A complex system of pipes, tunnels and canals carries water around the Western U.S., like this one in Colorado’s Fraser Valley. However, policy experts say a cross-country pipeline wouldn’t make sense for political, financial and engineering reasons. (Ted Wood / The Water Desk)
The Colorado River is a lifeline for about 40 million people across the Southwest. It supplies major cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Denver and a multibillion-dollar agriculture industry that puts food on tables across the nation. But it doesn’t have enough water to meet current demands.
Policymakers are struggling to rein in demand on the river, which has been shrinking at the hands of climate change. The region needs to fix that gap between supply and demand, and there’s no obvious way to do it quickly.
But one tantalizingly simple solution keeps coming up. The West doesn’t have enough water, but the East has it in abundance. So, why don’t we just fix the Colorado River crisis by piping in water from the East?
The answer is complicated, but experts say it boils down to this: It doesn’t make sense to build a giant East-to-West water pipeline anytime soon for three reasons — politics, engineering, and money.
Political headwinds
If the West’s leaders wanted to take some water from the East, who would they even ask? Right now, there’s no national water agency that could oversee that kind of deal.
“I would argue that there aren’t many entities with the authority across the country to do this,” said Beaux Jones, president and CEO of The Water Institute in New Orleans. “I don’t know that the regulatory framework currently exists.”
Delegates from states that use the Colorado River meet in Las Vegas on December 15, 2022. Western water is managed through a fragile web of agreements between cities, states, farm districts, Native tribes and the federal government. A similarly complex system applies to many watersheds in the East. (Alex Hager / KUNC)
Water is often managed using a messy patchwork of different government agencies and laws. The Colorado River is managed through a fragile web of agreements between cities, states, farm districts, native tribes and the federal government. Even though they’re all pulling from the same water supply, there’s no central Colorado River government agency.
A similarly complex system applies to many watersheds in the East. Even if a single city or state in the Western U.S. seriously wanted to build a pipeline from the East, it’s not even clear who they’d meet with to ask for water from a different area. And there’s no single federal agency that could sign off on such a deal and make sure it doesn’t harm people or the environment.
Any serious effort to pull new water in from the East to the Southwest would likely touch some part of the Mississippi River basin. It’s a sprawling network of smaller rivers that covers 31 different states, from Montana to Pennsylvania.
It’s a busy river with a lot of uses. And while its shortages aren’t as severe as dry times in the West, the Mississippi River basin goes through its own droughts. So even if, someday, the governments of the East and West set up a formal way to negotiate a water transfer, the cities, farms, boaters and wildlife advocates to the east might not be willing to share.
“The very nature of there being sufficient availability of water in the Mississippi River Basin to, in a large scale way, export that water,” Jones said. “I think there are many people on the ground within the Mississippi River basin that would fundamentally disagree with that.”
Engineering limits
There are countless examples of large pipelines and canals moving liquids around the U.S. at this very moment. The longest existing today is the Colonial Pipeline, which carries gasoline from Houston to northern New Jersey through 5,500 miles of pipe.
So if we have the engineering capacity to do that, could we build similar infrastructure for water? In theory, yes. But it would have to be much larger than existing pipes for oil and gas.
“It takes so much more water to supply a city than it takes gasoline,” said John Fleck, a water policy professor at the University of New Mexico. “So the size of the pipe or the canal has to be a lot bigger, has to be much wider, has to cover a lot more ground.”
Because that pipeline or canal would be so big, it is more likely to ruffle some feathers along the way. Fleck suggested that landowners in its path, including local governments, could push back on a giant new piece of infrastructure running through their properties and mire any pipeline project in regulatory red tape.
Phoenix, Los Angeles, Denver and Salt Lake City wouldn’t look like they do today without giant water-moving systems, like this pipe that is part of the Central Arizona Project. Experts say all of the feasible water pipelines have already been built, and a system to carry water in from the East is too difficult to be worth building. (Courtesy Central Arizona Project)
All that said, a pipeline is still physically possible. There is perhaps no better argument for an East-West water transfer than the fact that the Western U.S. is already crisscrossed by multiple huge pipes and canals that carry water across long distances.
The West as we know it today wouldn’t exist without that kind of infrastructure. Much of Colorado’s population only has water due to a series of underground tunnels that bring water across the Rocky Mountains. Phoenix and Tucson have been able to welcome new residents in the middle of the desert with the help of a 336-mile canal that carries water from the Colorado River. Los Angeles, Albuquerque and Salt Lake City would not be the cities they are today without similarly ambitious water delivery systems built decades ago.
The existence of those water-moving projects isn’t proof that we should build a new, even bigger water pipeline from the East, Fleck said. In fact, he pointed to those systems as proof that we shouldn’t.
“All the feasible ones have largely been done, and the ones that are left are the ones that weren’t done because they just turned out not to be feasible,” he said.
Money problems
Even in a world where the West’s leaders could find a willing water seller, get the right permits and put shovels in dirt, experts say an East-to-West water pipeline would simply be too expensive.
Any solution to the Colorado River crisis will require massive amounts of public spending. The federal government alone has thrown billions of dollars at the problem in just the past few years. But water economists and other policy experts say a cross-country pipeline isn’t the most efficient use of taxpayer dollars.
Kathleen Ferris, former director of the Arizona Department of Water resources, pointed to two ongoing efforts that might be a more cost-effective way to help correct the region’s supply-demand imbalance. One involves paying farmers to pause growing on their fields, freeing up water to bolster the region’s beleaguered reservoirs. Another uses expensive, high-tech filtration systems to turn wastewater directly back into drinking water.
Stacks of hay bales sit beside an irrigation canal in California’s Imperial Valley on June 20, 2023. Experts say there are more cost-effective ways to fix the Colorado River crisis than building a cross-country canal, like paying farmers to pause growing thirsty crops such as alfalfa. (Alex Hager / KUNC)
“Sometimes I feel like people don’t want to do the heavy lifting,” said Ferris, who is now a water policy researcher at Arizona State University. “Instead, they want to just find the next water supply and be done with it and have somebody else pay for it.”
Ultimately, she said, those kinds of programs already have momentum and cost less money than an East-to-West water pipeline.
“Why don’t we do the things that we know are possible and that are within our jurisdiction first,” Ferris said, “Before we go looking for some kind of a grand proposal that we don’t have any reason to believe at the moment could succeed.”
Pipe dreams becoming reality
Piping in water from outside of the Colorado River basin, for all of its challenges, is a tempting enough idea that the federal government has given it a serious look.
In 2012, a Bureau of Reclamation report analyzed ways to bring new water into the Colorado River Basin, including importing piped water from adjacent states.
The study concluded that strategy was not worth the money and effort.
This map from the Bureau of Reclamation’s 2012 “Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study” shows places where water could theoretically be imported. One of the report’s authors said now “isn’t the time” to pipe water in from the East. (Courtesy U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)
“It just isn’t the time yet,” said Terry Fulp, a retired Reclamation official who helped write the study. “We felt that there were other things we could be doing in the basin, particularly in the Lower Basin, that would relieve the pressure.”
Fulp said the study was a worthwhile endeavor, and that the idea of importing water from the East might make sense down the road. The scale of the challenge posed by the Colorado River crisis, he said, will take some big thinking, “on the order of the thinking when we built the Hoover Dam.”
“It’s one of those possible solutions that should always stay, if not forefront on the table, somewhere on the table, so that you don’t lose sight of it,” Fulp said.
