scar near the Big Thompson Canyon after a thunderstorm developed over the area.
Farmers, ranchers and water managers are closely watching for drought and precipitation as Colorado endures the dog days of summer and the latter half of the irrigation season.
Statewide, the summer has been warmer than usual. This was the third-warmest June on record out of 130 years of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Joel Atwood, a hydrologist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Colorado Snow Survey program.
Most of the state saw normal precipitation in June compared with the historical record, except the Laramie, North Platte and South Platte river basins in north and northeastern Colorado, Atwood said. July’s precipitation was below normal across the board.
These conditions set the stage for other fires around the state, like the 4,155-acre Bucktrail fire, near Nucla in Montrose County.
As climate and water experts get more data about this year’s water conditions, they’re also starting to spot patterns in how the flow of water through streams and rivers matched up with the forecasts based on the snowpack. These streamflow forecasts are vital for water managers as they decide how to store and release water in reservoirs.
In past years, like 2020, forecasted flows were much higher than actual water supplies — a discrepancy that could be explained by different factors, like thirsty soils and plants sucking up water before it can reach streams.
“There are some enigmas to try to understand a little bit better, but I would say that, by and large, it was a fairly average peak runoff season and a fairly well-forecasted peak runoff season,” said Peter Goble, a climatologist for the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University.
One of those enigmas was in southwestern Colorado. Water managers in the Dolores River Basin were thrown a curveball when forecasts for the summer’s streamflows turned out to be much higher than the actual streamflows.
In early April, the federal forecasts based on monitoring stations in the mountains projected around 200,000 acre-feet of water flowing through the Dolores River Basin. In reality, the basin saw 42% less than the forecast, about 115,000 acre-feet.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual use of two to three households.
April forecasts based on aerial basinwide mapping, which indicated about 116,000 acre-feet of water, helped clue reservoir managers into the discrepancy, according to Airborne Snow Observatories, Inc., which does aerial snowpack monitoring around the state.
Farmers and ranchers who depend on water from McPhee Reservoir were still able to receive a full allocation of water this season. The next big question will be to see how much water can be saved in the reservoir for next summer, according to the Dolores Water Conservancy District.
Looking ahead to the fall, Goble is tracking signs of a La Niña, a climate pattern on the Pacific Ocean which tends to come with warmer and drier conditions in Colorado.
“The developing La Niña is not good news if you’re looking at a more seasonal outlook,” he said.
]]>Colorado State University researchers are counting greenhouse gases released from irrigation for the first time, making top-emitting counties more visible alongside ways to help cut emissions.
Agriculture relies on irrigation, the CSU researchers said. It’s a vital tool for farmers and ranchers to water crops when the rain just isn’t there — an increasingly common problem with over two decades of drought and a changing climate in Colorado. But the process of pushing water through pumps, canals and center-pivot sprinklers into soils can add to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Cutting emissions starts with knowing how much is released in the first place, said Avery Driscoll, a doctoral candidate and lead researcher on the study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Water. It’s all she’s been thinking about for three and a half years, she said.
“Before the study, we really didn’t know how big of an emissions impact this was,” Driscoll said. “We wanted to do this to identify opportunities to irrigate in a way that gives us productivity benefits but also minimizes our emissions impact.”
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.
The buildup of greenhouse gases amplifies Earth’s natural greenhouse effect, which traps heat from the sun and warms the planet, and contributes to climate change.
Some climate stressors — longer droughts, more heat waves — are being felt in Colorado and across the West. Colorado temperature is rising, and research indicates the state’s rivers and streams will shrink by 5% to 30% over the next 30 years as a result.
Reducing the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, often reduces components of Colorado’s toxic ozone — a big issue in Colorado’s nine northern Front Range counties which are in “severe” violation of EPA limits on toxic ground-level ozone.
Colorado has reached 80% of its goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. To hit the target, the state needs to take big steps like adding rapid transit and plugging more old oil wells, according to Colorado’s Greenhouse Gas Pollution Reduction Roadmap 2.0.
Driscoll offered more items for Colorado’s to-do list: switching to electric water pumps and relying on electricity from renewable sources. That way farmers can keep farming, just with less emissions, she said.
“The goal here is not to say that we shouldn’t be irrigating,” Driscoll said. “It’s to identify opportunities to use irrigation as an adaptation tool with lower emissions.”
Farmers are already doing a lot of this work, said Greg Peterson, who works with farmers and ranchers across the state as the executive director of the Colorado Ag Water Alliance.
“I’m sure there’s more out there using diesel pumps, but I’ve only had one farmer come to me looking for funds to switch from diesel to electric,” he said. “Every other project I’ve dealt with we’re talking about electric pumps.”
Driscoll and the team of seven other researchers looked at federal databases, submitted public information requests, interviewed water managers and more to calculate irrigation emission estimates between 2015 and 2022.
In Colorado, they found that Yuma County was the top-emitting county, releasing about 158,400 metric tons of greenhouse gases.
Most of this came from pumping water on farms. Water pumps — powered by natural gas, oil and electricity — can bring water from deep underground aquifers or push water across sloping croplands.
Water in underground aquifers contains carbon dioxide, which escapes when it is brought to the surface — like how dumping a can of soda on the ground releases carbonation, Driscoll said.
The other top counties for irrigation related emissions were Baca County, with nearly 77,560 metric tons; Rio Grande County, with about 74,700 tons; and Saguache County, with less than 72,650 tons.
Groundwater pumping on farms was the main emission source in each county. Another leading source: soil microbes. A particularly potent gas, nitrous oxide, is released by microbes when soils are suddenly moistened by rain or irrigation. Emissions also come from larger pumping systems that move water from one river basin to another, even across mountain ranges.
Most interbasin water systems in Colorado rely on gravity to move irrigation water. But this gets complicated: Denver Water’s system, for example, was classified as a public supply only — not for agricultural irrigation — so it was not included in the CSU research, Driscoll said.
Three systems served irrigators and required energy: the Colorado-Big Thompson Project in north-central Colorado, the Doloras Project in southwestern Colorado, and the Redlands Power Canal near Grand Junction.
These projects deliver water to cities, homes, industries, ecosystems and croplands across the state, which means turning on a faucet at home also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.
