It’s not clear to me whether the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study is a tool for developing solutions to the long term supply-demand imbalance on the river, or a process for the states and other interests to stake out their turf. Probably some of both.

Witness, for example, the comments in a story I recently did framing the study from a New Mexico perspective:

By 2035, according to new data released last month, annual demand for the basin’s water could exceed supply by 13 percent under the most likely scenario as use continues to grow while climate change reduces flows in the river. Such an imbalance is unsustainable, emptying the reservoirs on which the region depends, said University of Colorado professor Doug Kenney.

“That’s enough to crash the system,” Kenney said.

The risk for New Mexico, which is not yet using its full share, is that others may covet our underused allocation as supply-demand tension grows, said Estevan López, head of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission and acting state engineer.

“We should be working with the other states to try and make sure that the other states aren’t looking at water that New Mexico is entitled to,” López said in an interview this month.

Note that staking out turf and developing collaborative solutions are not mutually exclusive.

Power for the coming centuries!

In Colossus, Michael Hiltzik talks about the way Hoover Dam, during its construction, became a tourist spectacle.

When Lissa and I were in Boulder City last week, I found this in the museum-y hallway at the Boulder Dam Brewing Company (which has a lovely collection of similar memorabilia), a poster hawking tours:

THE MAKING OF AMERICA! Power for the coming centuries! Blocking the age-long escape of floods to the sea! The massive Hoover Dam will create the largest artificial lake in the World. Never again will humanity view the open gorge of the Black Canyon, nor the river basin above it. See it now. Have your children see it.

Not being up in Colorado, I don’t have a good feel for how seriously to take Aaron Million’s Flaming Gorge pipeline proposal. My hallway conversations at CRWUA left me with the feeling that not a lot of people in the basin take it very seriously, but I don’t know water issues in the state of Colorado well enough to know if I was talking to the right people.

Bruce Finley’s latest Denver Post story on the project gave me pause:

The pipeline to move up to 200,000 acre-feet of water a year could sustain water-intensive hydraulic-fracturing operations in Wyoming and Colorado, Million said.

“We’ve heard rough figures of 15,000 to 20,000 acre-feet annually for fracking needs,” Million said. “If this new water supply helps with the fracking issues, then, without question, we would consider delivering water for the industry.”

Here’s the puzzle. During the tangled federal approval process last year (at the time, the project was before the US Army Corps of Engineers), Million delivered a list of potential users that was mostly front range municipal water users, with some ag thrown in. (pdf here) Now that fracking is hot, Million’s talking fracking and energy with the Denver Post. Does this kind of changeability mean this is a flakey project I should ignore? Or, conversely, does this mean that water demand from multiple sources on the front range is such that I should take it even more seriously?

Some more odds and ends from last week’s Colorado River Water Users Association meeting

Water in the Desert, Caeser's Palace pools

Yuma Desalting Plant

The trial run of the Yuma Desalting Plant “went well,” according to Terry Fulp, head of the USBR Lower Colorado office. YPD was built in the early 1990s to clean up icky agricultural drain water to meet US delivery obligations to Mexico, but it’s never really been used until a trial run in 2010-11 intended to see what it might take to put it to use. According to Chuck Cullom of the Central Arizona Project, one of the YPD trial run’s funders, the operational costs worked out to about $300 per acre foot of water for the 30,000 acre feet produced during the trial run. That makes it relatively expensive water. Fulp said one of the things they learned is that major infrastructure upgrades would be needed to move beyond the trial phase into routine operation.

Brock Reservoir

The Brock Reservoir, formerly known as “Drop 2”, “saved” 110,000 acre feet of water in the 2011 water year. Brock’s purpose is to capture water released from Lake Mead but then not needed by Imperial Valley farmers because it rains. Such water was “wasted” because it would flow on to land formerly known as the Colorado River Delta unused by humans, though it’s worth noting that one person’s “waste” is another person’s “environmental flows”.

Environmental Flows

Worth noting – the discussions about YDP and Brock both expose the significant unresolved conflict between water development and the growing recognition that environmental flows need to be part of the discussion as we divide up the increasingly stressed Colorado.

Water for Mexico

50,000 acre feet of Mexican water is currently being stored at Lake Mead as part of an agreement that for the first time allows the Mexicans to take advantage of storage behind U.S. dams. This is being done after the April 2010 Mexicali earthquake damaged irrigation canals there. It seems like a very important first step toward some broader cross-border water management.

Still moving last year’s water

The Bureau of Reclamation continues to run Glen Canyon Dam’s power full bore to move last year’s bounty downstream. There was so much inflow that the dam’s power plants have been running all out for months.

Navajo-Gallup

We should see a request for bids soon (by the end of this month) on construction of Reach 12A of the Navajo-Gallup water supply project, which will ultimately connect the eastern Navajo Nation to San Juan River water. This is the first length of pipe on the project, and would in the near term carry groundwater. The US Bureau of Reclamation was really pushing this project at the meeting. “We’re bringing drinking water to people who are still hauling it to their homes,” Anne Castle, Interior’s Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, said during one of the meetings. But it’s also clear that finding money for the full project in the long term will be a challenge.