Despite the fact that many Colorado River experts have cast doubt on the feasibility of a cross-country water pipeline, even some sitting state officials say it deserves more research. Chuck Podolak, director of the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona said the idea deserves “serious attention.”
“We understand that every option is hard, every option is expensive, every option has political hurdles, every option is a daunting engineering task,” he said. “Right now, we’re in a let’s-look-at-everything mode with eyes wide open.”
Arizona and other states around the region, with their eyes on continued growth, are already looking at ways to stretch out the water they already have using technology. Terry Fulp said those efforts may need to expand past the spendy and ambitious engineering projects that are already helping facilitate that growth.
“It’ll be the time someday, if we want the Southwest to continue to grow the way it’s been growing,” he said. “There’s only so much water in the basin.”
This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions in the West, produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder. KUNC’s coverage of the Colorado River is supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
Homes line the foothills outside Colorado Springs on Sept. 11, 2024. The city has doubled down on water conservation to make its recent spike in population growth possible. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
When researcher Brian Richter set out to take a close look at how big cities in the Western U.S. were adapting to water scarcity, he already knew the story’s basic contours.
Previous studies showed the trend clearly for some large utilities. As a megadrought has baked the Southwest since 2000, the region’s biggest cities have reined in their use to keep pace with the declining supply.
But it had been years since someone took a more region-wide look at who was conserving and how much. Richter, a lecturer at the University of Virginia, and president of his own independent research firm, Sustainable Waters, was up to the task.
After gathering data for 28 large and medium-size water utilities dependent on the Colorado River, Richter and his team were able to see the more modern trend lines in sharp detail. The results surprised him. It wasn’t just that cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Tucson and Las Vegas were using less. They were doing it while growing rapidly.
His 2023 study found that collectively the region’s cities had grown by 25% from 2000 to 2020, while their water use dropped by 18%. Per person use rates declined even more sharply, falling by 30%.
“We thought that was nothing short of miraculous, to be honest,” Richter said. “It’s quite a water conservation success story.”
Richter had heard the region’s growth anxieties before. As homes spring up, highways widen and new schools open, conversations about rising populations in the arid West eventually find their way to water. Those new residents mean more green lawns and household faucets, forcing cities to scramble to meet the new demand, or so the thinking goes.
It’s easy to understand why the notion that more people beget more water use jumps to people’s minds, Richter said. All of the on-the-ground impacts of growth are highly visible.
“What you can’t see so easily are the numbers, the water numbers behind that growth,” Richter said. “We felt it was really important to start getting those numbers out there, and to start revealing the fact that it’s not necessarily true any longer, that as a city’s population grows its water use has to increase at the same time.”
Now, as pressure from climate change mounts, the region faces a critical question: Can urban areas keep pace with their past successes in water conservation, or is there a floor to just how much water savings can be wrung from Southwestern cities?
The Colorado Springs skyline rises above Fountain Creek on Sept. 11, 2024. For the past couple decades the city has experienced rapid population growth while ratcheting down its demand for water. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Using less in Colorado Springs
Until 2002, Colorado Springs was using water like there’s no tomorrow. As the city grew, so did its water demand, hand-in-hand.
“There was a lot of inefficiency out there, a lot of inefficient fixtures, a lot of landscape irrigation, primarily of turf grass,” said Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager. “A lot of it was, frankly, egregious.”
A punishing drought in 2002 provided a shock to the system. While reservoirs declined, the people in charge of Colorado Springs started to realize that unchecked water use would eventually lead to serious shortages. Mandatory restrictions on use at the city level ran from 2002 to 2005.
“I don’t think people thought of the water system, the water supply, as being constrained in any way until we hit 2002 and then our perspective changed on the scarcity of water and how reliable our supply was,” Winter said.
Conservation is now seen as a reliable way to live within their means, he said.
Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager, points out a turf grass conversion project on Sept. 11, 2024. The utility offers incentives to encourage homeowners and commercial businesses to swap lawns for native grasses. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Colorado Springs has taken a gradual approach. First came the rate changes. Residents who irrigated more paid more per gallon. Then came the incentives to swap out indoor plumbing fixtures, such as replacing a toilet that uses 5 gallons per flush with a new model that uses less than 1.
The city has also begun to embrace the loss of its lawns. It ramped up its lawn replacement program, in which thirsty yards are replaced with native grasses, like blue grama or buffalo grass, which use 60%-80% less water. The utility offers 50 cents per square foot of lawn converted.
Since Colorado Springs started those conversions in 2013, the city has swapped in native grass on about 3.1 million square feet, or about 72 acres, mostly on commercial properties like shopping centers, churches and business parks. In 2020 a permanent shift to only allow for three days per week of outside watering on existing grass went into effect as well.
Blue grama grows alongside a Colorado Springs parkway on Sept. 11, 2024. Concerns over dwindling water supplies have sped up the city’s conversions of turf grass to blue grama and other native species. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
All of the focus on conservation is paying off, Winter said. From 2000 to 2023, Colorado Springs has grown by about 40%, while also recording a 39% reduction in average per capita water use and about a 25% drop in total water deliveries. The city’s water use is now about equal to what it was in the late 1980s, despite the rapid growth, he said.
Mandatory conservation measures have started taking hold in some parts of the Colorado River Basin, like a nonfunctional turf ban in Las Vegas, for example. But Winter said the cultural and political contours of Colorado Springs mean water managers have to get creative, relying more on voluntary incentives than strict mandates that could rile its conservative voter base.
When the city decided to overhaul its building code a few years ago, the process brought up the usual tensions over growth. One code change ruffled feathers. A restriction on new developments limited turf to 25% of the total landscape.
“Individual freedom is a core value here,” said Nancy Henjum, a Colorado Springs city council member. Henjum summarized the early complaints of some fellow council members: “What do you mean I wouldn’t be able to have Kentucky bluegrass in my whole yard?”
But after lengthy discussions, plus field trips to the infrastructure that brings Colorado River basin water over the mountains to Colorado Springs, lightbulbs went off for the city council members about the scarce nature of their supply, she said. As of June 2023, the turf restriction is now officially part of the city’s landscape code.
“It was ultimately fascinating to watch people who are policymakers kind of push back initially, and then little by little over time recognize this is the right thing to do,” Henjum said.
A sign indicates where to find low water use plants in Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. A punishing drought in 2002 reframed the way the community saw its reliance on the shrinking Colorado River. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Conserving the way out
While city leaders are proud of the water conservation success they’ve had over the past two decades, they say that was the easy part. In Colorado Springs, another 40% reduction in use over the next few decades will be tough, if not impossible, Winter said.
“Used to be that we could put a conservation program out there and anyone could participate. Almost everyone was inefficient, and so you could just broadcast a program out there and it worked,” he said. “It’s getting harder, it’s getting more expensive. We’re having to get a lot more strategic and targeted in our approach.”
The same is true just to the north, in Aurora. The city grew by 40% from 2000 to 2020, while lowering both its total water use and per-person use, according to Richter’s study.
“We are the first city (in Colorado) to pass a turf ban,” said Alex Davis, assistant general manager for Aurora Water. “Fifty percent of our use is outdoor water use in the summer, and we’re trying to ratchet that down.”