The Colorado-Big Thompson Project, managed by Northern Water and the Bureau of Reclamation, was the largest. The researchers estimated its irrigation-related emissions to be about 65,470 metric tons and its total emissions to be about 146,280 tons.
It contributes about 6% of the irrigation-related emissions from similar interbasin water systems nationwide. Only two projects in the U.S. contribute more: the California State Water Project, which accounts for 49%, and the Central Arizona Project, which comprises 36%.
One factor that needs to be considered, according to Northern Water, is that the system also uses the flow of water to generate hydroelectric power, adding enough back to the electric grid to more than make up for its energy usage.
“We still think that we are a net power producer, rather than a power user on the system,” said spokesperson Jeff Stahla.
The CSU study quantifies irrigation-related emissions across the entire United States down to the county level. It’s the first in the world to do this so comprehensively, Driscoll said.
They found that, nationwide, irrigation produces 18.9 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. The entire country of Costa Rica, for example, produced about 15 million tons in 2020, Driscoll said.
That’s a small slice of the nation’s total emissions. The U.S. released over 6 billion metric tons in 2022, making it the second-largest emitter globally, according to the European Union.
Most of those irrigation-related emissions, about 12.6 million tons, come from small water pumps on farms — powered by natural gas, oil and electricity — that pull up groundwater and move water across sloping fields.
The study also found that irrigation-related emissions concentrate in specific areas, which is encouraging, Driscoll said. It makes it easier to target reduction efforts geographically.
Cutting emissions may be more challenging in some areas than others. Farmers already put solar panels center pivots and barns but face barriers, like the expense of building a service line to connect a field to the electric grid, Peterson said.
Farmers and ranchers are already taking advantage of new technologies, like special motors, called variable frequency drives, that draw on the electric grid more efficiently. They are working with the state, which offers energy audits for agricultural businesses and funding for energy projects.
Driscoll hopes the new research helps more of these projects happen.
“Our hope is that policymakers and producers can use this information to reduce emissions from irrigation in locally relevant ways,” she said. “Particularly with respect to energy-related emission reductions, we have the tools to make that happen. It’s low-hanging fruit.”
]]>Story first appeared in:
OLNEY SPRINGS — From satellite view, the land north of the Arkansas River is a seemingly random checkerboard of vital green and desperate brown, quickly fading from a few thriving farm acres to the broad, water-drained desolation of northern Crowley County.
From the cab of Matt Heimerich’s pickup, each alternating square of emerald corn or desiccated knapweed is a decision by a distant big city — to either share Colorado resources responsibly or toss rural Arkansas River counties to the fate of the hot summer winds.
That square was reseeded with native grass after Aurora bought the water in the 1970s, Heimerich says. That plot, Colorado Springs dried up and it’s all weeds. That farm, Aurora wants to dry it up soon, but the water court referee wants a better reseeding plan.
Heimerich’s family is one of the few farmers remaining in the 790 square miles of Crowley County after city water buy-ups shrank the county’s irrigated acres from more than 50,000 in the 1970s to fewer just a few thousand this year. He jumps down from the pickup to clear invasive kochia weeds from a pipe opening gushing cool canal water down a 1,500-foot corn row.
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.
Crowley is just the worst example of what can happen when nobody cares, and nobody pays attention.
Two miles away is downtown Olney Springs, population 310. Crowley County as a whole has only 5,600 residents, and more than a third of those are inmates at two prisons. The only retail operation left in Olney Springs is a soda vending machine against the wall of town hall.
As Heimerich clears his irrigation pipe, he pauses to jab a thumb over his shoulder 150 miles to the north at Aurora, where the population increased by more than 100,000 over 20 years.
“When you build a new development, at the end of the day, you’re drying up a farm,” Heimerich said. “Where else is it going to come from?”
“Crowley is just the worst example of what can happen when nobody cares, and nobody pays attention,” he said.
The tiny community serves as an enduring reminder of the cultural and economic ruin that occurs when big cities in Colorado and elsewhere purchase farms, dry up the land and move the water to urban areas. It gave rise to the term “buy and dry,” a practice now widely condemned.
The practice was supposed to end in the Lower Arkansas Valley in 2003 with a hard-fought federal court battle and settlement. Since then, state lawmakers and top water and farm agencies have changed laws and spent millions of dollars testing new protective methods for sharing water temporarily between rural and urban areas. They have also spent heavily to improve water quality for thousands of people living near the river who still don’t have clean water to drink.
The big cities insist they have learned their lessons from the Crowley County disaster.
“The results of what happened in Crowley County are unacceptable and widely recognized as a travesty,” said Colorado Springs Utilities spokesperson Jennifer Jordan. “We’ve taken those lessons to heart.”
But outraged Lower Arkansas growers and water districts say new efforts to protect their farm water aren’t working. At the same time, the big cities say new laws making it easier to share farm water don’t provide enough reliable water to grow their communities.
The cities also say big changes in the future water picture, climate-driven reductions in stream flows and threats to their Colorado River supplies leave them little choice but to draw more farm water.
This year they did that, inking deals in the Lower Arkansas worth more than $100 million to buy and lease land and water, raising alarms among local growers and generating big questions about whether the state is doing enough to protect rural farm communities and the water that keeps them going.
The cities say a lot has changed in the past 20 years and that these new deals represent innovations in water sharing. But critics in the Lower Arkansas Valley say these same deals signal that no one is doing enough to prevent “buy and dry” or the the latest tool in the water acquisition quiver, “lease and dry,” in which water is pulled from farmland periodically.
Aurora, for instance, spent $80 million in April to buy nearly 5,000 acres of farms in Otero County and the more than 6,500 acre-feet of water associated with that land. An acre-foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons of water, enough to irrigate half an acre of corn, or supply at least two urban homes for one year.
Aurora plans to use the water itself in three out of 10 years, leaving it on the farms the rest of the time. Some 4,000 acres of land will be dried up intermittently when Aurora is using the water, according to Karl Nyquist, a developer and grower who negotiated the deal with Aurora and who is operating the farms for Aurora under the lease agreement.
Colorado Springs has a different arrangement just downriver in Bent County, where it will permanently purchase up to 15,000 acre-feet of water from local farmers. Colorado Springs will also help pay local farmers to install modern center pivot irrigation systems that use less water, allowing the city to keep the saved water for its use.