Protect the Flows

Molly Mugglestone of Protect the Flows gave an interesting presentation on the relatively new organization’s work. It’s a growing coalition of businesses that depend on water in the river – fishing guides, rafters, tourism-based businesses of various types. It’s the business-economic case for instream flows.

Las Vegas

Did I mention that Las Vegas (NV) is a very strange place? But well lit.

For better or worse, my decision to not pay the $15 a day for an internet connection at Caeser’s Palace has left me with a bow wave of things to write about after a week spent in an around the Colorado River Water Users Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, NV.

Boulder Harbor, 2011

Let’s start with Lake Mead itself, which hovers over Las Vegas like a reminder of trouble to come. But hey, the reservoir’s up this year, what’s not to like? Lissa and I drove the scenic road past the marinas on Mead’s western shore, the Las Vegas playground that was not so playground-y when I was there a year ago. At Boulder Harbor this year, I found a couple of guys fishing off the boat landing that a year ago was mired in mud. The striped bass were biting, and they looked big and tasty.

Boulder Harbor, 2010

Thanks to an epic snowpack, the reservoir is up more than 40 feet from where it was when I visited in October 2010 trying to document its drop to historic low levels. There were places where the shoreline was unrecognizable. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, a close look at the data offers a reminder of the underlying problem. The Law of the River seems to ensure that the Lower Basin states are guaranteed 8.23 million acre feet a year of water released from Glen Canyon Dam. In the water year just completed, the US Bureau of Reclamation released 12.5 maf – 4.3 million acre feet of “bonus water” above and beyond what one might consider the system’s reliable yield. But Mead ended the water year up just 2.9 million acre feet. Some of the 2010-11 bonus water has already been used.

Consider the long term elevation of Lake Mead.

Lake Mead Elevation

The big long decline you see in the reservoir’s surface elevation, beginning in 2000, coincides with a period during with the full Law of the River release from Lake Mead, 8.23 maf, happened every single year. All it takes is three or four years of such minimally required releases – either because of drought in the Upper Basin, or because the Upper Basin states’ increasing consumption of water they’re legally entitled to but are not currently putting to use, to wipe out this year’s bounty.

In a sense, the Lower Basin’s drought is a situation of its own making.

Another example that the old New West development model isn’t working:

Next spring, water bills will rise to help pay the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s mounting debt used to fund some $3.3 billion in pumps, pipes and intakes installed over the past several years.

The fee, which comes on top of other recent increases, is needed because the old way of paying off water utility debt — connection fees paid by developers — has dried up in the recession. Consider that in fiscal year 2005-06, the Water Authority collected about $188 million in connection fees. This year, connection fees will total $11 million.

A graphical representation of what’s going on:

New home starts, monthly, Las Vegas MSA

Solving the Colorado River’s supply-demand imbalance is easy. There are lots of ways to do it.

• stop farming the Imperial Valley
• get rid of all those Phoenix lawns
• get rid of Phoenix!
• give all the water to the Indians (they were here first, after all) and let them parcel it out
• Solar powered desal!

OK, it’s a silly list. But the point is that in mathematical terms, there are a lot of different ways of balancing the books. All involve sacrifice and, as OtPR likes to point out in a similar discussion to our west, “This debate, over where the next century’s water should be allocated has genuine winners and losers.” But given that the water is finite and demand is outstripping supply, we will end up with some combination of the diverse list of options for closing the supply demand gap now being discussed in the Bureau of Reclamation’s Basin Study. There’s only so much water. To borrow Stein’s law, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

The real question for me is what the process of stopping will look like. As a journalist, I’m all about process. One clear path forward is litigation, but I get a clear sense from my conversations with Basin water types that no one wants to go that route because of the enormous downside risk. So the alternative is some sort of process aimed at determining, insofar as the current allocation rules are insufficient, who gets how much of the shrinking pie.

That’s why the new Carpe Diem West Governing Like a River Basin report was so interesting to me, and I hope everyone interested in Colorado River Basin issues reads it. It sketches out a number of different models by which other transboundary water issues are handled, from modest and loose to prescriptive and binding:

• Voluntary networks and linked dialogues
• Regional goal-setting collaborative entities
• Advisory groups with appointed stakeholder representatives
• Regional governance authorities

For each type, the report offers a case study of how it’s been used in North America. They’re worth a read. Some good ideas therein. It’s clear that something along the lines of what’s being discussed is needed.

But what remains, and is unanswered in the report, is the meta-process question. By what process involving the existing institutions we’ve got will some sort of solutions-oriented new process arise?

Dunno. Maybe we’ll end up in court. Or we could just abandon Phoenix. (I kid, and I have apparently written this post before.)