A path winds through the Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. Because of gradual water conservation measures the city has been able to add thousands of new residents while using less water from the Colorado River basin. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
But Davis isn’t convinced a city like Aurora, with its steep population curve, can rely solely on conservation to make its way toward a stable water future.
“When we look at our demand projections going forward, we have a gap that we need to fill, right?” she said. “We have a projected need that we can’t meet today for what we expect the population to be in 2060, and so we have to acquire more water resources and do more supply projects in order to meet that gap.”
A big portion of that gap is being driven by climate change, Davis said. Longer, hotter dry spells mean the uncertainty about future water supplies is greater than it was 20 years ago. Her team uses models to game out what kinds of policies the city might need to make it through extreme droughts.
Under those severe scenarios, Aurora’s plans indicate it would first cut down on outdoor watering, then eliminate it all together. That would leave just indoor, household use, but Davis said, “there are projections where we don’t have enough water to meet household use only in these very severe projected scenarios.”
John Fleck, a University of New Mexico water policy professor, said this is the challenging future facing many of the West’s municipal water leaders. Even so, he cautioned against too much hand-wringing over population growth and urban water use. There’s still a lot of slack in the system and a lot more savings to be had, he said.
Because so much water is used outdoors, Western cities face a fundamental question: As the region warms and dries, how much green space are they willing to part with to close the gap between supply and demand? It’ll be a tough call, but not an impossible one, Fleck said.
“When you think deeply about it, it would be weird for people, for communities, not to take the necessary steps to ensure their future existence, right?” he said.
“If you’re facing the choice of getting rid of some swimming pools and lawns, or abandoning your city, it’s a no-brainer. People are going to use less water. And that’s what we see happen over and over again.”
This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions, produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The Rawlins, Wyo. water treatment facility, pictured Sept. 16, 2022. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
After a town council shakeup, Micah Foster was suddenly mayor of his tiny eastern Wyoming agricultural town. A wave of resignations last April meant that in addition to getting up at 2 a.m. each day for his regular job — delivering bread to grocery stores for Bimbo Bakeries — Foster found himself running his 400-person town.
In June, as Foster was still adjusting to his new role, he got some good news. Lingle was awarded a $1.4 million American Rescue Plan Act grant to upgrade aging sewage pipelines — a big deal for any small town, sparing it from having to borrow the money because it cannot possibly raise rates high enough to cover such an expense. Lingle even secured the required 10% match from the state, Foster said.
But there was a hitch. To complete the required engineering plan, the town still needed the cooperation of BNSF Railway to cross its tracks on the south side — a slow process and an effort that the town’s small, overworked staff struggled to accomplish.
Wyoming officials, in July, reminded town leaders that the engineering plan must be complete, contracts signed and the project “shovel-ready” by Oct. 1, or the state would be forced to revert, or claw back, the grant to pre-empt the federal government from taking the money back — from Lingle and the state.
“There’s no way we can get that done,” Foster said, adding, “We’re not Cheyenne,” referring to the capital city’s advantage in having a full professional staff. “We don’t have an engineer on staff to do this and push it. So we were happy [when initially approved for the grant] and then we were sad.
“It’s like dangling a carrot in front of you but it was never really there,” he added.
A segment of water line was removed to repair leaks in Rawlins, Wyo. over the 2024 Labor Day weekend. (Courtesy City of Rawlins)
Many Wyoming towns and entities that have been awarded ARPA grant dollars administered by the state worry they may suffer the same fate. In August, the Office of State Lands and Investments hosted a webinar with municipalities and others, striking a tone of urgency as staff reiterated the Oct. 1 deadline to prove ARPA grant projects are ready for shovels to hit dirt, or lose the money.
“We want to have this opportunity to make long-term investments with these dollars,” Wyoming Grants Management Office Administrator Christine Emminger told attendees. “So create the pressure on your contractors to get these dollars obligated, get them contracted at your local government or your entity level. Because if they are not contracted, and you do not provide that evidence to the Office of the State Lands and Investments (OSLI), we will have to go back and recapture those dollars.”
More than 50 of 159 state-administered ARPA grant recipients for water and sewer projects have yet to file completed compliance documents to avoid recapture, according to state officials.
“OSLI is in regular communication with all the entities that have not yet provided the necessary information, and are making every effort to provide assistance, where possible,” Gov. Mark Gordon’s press secretary Michael Pearlman told WyoFile.
The state is also facing a tight deadline, and is at risk of losing potentially tens of millions of federal dollars that budget-strapped communities desperately need. Wyoming’s mineral royalty revenues, which used to fund such water infrastructure funds, are drying up due to the declining coal industry.
State officials, under the guidance of the governor’s office, will determine in October which ARPA grants to claw back, then rush to “redeploy” those dollars before the federal government’s Dec. 31 deadline, they say. Though Gordon has indicated his priorities for redeploying ARPA dollars, exactly who and what projects the state might choose before the end of the year is yet to be determined.
“Any funds available after the Oct. 1 deadline may be deployed to local governments to reimburse or reduce local matches for previously approved water infrastructure projects,” according to an Aug. 19 press release from the governor’s office.
Meanwhile, there’s an increasingly urgent need among Wyoming towns to update water and sewer systems.
A stockpile of bottled water was collected to help residents in Rawlins and Sinclair, Wyo. to get through a temporary boil advisory in March 2022. (Courtesy City of Rawlins)
The neighboring oil boom-and-bust towns of Midwest and Edgerton in the middle of the historic Salt Creek oilfield are relying on ARPA dollars to help cover an estimated $5 million cost to replace 7 miles of potable water pipeline at risk of corrosion due to acidic soils in the oilfield.
In the neighboring towns of Kemmerer and Diamondville (with a combined population of about 3,000) in the state’s southwest corner, town officials have described a chicken-and-egg dilemma to fund long-overdue upgrades necessary to not only meet current demands, but to meet the needs of construction workers arriving for the $4 billion Natrium nuclear energy project already underway. The construction workforce is expected to peak at 1,600 in 2028, although many of the workers will commute from other nearby towns, according to officials. Project developers, backed by both the U.S. Department of Energy and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, say it’s up to local government entities in Wyoming or the federal government to make any needed investments.
Human-caused climate change plays a role, too, forcing many towns to consider increasing competition for secure sources of water made more scarce due to warming and drying trends.
Cascading water challenges
Sometimes when you patch a leak, you spring another one down the line. Then another, and another.
That was the challenge for city water crews in Rawlins over Labor Day weekend. They chased and patched six leaks at gushing “weak points” in the aging municipal water system that serves both Rawlins and neighboring Sinclair without major interruptions to water deliveries, according to officials.
It’s a routine that many water crews in Wyoming towns have become well practiced at in recent years: Fixing one leak in a frangible network begets another — a result of depressurizing then re-pressurizing segments of pipe. The problem worsens when you’re dealing with an aging system long overdue for upgrades.
And towns like Rawlins aren’t just patching leaks. They’re looking at systemwide water and sewer upgrades vital to simply meet existing demand, not to mention potential population growth and previously unfathomed pressures of climate change.
In March 2022, Rawlins residents were under a boil order for nearly a week due to a “catastrophic” failure in the 100-plus-year-old wood-stave pipelines that deliver the majority of water to the municipal system from springs 30 miles south of town.