FIRST PHOTO: Rows of corn are flood-irrigated in Pueblo County on June 23. Water for most farming in Pueblo County is delivered from the Arkansas River via the Bessemer Ditch. SECOND PHOTO: The view looking north from Olney Springs on June 26 shows how “buy and dry” practices have cut cultivated land in Crowley County from 50,000 acres to just a few thousand acres. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
In this deal, Colorado Springs and the farmers will be responsible for revegetating any dried up land. It will use the water in five out of 10 years, and it has agreed to make a one-time, upfront payment of $2.5 million to Bent County plus payments each year based on how much water is taken off the fields. The money is in addition to payments to farmers.
“We wanted to make sure Bent County was kept whole,” said Scott Lorenz, a senior water projects manager with Colorado Springs Utilities.
And in Pueblo County, perhaps the least controversial of the three deals, Pueblo Water agreed to purchase nearly one-third of the shares in the local historic Bessemer Ditch system for $56.2 million. Pueblo continues to lease the water back to the farmers for now. At the same time, the Palmer Land Conservancy has developed a sophisticated new framework that measures farm productivity on land watered by the Bessemer Ditch and will eventually help direct water to the most productive farms as Pueblo takes its water. The hope is that the new system will increase overall farm productivity on the ditch system and help make up for anything lost when the less productive lands are dried up, according to Dillon O’Hare, Palmer’s senior conservation manager.
Palmer is also working to analyze the impact of the deals on water quality downstream and how to prevent further damage, O’Hare said.
The three projects come as new data shows Colorado’s irrigated farmlands are shrinking. Since 1997, the state has lost 32% of these lands, with areas in the Lower Arkansas Valley seeing losses higher than that, according to an analysis of federal agricultural data by Fresh Water News and The Colorado Sun.
Crowley County has lost 90% of its irrigated lands in that period. Pueblo has lost 60.2%, and Bent and Otero have lost 37.6% and 35.2%, respectively.
State agriculture and water officials are worried about the decline, but say they have few tools to prevent it because farmers are free to sell their water rights to whomever they want.
“Am I concerned? Definitely,” said Robert Sakata, a long-time vegetable grower near Brighton, and former member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board who now serves as the director of water policy for the Colorado Department of Agriculture. “We all talk about water being a limited resource, but prime farmland is also limited and it’s important to take that into consideration.”
Not all these losses are due to big city water prospecting. Climate change, market challenges and legal obligations to deliver water to downstream states are also fallowing Colorado farmlands.
Still, more than 20 years after the intergovernmental peace accords, it wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The Lower Arkansas Valley region is part of the sprawling Arkansas River Basin. The river has its headwaters near Leadville and flows through Buena Vista, Salida, Cañon City, into Pueblo Reservoir and on over the state line east of Lamar.
Its counties were once a sweet spot in the basin’s agriculture economy. The river fed a bountiful chain of tomato, sugar beet and onion fields, as well as acres of luscious Rocky Ford melons, and chiles, corn and alfalfa.
Cities say these latest deals, which they call “water sharing” agreements, will bolster the agricultural economies and keep remaining water on farm fields forever. But the term “sharing” doesn’t sit well with some local farmers and water officials who have a deep distrust of the cities they blame for the region’s decline.
“I call it a charade,” said Mike Bartolo, a retired Colorado State University extension research scientist who farms in Otero County near Rocky Ford. “You dry up an acre, you’re drying up land that was formerly irrigated. That’s buy and dry.”
While the state’s highly touted Water Plan cheers for the concept of cities helping rural areas thrive after water losses, there is no mechanism or state law or bureaucracy to watchdog new sales.
After the 2003 agreement in the Lower Arkansas Valley, state and local water leaders began testing new ways for cities and farmers to temporarily share water, something that had been almost impossible under older water law.
I call it a charade. You dry up an acre, you’re drying up land that was formerly irrigated. That’s buy and dry.
But Aurora and Colorado Springs say the early experimental programs didn’t provide enough water at reasonable prices to fulfill their fast-growing community needs permanently.
Lorenz, the Colorado Springs Utilities manager, said the city does lease some water in the valley, but it hasn’t been enough to ensure the stability of its long-term water supply.
“The major concern is that we would lease from a particular farmer, and then a different city would come out and buy those water rights and the farmer wouldn’t lease to us anymore,” he said.
And in fact that is what just happened in April, when Aurora purchased the Otero County farms, which had formerly leased water to Colorado Springs.
Colorado Springs Utilities formally opposes the latest Aurora water deal, as do the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District based in Pueblo, and the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District in Rocky Ford.
But their anger has so far been expressed by passing resolutions, not filing lawsuits.
How Aurora Water and other cities have treated Arkansas River counties like Crowley after past buy-ups leaves nothing but suspicion about newly announced deals, local leaders say.
Though Aurora says it is not attempting any more permanent dry-ups of local land, “I don’t think any of us believe them,” said Heimerich, Crowley County’s representative on the Southeastern Conservancy board. Heimerich also is a member of the board of Water Education Colorado, which is a sponsor of Fresh Water News. “They’ll do whatever they need to do and apologize later.”
Thornton and Larimer and Weld counties conducted a similar debate publicly — from the 1990s to this year — as Thornton bought up 17,000 acres of northern Colorado farms and their water rights and began drying up the land. County commissioners and other local officials brought their legal weight and bully pulpits to bear in demanding extensive concessions from Thornton. The Adams County city has been reseeding dried up land with native grass and backfilling lost property taxes, but gets mixed reviews from locals.
First photo: Seasonal workers harvest cabbage near Vineland on July 6. Pueblo County farmers operate on some of most fertile land in the state and irrigate their crops from water taken from the Arkansas River. But water-rights sales have changed the way they manage their land. Second photo: Water flows in the Bessemer Ditch near Vineland on June 23. Pueblo Water acquired rights to one-third of the ditch, but has been working with local farmers to help ensure their farmland remains productive. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The latest Lower Arkansas water deals are also pitting Colorado’s big cities directly against each other in conflicts not seen for decades. When the board of Colorado Springs Utilities passed a resolution earlier this year condemning Aurora’s Otero County deal, it was a direct shot from leadership of a city of nearly 500,000 — the Colorado Springs City Council is the utility board.
“The idea is that there’s Denver, there’s a Denver metro complex and they’re going to just do whatever they want to do and the rest of the state has to go along with it,” City Councilman Brian Risley said.
But Alex Davis, a top Aurora Water official, said Colorado Springs’ ire is unwarranted.
“Aurora has worked in close partnership with Colorado Springs for decades and that will continue,” she said. “This is a case where we disagree.”
Peter Nichols, general counsel for the Lower Arkansas Water Conservancy District in La Junta, said he is deeply concerned by what cities are proposing now. “We thought we were through with all of this. We thought we had it under control,” he said of the Aurora and Colorado Springs purchases.
Nichols is among those who have spent much of the past 20 years creating a system, now known as the super ditch, that allows seven local irrigation companies to negotiate leases with cities.
Importantly, it also won the legal right to move leased water stored in Pueblo Reservoir out of the valley, via the federal Fryingpan-Arkansas Project and the Otero Pipeline, removing what had been a key barrier to leasing.
Nichols said local growers and water districts have worked hard to find ways to share water so that it doesn’t permanently leave the valley. That the cities are now jumping the line with these new deals isn’t OK with him.
Colorado Springs and the other thirsty Front Range cities want farmers like the young Caleb Wertz to be the new face of urban water agreements.
On a recent 95-degree summer afternoon, Wertz high-tailed it across Bent County driving an ambulance to take an injured neighbor to the hospital. He had planned to be on his farm, but that’s life in the Lower Arkansas Valley.
Colorado Springs is reimbursing the farmers to turn those corners into pasture land or to revegetate. … Even if it is not producing corn, it’s not just becoming wasteland.
The population is shrinking, and everyone has too many jobs to count. The local farmer is also a first responder. Your primary care provider is a farmer’s wife.
Arriving back at the farm just after 5 p.m., Wertz talks about what is perhaps the most controversial decision he has ever made: Selling a portion of his agricultural water to fuel housing growth in Colorado Springs.
The deal will pay him enough so that he can install modern irrigation systems, drying up portions of the fields, known as corners, that won’t be reached by the new, center pivot sprinklers, and allow Colorado Springs to buy the saved water.
He is also planting cotton alongside his traditional corn, and he believes he is the first in the state to do so. A new modern variety is supposed to use half the water, just one acre-foot per acre, rather than the two acre-feet of water that older types, such as those grown in Arizona, use.
For Wertz, the agreement will give him enough money to keep farming and enough new technology to make his remaining agricultural water go farther. He will become a rarity in the area: A young farmer with enough land and water to continue the business his family started in 1919 and to expand it.
“The water purchase makes it a lot more doable because we can farm those acres so much more with pivots,” Wertz said. “That’s the case even though we’re drying up the corners. … That has a bad connotation to it. But Colorado Springs is reimbursing the farmers to turn those corners into pasture land or to revegetate. … Even if it is not producing corn, it’s not just becoming wasteland.”
But to some of his neighbors in the valley, Wertz has entered a hostile no-man’s land, facilitating yet another dry-up of farm land in a region that has already lost too much water and land to urban thirst.
“I know people don’t like it and people are entitled to their opinions, but a lot of those are the older generation who don’t like seeing it because of what happened years before I was even born,” said Wertz, who is 23. “I was glad to see the Springs come in and ask questions about working with us.
“We were quite leery at first. But they have proved it to us. It is extending the water use for them and us, and allowing my brother and I to start taking over some of these acres that haven’t been farmed for awhile because there isn’t enough manpower.”
Another worry for Lower Arkansas growers is whether new methods that allow cities to take the water off the fields for one or more years and then return it at a later time, do more harm than good. They’re not sure farmland in the region is resilient enough to bounce back from cycles of city-caused drought.
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Perry Cabot, a research scientist and specialist in farming practices and farm economies, has spent years studying the issue. He says that there is hope for fallowing, after years of experiments and tests, but only with crops such as alfalfa and other grasses and sometimes corn.
“The programs we have done saw alfalfa return almost with a vengeance,” Cabot said. “Grass hay is the second-best candidate.”
Nyquist, the developer and grower who is leasing back and farming the land he recently sold to Aurora, agreed, saying fallowing programs do work, but they are not good for small growers who don’t have the cash to buy the necessary new equipment and nutrients that are needed to help fully restore the crops once water returns.
Still, Jack Goble, general manager of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District in Rocky Ford is wary of plans that take water from parts of farm fields over long periods of time.
“And I haven’t found a farmer yet that believes that that’s a viable farming situation, ” he said. “It’s tough to bring that land back.”
Anger aimed west and north from Lower Arkansas Valley towns extends to water quality issues, not just water volume.
For many decades, groundwater wells and the river have been contaminated by farm runoff, mining operations and some naturally occurring pollutants.
The same federal Fryingpan-Arkansas Project that in 1962 created Pueblo Reservoir was also supposed to solve the drinking water problem for 40 communities downriver by building the 130-mile Arkansas Valley Conduit to move clean water from Pueblo Reservoir. But it wasn’t until 2023 that final funding for the $610 million pipeline arrived.
Some downstream leaders are galled that Aurora can start taking more fresh water out of the Arkansas before serious pipeline construction has begun to serve the 50,000 people in long-suffering downstream towns.
“My whole life has been under drinking water restrictions, not being able to attain safe drinking water except to go buy it or to go through extraordinary measures to treat it,” said Dallas May, whose family ranches 15,000 acres north of Lamar. May also is on the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District board.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Water Quality Division, which tests Lower Arkansas water a few times a year, classifies most of the river below Pueblo Reservoir as not supporting drinking water or “aquatic life use.” The classification calls the Lower Arkansas suitable for “warm-water aquatic life” and recreation. The state did not respond to requests for more detailed assessments of Lower Arkansas water health.
Asked if state efforts were improving water quality on the Arkansas, a spokesperson said in an email, “Trend studies require extensive data over a significant period of time. The water quality in watersheds is influenced by a wide variety of factors, including precipitation and weather trends that can highly influence the water quality from year to year.”
Some Lower Arkansas farmers and officials are tired of waiting. They see the problem getting worse as, for instance, Aurora takes more water out of Otero County, “What happens is all of the bad things are concentrated into what is left,” May said, “and that is a huge problem.”