In addition to the expense and task of gradually upgrading the wooden pipelines — nearly 2 miles have been replaced so far — the town also brought back online a long-derelict pre-water treatment plant so it can supplement its water supply by pumping from the North Platte River, as needed. Flow from the springs that provide Rawlins and Sinclair most of their water varies greatly, depending on seasonal snowpack, according to city officials. And those seasonal flows are only becoming more unpredictable.
All told, it will take nearly $60 million for necessary water system upgrades, according to Rawlins officials. They’ve already had some success landing grant dollars from state and federal sources, including ARPA dollars. But to secure those grants, and other fundsin the form of loans, water users have been asked to pony up.
The average residential water utility bill has increased by about $30 per month since 2022, officials say.
“Our rates were too low to support the maintenance and the work that we have to do on our lines,” Rawlins City Manager Tom Sarvey said.
“A lot of these grants or loans require that you show community buy-in,” Rawlins spokesperson Mira Miller said. “So you can’t apply for these things if you can’t show that you are charging your customers a fair rate.”
Rawlins — because it’s been in emergency mode for the past two years — is confident about the security of its state-administered ARPA funding so far, according to officials. But many other towns with pressing water system improvement needs aren’t so sure.
Many small towns, even those that clearly qualify for federal grants, struggle to complete engineering and other required planning in the arduous process due to a basic lack of resources and expertise, Wyoming Association of Municipalities Member Services Manager Justin Schilling said.
Kemmerer, population 2,800, was selected as the host community for TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear reactor power plant. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
“Municipal government, it’s a constant rotation of people, so they might not have been aware how urgent [completing grant requirements] was,” Schilling said. “So, we had a bunch of these small communities that got a lifeline tossed to them, but because of engineering delays, the state’s got to pull it back and slide it to shovel-ready projects so that it doesn’t just go back to the feds.”
State officials, in their August webinar with ARPA recipients in the state, fielded about a dozen questions from concerned community leaders.
“I know the process has been cumbersome,” State Loan and Investments Grants and Loans Manager Beth Blackwell told attendees, adding that state officials knew all along that the ARPA requirements were going to be a major challenge for many small, resource-strapped towns to meet. “My staff is working extremely hard, and it’s just, we’ve got to make sure that at the end of the day, the state’s not on the hook to paying these funds back.”
In Lingle, without the ARPA grant, there’s no alternative plan in the works to fund the wastewater system upgrades, Mayor Foster said.
This story was produced by WyoFile, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
The Colorado River Indian Tribes have the right to divert 662,402 acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River for use on their lands in Arizona. Congress recently granted the tribes authority to lease some of this water to entities elsewhere in the state. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
PARKER, Arizona – South of Headgate Rock Dam, beyond riverbanks lined with willow and mesquite, the broad floodplain of the Colorado River spreads across emerald fields and sun-bleached earth.
The Colorado River has nourished these lands in present-day western Arizona for millennia, from the ancestral Mohave people who cultivated corn, squash, beans, and melons, to the contemporary farmers of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, or CRIT, whose reservation extends for 56 miles along its namesake river.
CRIT has rights to divert a large volume of Colorado River water – nearly 720,000 acre-feet in Arizona and California combined, which is more than twice Nevada’s allocation from the river. To this point, the water has remained within the bounds of the CRIT reservation. But soon, the water might flow to lands far beyond CRIT’s borders.
Due to an act of Congress signed into law in January 2023, CRIT now has the authority to lease or exchange its water for use elsewhere in Arizona. (The authority does not apply to water rights held by CRIT on the California portion of its reservation.) Agreements signed in April with the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the federal Bureau of Reclamation to fulfill administrative requirements in the legislation brought the tribes another step closer to greater control over their water.
What remains is the work of negotiation, both within CRIT and with potential leaseholders. CRIT leadership must decide what it wants in leasing deals – how much water to part with, to whom, for what price, and for how many years. And they will have to find a partner who agrees to those terms.
CRIT’s leasing authority opens a new chapter, not only for the tribes but for other water users in the state who might covet CRIT’s high-value, high-priority Colorado River water. Leasing this water would represent a financial windfall for CRIT’s more than 4,600 enrolled members. CRIT leadership has framed it as an economic and civic development opportunity. For those on the other side of the deal – be they environmental groups, farm districts, mining companies, or fast-growing cities in the center of the state – it is a rare chance for a relatively secure source of water in an arid region where most supplies are already claimed or running out. Homebuilders west of Phoenix, for instance, have recently seen their access to local groundwater restricted by state regulators.
For CRIT leaders, the new powers come at an auspicious time. They see their duty as stewards of the river intersecting with the mounting challenges of maintaining Arizona’s desert empire amid merciless heat and a drying climate.
“With the climate crisis and the drought going on at the present time, there’s going to be a major shortage of water,” Dwight Lomayesva, CRIT Tribal Council vice chairman, said at a conference in March. “But we would like to be part of the solution to the problem.”
A valuable asset
CRIT is a union of sorts. Four tribes with distinct histories live on the 278,000-acre reservation that spans Arizona and California. The Mohave, known for farming and beadwork, and the Chemehuevi, masterful basket weavers, were original inhabitants of the land. The Hopi and Navajo came later. The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs relocated members of the two northeastern Arizona tribes to the area after World War Two.
Some 79,350 acres are farmed on the Arizona portion of CRIT’s reservation. More acres are dedicated to alfalfa than any other crop. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
CRIT’s history and location translate into a strong water rights position. Like in most western states, water in Arizona is based on a priority system. “First in time, first in right,” as the saying goes. Junior users, who have a later priority date, are cut off first in times of shortage, while senior users like CRIT who have earlier claims can continue to divert.
CRIT’s reservation along the banks of the Colorado was established in 1865, making it one of the first in time in Arizona for water rights – and one of the last to lose access to water. Crucially, leased water retains its place in the priority system. That’s what makes it valuable, said Cynthia Campbell, the water resources management adviser for Phoenix. “That’s front of the line, basically.”
Not only does CRIT have secure water. The tribes also have a lot of it. Comparatively speaking, their water rights are massive. A display at the CRIT Museum makes the point visually. Tubes of foam insulation painted blue depict the volume of water held by tribes along the lower Colorado River. CRIT has the right to divert 662,402 acre-feet per year to its Arizona lands and 56,846 acre-feet to its much smaller landholdings across the river in California. The museum display reflects this bounty – the blue foam bar representing CRIT’s water towers over the others.
For now, CRIT is keeping its water leasing intentions close to the vest. Chairwoman Amelia Flores and Tribal Council members declined to be interviewed for this story.
John Bezdek, CRIT’s lawyer, said that Tribal Council had been focused on finalizing the state and federal agreements and is now turning its attention to how it might structure leases. “There’s a number of additional steps that need to be done in terms of developing a water code, developing provisions on how proposals will be evaluated, looking at those types of things,” Bezdek said. “And so that is all being done right now. We’re working on the next steps internally.”
Despite that public reticence, the contours of CRIT’s thinking have been previewed in other venues. Vice Chairman Dwight Lomayesva outlined his thoughts on the matter in a panel discussion earlier this year, when he participated in the Eccles Family Rural West Conference, held in Tempe, on March 27.
Lomayesva reiterated the cultural and spiritual significance of the Colorado River to his people. “We want to save the river,” he said. “We’re not just a benevolent nation trying to help other countries and tribes and water districts.”