First photo: The Catlin Canal winds its way through southern Otero County near Rocky Ford on June 8. Aurora Water earlier this year paid $80 million for rights in the canal. Second photo: A screen bubbler helps filter water for pivot irrigation operations like this one near Rocky Ford. Farmers in the Arkansas Valley draw water from the Arkansas River via a system of canals and ditches to irrigate their crops. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
The Colorado Water Conservation Board spent years writing the statewide Water Plan, convening forums and task forces, and conducting listening sessions on the tensions between city water needs and the survival of agricultural communities. They say they are concerned about new city water buys, but add they have no authority to influence any deals because water rights are private property rights and can be bought and sold at will.
The board declined an interview request about Aurora’s water purchase or the broader water use questions.
“The Colorado Water Plan sets a vision for meeting the state’s future water needs and was broadly supported by local communities,” Russ Sands, the board’s water supply planning chief, said in email responses to questions. “But the decisions that happen in local communities regarding their water purchases and planning are largely outside of the state’s control. Accountability for staying true to the vision of the Water Plan is a collective responsibility.”
The loss of irrigated farmland isn’t expected to slow anytime soon as climate change dries up streams and population growth drives cities to buy more. The Colorado Water Plan’s forecast shows the population of the Arkansas River Basin, which includes Colorado Springs and Pueblo, surging more than 60% by 2050, increasing the pressure to tap farm water.
Sakata, the state water policy advisor, who farms near Brighton, said protecting the state’s irrigated farmland will take more work. “We can’t just say lease the water for three out of 10 years. We need to have agreements so that water sharing will be really available.”
As an onion grower, Sakata can’t do interruptible water supply agreements because he has long-standing yearly agreements with suppliers that require him to deliver vegetables. If he fallows his land for a year, the money he would likely be paid wouldn’t be enough to compensate him for the loss of onion sales and the need to support his employees during the break.
Farm research scientist Cabot would like to see the state begin buying irrigated farms, using conservation easements to protect them from development or purchase, and then leasing that land and its water to young growers.
What else state leaders can do to preserve what’s left of Colorado’s irrigated land isn’t clear yet, but Alan Ward, a Pueblo native who is also director of water resources for the Pueblo Water, said the state needs to reexamine its policies and goals.
“There is only so much water available, and I don’t think it’s realistic for the state to continue to think that we can control our urban areas and grow them fast without impacting agriculture.”
Clarifying that he was speaking as a private individual, rather than a water official, he said, “I’d rather have the farms continue and not have the urban growth, but I am probably in the minority on that.”
Water veterans such as Cabot said the state is likely doing everything it can right now to protect irrigated ag lands. But like Sakata, he says more work needs to be done to shore up farm markets and to create easier, more lucrative water sharing arrangements.
“I don’t want to oversimplify this,” Cabot said, “but the simplest way for cities to get this water is to go to farmers and say ‘How much did you make last year?’ and then offer them 10% more. … These are not just fields. They are farm enterprises.”
Kate Greenberg, Colorado’s agriculture commissioner, is overseeing multimillion-dollar efforts to protect farm lands by improving soil health, solving market challenges and making farm water use more efficient. She says the people of Colorado are on board with her agency’s efforts.
“We did a study last year that showed over 98% of Coloradans believe agriculture is an integral part of our state. If we’re taking water out of agriculture, where are we putting it to beneficial use?
“Are we conserving it to grow urban developments and do we want to see that over preserving agriculture and biodiversity. We need to answer that question as a state.”
Bartolo, the retired CSU researcher, hopes the answer comes soon, before any more of the valley water is siphoned off for urban use.
As news of the deals spreads, Bartolo’s sense of deja vu is growing and his fears for the future of the valley’s irrigated ag lands is growing too. No one knows yet what will happen when Aurora’s contract to use the Fryingpan-Ark to deliver water expires in 2047.
“Having lived through it in my lifetime, I have seen the drastic changes,” Bartolo said.
What worries him, and other growers too, is “what happens if they come back after 2047? What happens then?”
]]>Residents around Aurora Reservoir who are fighting a large-scale oil and gas drilling operation are trying to use an untested maneuver — seeking to be declared “affected persons” — to get their voices heard by state regulators.
The affected-person designation is mainly for people living within 2,000 feet of a drilling operation or those demonstrating a unique impact from the oil and gas development.
But members of the grassroots group Save the Aurora Reservoir, or STAR, in their petition to the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission argued that the health, wildlife and traffic impacts extend beyond 2,000 feet. STAR has 330 members.
The ECMC is scheduled to hold a day-long hearing Tuesday and rule on Crestone Peak Resources’ proposed Lowry Ranch Comprehensive Area Plan, which would drill up to 166 wells from nine pads on 32,000 acres straddling Arapahoe County and the city of Aurora.
The comprehensive area development plans, or CAPs, were added to the commission’s revised rules as a mechanism to better assess, coordinate and manage the cumulative impacts of drilling.
In 2022, the ECMC, formerly the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, approved a Crestone Peak CAP for 151 wells on 20 pads in a 55-square-mile area in Aurora.
The commission at the start of the Crestone hearing will decide whether STAR’s petition meets Rule 507, the state regulation defining affected persons.
Public commenters before the commission are limited to three minutes. If STAR’s petition is successful the group could get three hours to make a presentation, cross-examine Crestone witnesses and offer a rebuttal closing argument.
Crestone, a subsidiary of Denver-based Civitas Resources, one of the state’s largest oil and gas producers, is opposing STAR’s petition. “STAR failed to comply with the requirement of Rule 507 and has provided zero legal position for its request as an association with standing,” the company said in a filing.
Mike Foote, STAR’s attorney, said that commission has more broadly drawn the circle for affected persons, noting that the commission said a hunter or a birder concerned about preserving deer or birds in an area slated for drilling could have standing.
“A mountain biker may have a unique interest in avoiding surface disturbance in an area of public lands where she frequently bikes,” the commission said in the statement of purpose for its rules.
The 12 STAR families, petitioning the ECMC, bike, jog, and walk their dogs around the reservoir and through parts of the CAP. Some swim and boat on the reservoir and others work or have children going to school within the drilling area.
The home of Jason and Shannon Randels, according to the petition, is 3,500 feet from one of the proposed drill sites.
“The Randels chose their lot on South White Crow Way specifically for its proximity to the reservoir, the wildlife, the views, and the peacefulness of the surrounding area,” the petition said. “They were not aware of looming oil and gas development at that time.”
The battle lines between STAR and Crestone are between the operator’s efforts to show it has reached out to the community and to limit the impacts of its drilling plan and the grassroots group’s stance that under any circumstances there will be widespread impacts on hundreds of homes.
In its prehearing statement, Crestone noted that after consultations it has removed two sites and trimmed 1,440 acres from the plan. After the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency voiced concerns, the company agreed not to drill beneath the Lowry Landfill Superfund site.
It has also increased the setbacks for five pads, in one case adding 2,356 feet to the buffer, bringing it to nearly 4,500 feet.
Crestone already operates 17 horizontal oil and gas wells from six drilling pads in the CAP and two of the nine drilling pads it proposes to use already exist. The drilling would begin in this year and last until 2028. Production from the wells could last 25 years.
The company has also committed to a series of so-called best management practices to reduce the impacts. These include: continuous air monitoring, the use of pipelines to transport oil and gas from the sites (cutting down on truck traffic), and using cleaner burning engines.
Crestone said in a filing it is also working to electrify its drilling and production activities but cautioned that “electrical connections are dependent on Xcel Energy’s capacity, load and timing.”
“Crestone anticipates electrification during the production phase with a high degree of certainty, lower certainty for drilling phase,” the company said.
“We’re known as an early adopter of new technologies and innovative practice,” Richard Coolidge, a Civitas spokesman said in an email. “ We’re always exploring opportunities to recycle and reuse produced water and remain committed to finding solutions that will work for the unique challenges in our state’s geology.”
Coolidge said the Civitas will also have to meet the regulations adopted by Arapahoe County last November, which include a 3,000 setback from existing or planned reservoirs and a 3,000-foot buffer from homes and buildings, platted lots and water bodies.
The regulations also require air and water testing and groundwater and surface water quality plans.
In a cumulative impacts analysis submitted to the ECMC, Crestone’s consultant concluded that “the maximum annual emissions during production operations for each facility identified in the CAP are not expected to exceed the current major stationary source thresholds” for pollutants under state and federal regulations.
The ECMC director Julie Murphy has recommended the commission approve the CAP.
STAR in its planned presentation and filings disputes many of Crestone’s claims. It notes that the impact of truck traffic was never adequately assessed and that while pipelines would be used for products, produced water, which comes up from a well with the oil and gas, would be trucked away.
For 155 wells each producing 20 million gallons of produced water, that added up to 310,000 truck trips through the CAP, STAR said.
And while air emissions may not exceed regulatory thresholds, in 2025 the operations would put about 1,800 tons of ozone-causing pollutants into the air plus 54,000 tons of carbon dioxide, the prime greenhouse gas, according to Crestone’s consultant.
“It is widely understood that living near oil and gas development can cause negative health outcomes,” the STAR petition said. “Increases in ozone precursor chemical emissions can also lead to higher ground-level ozone levels.”
STAR also raised questions about the quality of Civitas operations saying that in the first quarter of 2024 the company paid $332,500 in enforcement action penalties to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and has 10 open enforcement cases.
While Crestone agreed not to drill under the Lowry Landfill, STAR said the drilling plan could put horizontal wells under people’s homes. “The densely populated neighborhoods of Aurora and Aurora Reservoir deserve at least as much protection as a Superfund landfill,” the STAR presentation said.
]]>The federal government has planned since 2022 to spend $450 million on water projects in four Western states, including Colorado. Last week, water officials finally learned which projects are eligible — and they’re planning to dream big.
The funding is part of the federal government’s plan to address the impacts of drought in the overstretched Colorado River Basin. It will, in part, be used for projects that restore habitats and ecosystems or offer other environmental benefits, according to an announcement from the Bureau of Reclamation July 22. A second application period, which opens later this year, will focus on long-term water conservation efforts using the same bucket of funds.
The door seems to be wide open for larger-scale projects — with more flexibility and fewer hurdles for applicants, several groups said.
“Normally we’ll see somewhere in the ballpark of $20 million to $30 million annually for ecosystem restoration work through WaterSMART for the Upper Colorado River Basin,” said Alex Funk, director of water resources and senior counsel at Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “Never have we seen $450 million come online all in one (request for proposals).”
The influx of money is headed for Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah, the four states in the Colorado River’s upper basin. The river basin spans seven Western states, the lands of 30 tribal nations and two Mexican states. There, the future water supply for 40 million people has been compromised by two decades of drought, a changing climate and overuse.
The funds come with a few strings attached. Only public entities, like governments and tribal nations, can apply. They can partner with other groups, like environmental advocacy nonprofits or nongovernmental organizations, which cannot apply independently.
The criteria seem suited to make big ideas happen, several water experts said. The funding minimum is $300,000. Many other grants max out at $300,000, which means projects are smaller in scope. Organizations will have five years to spend the money.
With applications due in mid-October, many organizations are in the early stages of deciding which projects to prioritize. Funding announcements are expected in spring 2025.
The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe is looking at opportunities to improve operations at its farming enterprise and water infrastructure, spokesperson Peter Ortego said.
The Southwestern Water Conservation District is already planning meetings with local partners to identify multipurpose projects that could receive funding. That could mean boosting a river’s flows or improving conditions for sensitive fish species.
In order to meet the funding minimum, a conservation group might choose to align its relatively inexpensive stream restoration project with a more expensive project to upgrade a concrete diversion gate for farmers and ranchers, for example. A recent project that helped fish and ranchers near Maybell is a good example of this type of work, Funk said.
“You might see some interesting bedfellows, like ag groups and conservation groups blending their projects together,” he said. “I think that could be really interesting in terms of long-term relationship development.”
Typically, a watershed is broken into smaller projects to fit requirements for smaller grants, which can lead to disjointed work, Funk said. The new funding could allow it to tackle a whole river segment at once or do work in both headwaters and valleys.
In the Gunnison Basin, the funding could be used to build artificial beaver dams, which slow the speed of water, attract beavers and restore wetland ecosystems higher in a watershed. That work could be paired with downstream projects, like improvements for irrigation infrastructure, Funk said.
Or, organizations could focus on the Animas River in southwestern Colorado, which turned yellow in 2015 when an upstream mine released toxic wastewater into the river.