Dwight Lomayesva, vice chairman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, speaks at the Eccles Family Rural West Conference, held in Tempe, Arizona, on March 27, 2024. (Courtesy Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University)
CRIT has a history of working with state and federal agencies to protect the Colorado River. The tribes participated in a pilot farmland fallowing program from 2016 to2019, in which they saved 45,373 acre-feet for storage in Lake Mead. That deal was the precursor to a larger commitment in 2020, when the tribes pledged to fallow 10,000 acres of farmland and store 50,000 acre-feet of water per year in the basin’s largest reservoir. For the three-year effort, the tribe earned $38 million, from the state and the Environmental Defense Fund.
CRIT’s capacity to lease water is directly related to the farming operations that take place on the reservation. About 79,350 acres are farmed on its Arizona lands, mostly for alfalfa. Some of the land is farmed by a tribal enterprise, but many of the acres are leased by non-tribal members. A majority of the fields are flood irrigated, an inefficient method in which only half of the water is taken up by the crop. The rest eventually flows back to the river or evaporates.
This is important because CRIT can only lease water that it has put to consumptive use in at least three of the previous five years. The consumptive-use stipulation is part of the agreement signed with Arizona and Reclamation in April. CRIT diverts less Colorado River water than its allocation, so the agreement dictates that the tribes can’t part with unused water to which they have rights but bypasses their fields. In effect, it means that water conserved from farming is water that can be leased.
“That’s a very, very important component that we then have to factor into in terms of how we want to develop the program,” Bezdek said.
A huge impediment is CRIT’s obsolete means of moving water to its fields. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency, owns and operates the Colorado River Irrigation Project, an irrigation system that is, by all accounts, deteriorating and badly needs repair. It was developed piecemeal starting in the 1870s and diverts water into the main line canal at Headrock Gate Dam. Two-thirds of the 232 miles of lateral canal are made of packed dirt, Lomayesva said. (All quotes from Lomayesva in this piece are from his comments at the March conference.)
Lomayesva said that one study pegged the cost of rehabilitating the system at $300 million – an amount of money that CRIT cannot afford. And even if it could, Lomayesva said that because the tribes do not own the water delivery infrastructure, they would hesitate to invest in it. But he said that leasing deals could provide the capital for farming on the reservation to become more efficient.
“We’re going to only market the water if we can use those funds to develop conservation systems – sprinklers instead of flood [irrigation], pipes instead of dirt ditches, recycle some of that water and reuse it again,” Lomayesva said. “That’s the only reason why we would market our water.”
Others have concluded that the outdated irrigation system is a hindrance. “The high cost to repair infrastructure, including lining canals, reconstructing gates and turnouts, and realigning reaches of the system, limit the Tribes’ ability to realize the full potential value of its water,” according to a 2018 Bureau of Reclamation study.
CRIT recently asked BIA to increase the amount it charges for irrigation water because the tribes believe that the system is underfunded and additional revenue could improve the irrigation infrastructure.
BIA did not respond to interview requests.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency, owns and operates the canal system that supplies the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation with irrigation water. The system, which draws from the Colorado River, was developed piecemeal starting in the 1870s and needs repair. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
Tribal members voted on an ordinance in 2019 that endorsed leasing and set certain boundaries for its implementation. The ordinance, which passed with 63 percent of the vote, was the result of an attempt a year earlier to recall all nine council members over some residents’ objections to leasing. Two council members, including former chairman Dennis Patch, lost their seats.
Under the ordinance, Tribal Council intends that the same number of acres will be farmed after water is leased. “We are farmers,” Lomayesva said. “We are farmers first, and we will probably always be farmers. And we want to continue farming. But the savings from conservation efforts, we could make some of that water available.”
The way for that to happen is for farming on the reservation to become more efficient – and that means applying less water to the fields. It could happen through conservation. But what tribal leaders like Lomayesva really want is a better irrigation system.
“Water could be made available for conservation or off-reservation leasing, exchange or storage in accordance with the requirements of the federal legislation and agreements if deferred maintenance was addressed along with improvements to the irrigation project,” according to a statement from the tribal government.
How much water might be available? In 2018, CRIT participated in a Bureau of Reclamation study to assess current and future tribal water use in the Colorado River basin. CRIT told Reclamation to assume that up to 150,000 acre-feet per year might be leased and moved off the reservation by 2060. CRIT used the same figure in a December 7, 2020, public meeting discussing the proposed legislation to authorize leasing. However, at the end of July the tribal government said in a statement, “No decisions have been made on a baseline amount of water to be available for leasing.”
What about the length of the leases? Many leases signed as part of a settlement extend for 99 or 100 years. CRIT’s authorizing legislation caps leases or exchange agreements at 100 years. But otherwise CRIT will be a free agent, able to negotiate its terms. Several water policy experts in Arizona interviewed for this story said they heard CRIT was considering a lease length of 25 years. The tribes, however, said in a statement that they have not decided any lease parameters.
Farming is a cultural legacy and economic driver for the Colorado River Indian Tribes. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)
The length is significant because of state water supply rules for municipalities. The Arizona Department of Water Resources requires proof of a 100-year supply. A shorter lease would not fully satisfy that requirement, but the water could be used in other ways, said Kathryn Sorensen, the former director of the Phoenix water department. It could be stored underground to offset groundwater pumping, or be paired with other water to fulfill the state’s 100-year directive. In the end, it will be a cost-benefit analysis for cities whether to lease CRIT water with a shorter term, she said.
“Each provider is going to have to weigh the length of the lease versus the priority and weigh the value,” said Sorensen, who is now with the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “But, look, it’s the highest priority Colorado River water in the state. So it’s bound to be very valuable, even with a short [lease] term.”
Autonomy and flexibility
Though it has liquid riches, this form of tribal wealth has been stuck in place. Tribes elsewhere in Arizona determined their rights to the Colorado, Gila, Salt, Verde and other rivers through negotiated settlements.
In these agreements, tribes generally ceded a portion of their historical rights in exchange for state and federal funding to build the infrastructure that would deliver water to their lands. A settlement currently before Congress – the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement – is the largest yet, a $5 billion proposal to determine water rights and build water supply and energy generation systems for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and San Juan Southern Paiute.
Those settlements typically include leasing provisions. Twenty-four tribes in the West and eight in Arizona currently have leasing authority. The Fort McDowell Indian Community’s settlement, approved by Congress in 1990, for instance, sends 4,300 acre-feet a year to Phoenix. The lease extends for 99 years. Other central Arizona cities, including Gilbert, Glendale, Mesa, and Scottsdale, lease Colorado River water from the tribes, as do mining companies and a housing developer.
CRIT, however, is an entirely different case study. The tribes did not receive their water through a settlement. Their rights were part of the U.S. Supreme Court decree in 1964 that resolved a Colorado River quarrel between Arizona and California and set water allocations in the lower basin. The decree granted CRIT a significant volume of Colorado River water but it did not confer the right to lease. Instead, CRIT had to seek the blessings of Congress to gain leasing authority.
CRIT is now celebrating that authority. In April, three weeks before the state and federal agreements were signed, the tribes held a Water Rights Day, a community festival “honoring our continued commitment to the living river.”
This story was produced by Circle of Blue, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
A reverse osmosis membrane is seen at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. (Liam DeBonis for NM Political Report)
Mario Atencio’s family never received a notification that 1,100 barrels of produced water—a byproduct of oil and gas extraction—had spilled on their allotment in February 2019 near Counselor, New Mexico in the Eastern Agency of the Navajo Nation, near Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
It wasn’t until later that the Atencios learned about the incident and, with the help of Silas Grant from the Center for Biological Diversity, were able to track down the spill report that companies are required to file with the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division.