The funds are also easier to access. Many grant programs require applicants to come up with matching funds, which can be difficult for rural communities, small organizations and tribal nations. These funds do not have a match requirement.
“Match funding can be hard to secure,” said Aaron Derwingson, Colorado River Program water projects director for The Nature Conservancy. “With the urgency a lot of us are feeling in the basin with the water situation and the scale of the work that needs to be done, it’s really encouraging to see this great downpayment of funds.”
]]>After four years of experimentation, a group of researchers in Texas have successfully used a type of virus — used to combat bacterial infections in medicine — to kill bacteria in wastewater from fracking.
This wastewater, which can come with radioactive, cancer-causing materials, and yes, bacteria, often gets shoved back underground for storage. But increasingly, Colorado and other states are looking at ways to clean the wastewater enough that it can be used in other mining operations instead of fresh water. It’s an intriguing idea in Colorado, where fresh water supplies have been strained by a two-decade megadrought.
Could viruses really help? The potential is there — but so are big questions about practicality, researchers say.
“It’s outside-the-box science. We knew that,” said Zacariah Hildenbrand, part of the six-person University of Texas research team that published a study on the viruses in April. “But I mean, necessity is the mother of all innovation here, and we need to find some novel technologies.”
Wastewater, called produced water, is the major waste stream generated by oil and gas production, according to the group’s research published in the peer-reviewed journal Water. The research was funded by Biota Solutions, a Texas-based research company founded to develop viruses to kill bacteria in produced water.
Oil and natural gas can be thousands of feet below the ground’s surface, where it mixes with brackish water. At that depth, the water can include naturally occurring carcinogenic compounds and radioactive materials. It’s so salty that, if used for irrigation, it could kill plants.
During the fracking process, companies pump a mixture of fresh water, sand and chemicals underground where it mixes with oil, gas and the brackish water. It returns to the surface and is separated from the oil and gas. The result is produced water, which can not be used for drinking or irrigation, per state regulations.
In Colorado, water used for fracking averaged about 26,000 acre-feet per year from 2011 to 2020, or about 0.17% of the water used in the state, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water used by two to three households.
The highest volumes of water used for hydraulic fracturing are used within the counties along the Front Range in Denver-Julesburg Basin.
“In an arid state like Colorado, where we’re worried about how much water is getting down the Colorado River, that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. And it should,” said Joseph Ryan, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Colorado.
The complex cocktail of produced water also comes with another ingredient: bacteria.
Some of the bacteria can corrode pipes while others sour the gas, which makes it stinkier and requires more processing. Both can cost oil and gas companies money, Hildebrand said.
Historically, companies have treated these bacteria with disinfectants, like chlorine and hydrogen peroxide. But over time, the bacteria can become more resistant. To protect themselves, they change their membrane structure to become less permeable — like putting on a raincoat in a storm, he said.
Some companies end up using twice as many chemicals to kill the same amount of bacteria, which is more costly and less environmentally sustainable, he said.
So the researchers set out to test another technology: The bacteriophage.
Bacteriophages are viruses that infect specific bacteria. They’re like the spiders in the “Starship Troopers” movie, Hildebrand said. Once the phage finds its host bacteria, it hooks into the surface of the cell, injects its DNA into the center of the bacteria, and hijacks the bacteria’s replication mechanisms.
Then it reproduces until the bacteria explodes.
The process allows the virus to multiply exponentially and infect more cells. But Hildebrand stressed the virus targets only its specific host bacteria, not any other type of cell.
Bacteriophages have been used for decades in medicine to treat issues like skin infections, indigestion and food poisoning caused by E. coli.
“Under the microscope, at the atomic scale, it’s scary. It’s an all-out civil war between bacteria and viruses,” he said. “But from the human perspective, it’s totally innocuous.”
The researchers’ study showed that bacteriophages successfully deactivated two strains of bacteria found in produced water — but there are some key hurdles that would need to be addressed for the technique to be used by oil and gas operators.
Produced water could include tens of thousands of bacterial strains, which means researchers would need far more strains of viruses to disinfect the produced water. And right now, there aren’t enough commercially available bacteriophage strains to make it happen, Hildebrand said.
“The goal is, we just learn enough from all of the basins that ultimately I build a 200-phage cocktail that’s kind of a kill-all, if you will. It’s a belt-and-suspenders approach,” he said. “Once I build it initially, it will renew itself in the environment.”
After the up-front costs, the bacteriophage technique would cost less than a penny per barrel because the virus renews itself, Hildebrand said based on his economic estimates.
Ryan of CU Boulder has doubts, big ones.
When it comes to reusing produced water, corroding pipes are a small problem compared to the radioactivity, salinity and carcinogenic compounds, he said.
There are so many microorganisms in the water that it would be difficult to affordably find enough bacteriophages to completely disinfect it. There’s no way fixing the minor problems caused by bacteria would be worth the effort and cost, he said.
“It’s a questionable solution to a problem that just doesn’t seem at the top of the list of importance if you’re trying to do something with produced water,” Ryan said.
Hildebrand acknowledged that disinfection alone is not enough to clean produced water to a reusable level, but it would help, especially if the bacteria have become resistant to other disinfection methods.
Ryan is one of 31 people on the Colorado Produced Water Consortium, which includes industry, state, federal and environmental representatives. (He emphasized he was not speaking for the group.)
In 2023, the Colorado legislature created the consortium to study how to reuse and recycle wastewater from fracking. The group is set to publish its fourth study on produced water Aug. 1 — one of nine that will be presented to legislators and state agencies.
Hope Dalton, the consortium’s director, declined to comment on the fresh-out-of-the-lab research.
“Generally speaking, bench-level research is innovative and new and hasn’t been tested,” she said. “Then you go out to industry and use it on the larger, pilot scale. Once it’s proven at the larger, pilot scale, then it can be implemented as practice.”
That’s the next step for the Texas researchers, Hildebrand said.
“Yes, it’s very early stages, but considering how effectively it works … how robust the phages are and how cheap they are to produce, I think it provides a really unique solution moving forward,” he said.
]]>Four states in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, including Colorado, want credit for conserving water, but water users and officials have big questions about how to make it happen.
Last year, taxpayers paid farmers and ranchers $16 million to cut their water use in the Colorado River Basin, but the water saved on one farm simply reentered streams, where it could be used by anyone downstream. For years, officials in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have been considering ways to get credit for that conserved water — to track it, store it in a reservoir, and save it to help the states in the future. Representatives from the four states voted in June to develop a proposal exploring the idea by mid-August.
But building a long-term program to track and store conserved water raises questions about equity, funding, economic impacts and whether the idea is feasible at all.
People are concerned about the bigger picture, said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District in Colorado.
“If we’re going to conserve water up here, and if the federal government is going to pay for that conservation with taxpayer dollars, it seems to us that storing it and using it for important public purposes makes sense, rather than sending it downstream to just encourage continued consumption of water (by downstream states),” Mueller said.
This Fresh Water News story is a collaboration between The Colorado Sun and Water Education Colorado. It also appears at wateredco.org/fresh-water-news.
Cutting back on water use is a big topic of conversation in the Colorado River Basin, which supplies water to 40 million people and is enduring warmer temperatures and a two-decade megadrought.
Officials from each of the seven states in the basin are weighing who might have to cut their use and how to manage the basin’s reservoirs in high-stakes negotiations over the river’s future after the current rules expire in 2026.
The Upper Basin released a proposal in March that outlined its plan to manage the river after 2026 as part of these negotiations. That proposal includes a commitment to pursue voluntary, temporary and compensated conservation programs.
The June vote of the Upper Colorado River Commission aimed to take that commitment one step forward. The state and federal representatives on the commission want to design a conservation-for-credit program in advance so it’s set up and ready to go if needed.
The commission’s plan could help inform the states’ negotiations, said Amy Ostdiek, who is part of Colorado’s negotiating team and works on interstate water issues for the state’s top water policy agency, the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
“We’ve heard this from water users a lot. … If we’re going to continue doing conservation-type activities, can we explore ways to quote-unquote get credit for it?” Ostdiek said. “It’s worth exploring. … There’s a lot we’d need to work out before we get there.”
Officials and water users have been kicking around the idea of tracking and storing conserved water for credit for years, and the commission’s August proposal will be the latest iteration of those discussions.
One heavily debated program, called demand management, offered a path toward storing conserved water in a reservoir to help Upper Basin states. But Colorado hit pause on analyzing the idea in 2022 as other Upper Basin states slogged through intense feasibility studies.
Taxpayers paid $16 million in 2023 to conserve water through another program, the system conservation pilot program. Because the program does not track conserved water, there is no certainty where it ends up.
“It inherently just flows downstream and continues to be used by the Lower Basin,” Mueller said. “It really doesn’t do anything other than feed the continued use of the water, rather than encourage conservation of the water.”
The commission’s proposal will try to answer key questions for a program that tracks and stores conserved water, said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission. But how will water managers track the actual water down streams, through reservoirs and across state lines? What is a “conservation credit” and how can it be earned? What role would location play?
Mueller of the Colorado River District said the location of the projects ties into big potential equity issues.
Most of Colorado’s participants in the system conservation pilot program so far have been farmers and ranchers on the Western Slope, he said. They helped conserve water by fallowing fields and switching to crops that used less water. But if a farmer stops production, or fallows, acres of land to conserve water, it can cut jobs on the farm and spending in the community.
A paid conservation program has to be designed to incentivize participation from all regions of Colorado where Colorado River is used, which includes Front Range cities from Fort Collins down to Colorado Springs and beyond, Mueller said.
Joe Bernal, a rancher in Loma who is participating in the system conservation pilot program, said his concern was how a conservation-for-credit program would be administered.
“Would they work with ditch companies, or would they go with individuals? How much would they offer?” he said. “Would they … help ditch companies and communities protect the viability of agriculture?”
Other water users want to know which reservoirs would store conserved water for credit.
Storing conserved water closer to a river’s source — in high-elevation Upper Basin reservoirs rather than farther downstream — would give the four states more say in when, how much and from where water is released.
Plus, local water users want to conserve water in good years and save it in a nearby reservoir to provide a cushion during the next dry year, said Ken Curtis, general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District.
Farmers and ranchers in his district are already doing just that: This year, they volunteered to be paid to save water through the system conservation program, and they’re storing it in the nearby McPhee Reservoir to boost carryover water supplies for next year, Curtis said.
The commission’s proposal also aims to define the requirements conservation projects would have to meet to qualify and how years of past water use would come into play.
How to factor in past water use is important to two tribes in Colorado, the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute Indian tribes, said Peter Ortego, general counsel for the Ute Mountain Ute Indian Tribe.
Both tribes have water in a southwestern reservoir that they plan to put to use in the future, but haven’t used yet. Their water does not qualify for use in current paid conservation programs, which raises the question of whether it could qualify for a newer, reimagined conservation-for-credit program, Ortego said.
As officials try to tackle big questions, one thing is clear: Upper Basin water watchers do not want to conserve water if it will just flow downstream to support current use in the Lower Basin.
Congress is currently considering a bill to extend the system conservation pilot program, which does not track where conserved water goes. Meanwhile, officials are dusting off years of analyses about the demand management program, which expires in 2026.
The demand management program created an “account” for up to 500,000 acre-feet of conserved water in Lake Powell. One acre-feet roughly equals the annual use of two to three households.
It’s been frustrating to know the demand management account exists in Lake Powell and to see water being conserved through the system conservation pilot program, or SCPP, that just flows through the reservoir, said James Eklund, a former Colorado water official who helped forge the program and owns a ranch in the pilot program.
“All it needed was to be tagged as DM (demand management) water instead of SCPP water — and it would be water we’d have in our account as Upper Basin states. And we’d be able to point to that water in negotiations,” Eklund said.
But that program is very prescriptive, Ostdiek said.
The account could be used for one purpose: fulfilling the Upper Basin’s interstate water sharing obligations outlined in the 1922 Colorado River Compact, even if river conditions worsen drastically and trigger mandatory cuts in the Upper Basin. The shorthand for this worst-case scenario is a “compact call” or “compact compliance.”
The commission’s upcoming proposal could explore more general uses for credits, including or beyond compact compliance, Ostdiek said.
“I think we need to do some more exploring on what the concept of credit actually means to individual states,” she said, “and think about what the goals would be of that type of approach.”
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