The report details how a contractor noticed fluids flowing from a 6-inch transfer line. This line was supposed to move produced water to a recycling facility. Produced water contains highly brackish groundwater from deep aquifers as well as chemicals from the hydraulic fracturing process and hydrocarbons such as crude oil.
A total of 1,400 barrels spilled—1,100 of those were produced water and another 300 were crude oil.
Through the report, Atencio learned how the produced water flowed down a small unnamed tributary of Escavada Wash—the place where his grandmother bathes her sheep. He learned how it occurred in an area where the freshwater aquifer is just 50 feet below the surface, which is a rarity in the desert environment where aquifers tend to be deep and laden with salt.
A photo included in a report submitted to the Oil Conservation Division shows the initial response actions that Enduring Resources took after discovering a produced water spill near the Escavada Wash. (New Mexico Oil Conservation Division)
The most economic option to deal with produced water has been to inject it deep underground, to avoid contaminating the surrounding environment. But in states like New Mexico, where a bustling oil and gas industry overlaps with a strained water supply, what once was viewed as a nuisance to be disposed of, is now being viewed as a valuable, untapped natural resource. Relying on it more has the potential to amplify its risks.
Atencio had been a vocal critic of the oil and gas industry before the spill and was among the Navajo people advocating for a moratorium on extraction in parts of Eastern Agency surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
Now he says the state has failed in its constitutional duty to protect residents from pollution caused by oil and gas extraction.
The Atencios are not alone in facing pollution from produced water spills, which are common in New Mexico in part due to a boom in extraction.
His family and other advocates had filed a lawsuit against New Mexico months before they learned of a new plan for produced water. That lawsuit is still making its way through the court system. In April, a judge heard oral arguments on a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, but has not yet issued a ruling.
It was late November 2023 when Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP-28. During a panel discussion, Lujan Grisham announced a plan she dubbed “the strategic water supply.” The funding for the strategic water supply—a proposed $500 million—requires legislative approval and lawmakers expressed concerns about some of the unknowns during this year’s session. A bill that would have provided some of the funding, but not the amount the governor requested, failed to pass this year. New legislation is expected to be introduced next year.
The concept is that the state of New Mexico will act as a middle man between companies treating brackish and produced water and the companies that can use the treated water for industrial purposes such as hydrogen production or manufacturing. Lujan Grisham’s administration has described this as a way to bolster the renewable energy industry in a state where fresh water supplies are already strained.
“We’re not looking for potable, drinkable water supplies,” Lujan Grisham said during a press conference in January. “We’re trying to preserve those. We’re identifying water supplies that do other things.”
But activists like Atencio are worried that this will have unintended consequences.
“To hear this announced on the world stage for political points, it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth,” Atencio said.
A photo included in a report to the Oil Conservation Division shows where Enduring Resources installed an absorbent boom in a tributary of the Escavada Wash in 2019 to stop produced water from migrating downstream following a spill. (New Mexico Oil Conservation Division)
Atencio expressed concern that the sacred landscape near Chaco Culture National Historical Park could be exploited to extract produced water for the “governor’s newfangled idea.”
The proposal comes as New Mexico experienced more than two produced water spills a day over a 13 year time period stretching from 2010 to 2023. While produced water spills are not directly connected to the strategic water supply, activists fear that the transportation of produced water to sites for treatment may lead to increased spills.
Opposition to produced water
There are a variety of reasons why environmental advocates are concerned about the proposal.
They point to the uncertainties about what is in the produced water—which could create some challenges for treating it—as well as the history of spills like the one that occurred on the Atencios’ allotment. If produced water is being moved off of the oil fields, they say it could lead to increased spills either through pipeline ruptures or, if being moved by truck, through crashes.
An average of two produced water spills happen per day in New Mexico.
Last year, more than 700 produced water spills occurred, according to data available from the state’s Oil Conservation Division, and already, in 2024, there have been more than 220 produced water spills of varying sizes. Most produced water spills get little attention and nearby residents or land owners may not even receive notification.
“We’ve been really trying to get more accountability for the ongoing crisis of produced water and waste spills that are happening all the time in New Mexico,” Grant said. Grant works for the Center for Biological Diversity, which has been assisting the Atencios with a lawsuit brought against the state of New Mexico.
They said New Mexico’s oil and gas industry has a huge waste problem as well as a problem with not enough maintenance or inspections. Even though New Mexico has a rule that prohibits spills of produced water, Grant said those spills are continuing to occur at record rates that coincide with the increased oil and gas production.
Christopher Lewis, a lead environmental scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy, said during a New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission in May that many of the constituents found in untreated produced water are known hazards. He gave examples of arsenic, barium, bromide, mercury, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes.
“These constituents have the potential to cause carcinogenic, developmental, reproductive or other adverse effects in humans and other biological organisms,” he said.
But even if they weren’t there, the untreated produced water would be toxic.
“The concentration of salts alone in raw produced water are high enough to be toxic to freshwater organisms, meaning raw produced water discharged into a freshwater stream or lake poses a risk of harming aquatic ecosystems,” he said.
A photo included in a remediation and closure report submitted to the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division following a 2021 spill shows crews excavating an area near the Pecos River where corrosion led to a steel pipe leaking produced water into a pool. (New Mexico Oil Conservation Division)
This was seen in 2021 near the Pecos River in Eddy County, New Mexico when corrosion at a facility led to a small amount of produced water leaking into a backwater pool on private land. While the pollution never reached the river itself, crews found 245 minnows dead in the pool that the contamination reached.
Exactly what is in the produced water varies from basin to basin and, to some extent, even operator to operator.
The variability is one reason that the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) has proposed a new rule that would prohibit discharges of produced water, even after it has been treated. Discharge permits are needed for activities that would impact surface or groundwater.
Some of the questions that remain include how much produced water is even available and if it can be safely treated.
This is because the oil and gas industry keeps some of the chemicals used in fracking fluids secret and, Lewis said, tests may not be able to detect all of them.
Additionally, he said, interactions that occur during the drilling process can lead to chemical transformations that would make it hard to know what constituents are present in the produced water.
“The very nature of its highly variable constituents mean that produced water from one well may pose a significantly different risk than produced water from another one,” Lewis said.
Should the strategic water supply become a reality, NMED will need to set quality standards that the treated water has to meet.
Shrinking supplies driving interest in produced water
Pressure to find uses for produced water comes as the state, and the West in general, sees existing water supplies shrinking as the region warms due to climate change. New Mexico officials say the state will have 25% less water available in 2050.
“So if we do nothing, where would you make 25 percent cuts?: Lujan Grisham said during a January press conference about water. “Would it be in one community, one region of the state and one reservoir?”
During the press conference, the governor said conservation is needed to close the gap, but said that New Mexico also needs to find new water supplies that can support continued economic growth such as manufacturing.
But Lewis said there aren’t even tests to detect some of the chemicals that might be present in produced water. And, because treatment needs to be tailored to the type of contaminants present, this makes it hard to know what methods to use to clean up produced water.
One of the more common ways to treat produced water is using a reverse osmosis filter.
Kannalis LLC is one of the companies experimenting with produced water treatment and use in New Mexico as part of a demonstration project.
One of the experiments that Kannalis performed involved using both reverse osmosis and salt water reverse osmosis technologies at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo to treat the water and then using the treated water to grow forage crops at a greenhouse owned by the New Mexico State University that is located near Navajo Nation’s Ojo Encino Chapter House.
Kannalis is now experimenting on using treated produced water to grow trees.
But reverse osmosis does not work on all types of produced water.
In 2019—the same year that produced water contaminated the water that Atencio’s family has relied upon for generations—the New Mexico legislature passed the Produced Water Act. This law established a framework for how produced water would be managed outside of the oil and gas sector and it gave NMED statutory control and authority. NMED then entered into a memorandum of understanding with New Mexico State University which created the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium. This consortium is tasked with establishing science-based methods and policies for using treated produced water, and stems from previous state initiatives to find a use for produced water.
Mike Hightower heads the group. During a May Water Quality Control Commission hearing regarding produced water, Hightower said that in the Permian Basin, where produced water is generally three times as salty as seawater, thermal technologies will be needed to treat it. He said there have been significant advancements in those technologies over the past 40 years.
But, while the San Juan Basin produced water is easier to treat, he said there are communities in the Permian Basin that could benefit from treated produced water.
“In the Permian Basin, you have some cities like Jal that are really close to being out of water,: Hightower said. “And maybe that’s a place where the risks of not having water versus the risks of using treated produced water is something that they might want to take on board more easily or more quickly.”
He said that there may need to be regional standards for treated produced water rather than a state standard due to the differences in produced water between the three oil and gas basins in New Mexico.
“There’s different qualities of water, different locations and different risks by different communities that may be interested in using that water quicker than Albuquerque or Santa Fe,” he said.
Outside of New Mexico, states rely on produced water
During the May hearing, Hightower said that there are around 30 states in the country that have produced water and many of them are facing drought or water shortages. Not all of the states allow produced water to be used outside of the oilfields, but some of the states that do include California, Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming.
More than a dozen states, including Ohio, allow it to be used for dust control. Another common application is as a de-icer. Because produced water has high salinity and can melt snow and ice, it is spread on roads in states like Ohio and New York during the winter.
In the western United States, where water resources are naturally more strained, states are turning to produced water to augment their diminishing supplies.
When it comes to agriculture, crops in Kern County in the central valley of California are irrigated with produced water that has been diluted using freshwater resources. This practice has been going on for decades.
In Montana and Wyoming, produced water has been used to irrigate lands in the Powder River Basin in an effort to restore rangelands following overgrazing.
Wyoming has also allowed ranchers to use produced water for livestock. Additionally, produced water in Wyoming has been used for wildlife and to enhance wetlands.
The Town of Wellington in northern Colorado found that using treated produced water for aquifer recharge could significantly increase the amount of water available for residents by injecting the treated water into the aquifer. A similar demonstration project is underway in northern New Mexico’s San Juan Basin.
For produced water proponents, the oil field wastewater represents a largely untapped possibility. Nationwide, about one to two percent of the produced water is used outside of the oil fields.
Hightower sees the potential to use produced water in the San Juan Basin to help people who currently have to haul water long distances to their houses.
“In those rural areas of northwestern New Mexico, there’s huge opportunity to provide some social improvements, economic improvements for people in that region,” he said.
Currently, though, that is outside of the scope of the state’s proposed strategic water supply, which would limit the use of treated produced water to industrial purposes.
But in places where produced water is used outside of the oilfields, the use has often been met with protests from environmental activists.
During a 2018 presentation that was part of the WateReuse Association’s webcast series, Christopher Bellona with the Colorado School of Mines identified public perception as one of the challenges facing produced water. And, during a 2022 presentation, the New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium listed public perception as one of the biggest hurdles.
In California, the use of produced water in agriculture has led to protests outside the state Capitol. And, in Pennsylvania, concerns about potential contamination led to a moratorium in 2018 on spreading produced water on roadways, including as a de-icer.
This story was produced by New Mexico Political Report, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
An experiment conducted by the University of North Texas and New Mexico State University tests different types of brackish and treated water on fava bean plants at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The device affixed to the pole in the center collects data from sensors used in the experiment. (Liam DeBonis for NM Political Report)
Heading through eastern New Mexico, dairy cattle can be seen in farms beside the highway while flashing lights illuminate the wind farms at night. Large sprinklers irrigate the crop circles where, in the spring, the endangered lesser prairie chickens may venture out of the brush onto the fields to dance while keeping a close eye on the sky for the hawks that hunt overhead.
Farther south, oil wells become more common than windmills.
Beneath all of this lies a giant underground lake that gives life to the region and has allowed it to become one of the top crop producing areas of the state and the fifth leading cheese producing region in the country. But that aquifer—the Ogallala—is quickly being depleted.
Faced with their depleting wells, farmers in eastern New Mexico are increasingly turning to dryland farming methods.
“Farming with limited irrigation is a challenge, and it is a greater challenge to produce crops in a strict dryland situation,” John D’Antonio said. “However, half of the eastern New Mexico farms have already been turned into dryland production.”
D’Antonio is a former New Mexico state engineer and now runs the company American West Water Advisors, which has a contract with the Lea County Soil and Water Conservation District to investigate the use of brackish – or salty – water to supplement dwindling supplies in the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies six New Mexico counties as well as portions of seven other states including Colorado, South Dakota, Kansas and Wyoming.
“The Ogallala Aquifer in New Mexico is the most economically important groundwater source in eastern New Mexico and is the primary driver for crop production in the High Plains region,” he told NM Political Report.
D’Antonio’s team has repurposed abandoned oil and gas wells in the heavily drilled Permian Basin to access naturally-occuring brackish water aquifers. Those aquifers tend to be deeper than the freshwater sources. To reach the brackish supplies, D’Antonio is using repurposed oil wells that can reach far deeper than even the deepest irrigation water wells.
D’Antonio said the six New Mexico counties overlying the Ogallala Aquifer provide a third of all the agricultural cash receipts in the state, including more than a quarter of the crop cash receipts. That makes it a valuable part of the state’s economy that could be jeopardized by the declining availability of water.
“The Ogallala Aquifer is heavily pumped for irrigation of various agricultural crops that support farming and livestock industries, which, in turn, sustain the many small- to medium-sized cities dotted throughout eastern New Mexico,” D’Antonio said.
Some of the crops grown there include corn, sorghum, wheat, triticale and alfalfa.
But, for decades, water levels in the New Mexico portion of the Ogallala have experienced what D’Antonio described as “long-term, serious decline.”
According to an Ogallala Summit white paper from March 2024, researchers sampled 121 wells in New Mexico’s Curry and Roosevelt counties from 2004 to 2007 and then again from 2010 to 2015. The samples indicated an estimated loss of about 2 million acre-feet of water in the aquifer and the average loss was about 277,586 acre-feet per year. About 75% of those 121 wells in the two counties experienced declining water levels.
“Well capacities are increasingly becoming less capable of supplying enough water to grow high water demand crops such as corn,” the white paper states.
Filtration and reverse osmosis systems are among the tools available for research inside the main bay of the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. (Liam DeBonis for NM Political Report)
To make matters more complicated, there are very few sources of surface water in eastern New Mexico to supplement the dwindling groundwater.
And it isn’t just the Ogallala Aquifer that is in decline. As water supplies become more strained—not just in the eastern part of the state, but throughout New Mexico—supplies that were previously considered unusable are getting increasing attention from government officials desperate to fulfill current demands, and spur future economic development.
D’Antonio’s team is not the only group studying the use of brackish water in New Mexico. Pilot projects have been in the works since at least 2007 when the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility was established in Alamogordo to provide a place for research. But now that work has a new sense of urgency.
With water being one of the major limiting factors to future economic growth, New Mexico officials are looking to the vast, but largely untapped and unstudied, brackish aquifers.
This is part of what is known as the strategic water supply, a proposal that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced in November 2023.
New Mexico’s strategic water supply
Sydney Lienemann, Deputy Secretary of Administration for New Mexico’s Environment Department, said that one of the pillars of the 50-year water plan that Lujan Grisham unveiled in January is providing approximately 150,000 acre-feet of new water to New Mexico per year.
To do so, New Mexico is looking at treated brackish water as well as treated produced water, a byproduct of oil and gas production.
Lienemann said one policy lever New Mexico has to accomplish the goal is by using what she described as commitments from industries seeking to buy water to incentivize development of previously unused water sources, such as brackish water. Essentially, the state will have contracts with companies that need water and that will provide a guaranteed customer for the companies treating the water.
“The administration’s proposal for (the strategic water supply) is not to fund the infrastructure itself or to finance the construction of these produced water or brackish water treatment plants, but rather to provide a guaranteed purchaser of the water at the end of treatment as a way to de-risk the upfront capital investment that treatment companies would need to take on,” she said.
Lienemann compared this arrangement to governments promising to purchase vaccines if companies will do the research and build the companies to manufacture the vaccines.
State funds will only be available to purchase the treated water if it meets predefined water quality standards that will be determined based on the end use.
Lienemann said New Mexico does not want to “stay in the business of owning that water.” Instead, the state plans to sell the treated water to identified end users who are currently unknown, similar to how a water wholesaler would act. She said having access to the treated water will allow New Mexico to recruit the end users. Under the current proposal, those end users would likely be hydrogen power generators or manufacturers of renewable energy technology.
“We want to reduce the pressure on our potable water, and this is one way to do it, while supporting the administration’s priorities to help with the clean energy transition,” Lienemann said. “So that is, are there ways that we can desalinate brackish water to do manufacturing of solar cells? Are there ways that we can treat produced water in a closed loop manner to generate hydrogen for energy storage?”
But the use of state funds for the strategic water supply requires legislative approval, which the governor has not yet secured. Lujan Grisham proposed using $500 million to fund the strategic water supply.
A University of Texas El Paso experiment uses brackish water to cool solar panels at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in an effort to increase their efficiency. The returning water, which is fed through red piping, is heated in the process, which makes it easier to treat. (Liam DeBonis for NM Political Report)
Funding and the state legislature
Rep. Nathan Small, D-Las Cruces, is the chairman of the House Appropriations and Finance Committee and the vice chair of the interim Legislative Finance Committee. Small is one of the legislators who supports using brackish water to augment the dwindling freshwater supplies.
He emphasized the importance of work to “enhance protections” for the existing supplies of freshwater.
“We have to be ready to use our budget to safeguard what we have,” he said.
New Mexico’s rivers were recently ranked as the most endangered in the country due to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that stripped Clean Water Act protections from ephemeral streams.
Small said the state budget should be used to maximize the efficiency of existing sources of freshwater. Some of the ways that New Mexico has worked to maximize efficiency include lining ditches with concrete to reduce water loss and removing invasive plants from banks.
“But, as we look to diversify and grow our economy, particularly when it comes to zero-carbon solutions…we’re going to need water,” he said.
In part due to federal incentives, New Mexico has seen increased interest in clean energy manufacturing including solar cells and wind turbines.
Small said companies that might be interested in locating in New Mexico to manufacture batteries or electric vehicles or other products needed for the energy transition will need water and, in some cases, those industries have high demands for water.
“I know that it’s very challenging for New Mexico to consider sort of slicing the freshwater pie even further. And so that’s a place where I think that treated brackish water fits for purpose… that’s where I think that brackish water really fundamentally is central to the state,” he said.
He said some industries may need lower salinity than others and that the treatment processes can be tailored for the end use.
At the same time, Small said New Mexico needs to follow and invest in science and implement safeguards. While the governor proposed $500 million for the strategic water supply, investing in science will require additional state funds for projects like aquifer mapping.
He said he would like more details about a timeline for developing the strategic water supply if a bill is brought to the legislature in the future.
In the interim, he said that he is beginning to see early engagement with stakeholders that is “essentially putting all the questions out there” and providing an open forum for discussion around the proposed strategic water supply. And, Small said, there is positive and innovative research occurring across New Mexico, including at universities like New Mexico State University and New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
He said it is important to take an “all of the above” approach toward water and that focusing on treating brackish water should not come at the expense of watershed restoration.
Small also said it is important to fund efforts to study the aquifers, including aquifer mapping.
Aquifer mapping a limiting factor
One of the biggest unknowns with the treatment of brackish water is how much is available and what its composition is.
D’Antonio said there needs to be more aquifer mapping done.
Former State Engineer Mike Hamman, said that if a well is deeper than 2,500 feet and is drilled into an aquifer that is considered to be in an undeclared basin for non-potable water sources, the Office of the State Engineer requires companies to file a notice of intent to drill a well.
“Then there will be requirements, once the well is completed, to meter and monitor the volume of water that’s pulled out of that,” Hamman said. “And we would do that to protect any surrounding freshwater aquifers and also to assure that there would be no residual impacts to river flows or anything along that line.”
Hamman said he is aware of three pilot wells for brackish water that have been drilled. Those include two in Sandoval County and one in the Santa Teresa area of southern New Mexico.
Staci Timmons, the Associate Director of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, said that in 2016 her agency worked to compile existing water quality data to try to characterize the brackish water aquifers in New Mexico.
She said statewide questions still exist about aquifer depth, water quality, recharge time and long-term usability.
“There’s certainly, we think, a good amount of brackish water because many of our rocks are salt bearing formations, and as you go deeper, we would expect that as the water is moving through lots of deep layers and longer flow paths, it’ll pick up greater mineral content and get saltier,” Timmons said. “But we generally don’t have a crystal clear view of exactly what the brackish water looks like.”
There are places in the state where the brackish water aquifers are a bit better understood.
For example, Timmons said, in the Estancia Basin east of Albuquerque, there is brackish water close to the surface.
“We’ve never really invested in the basic characterization that needs to happen for us to just jump ahead into brackish water yet,” Timmons said.
She said there’s still a lot of work to do on aquifer characterization, including mapping and determining how deep the brackish water supplies are. That will require a significant investment from the state. In 2023, Timmons told state lawmakers that the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources would need $1.25 million annually to hire eight employees to build and maintain an aquifer mapping and monitoring program. On top of that, it would need between $4 million and $10 million a year for ten years to install exploratory and monitoring wells.
One reason this is important is because brackish water supplies could interact with freshwater sources such as rivers or other aquifers. That could compromise the very freshwater sources that the strategic water supply hopes to protect.
Timmons gave the example of a hypothetical brackish water aquifer that interacts with the Pecos River. Developing the hypothetical brackish water aquifer could have downstream implications and even threaten compact compliance, she said. This could occur if there is a connection between the brackish aquifer and the freshwater aquifers. Flows in the Pecos River are in part influenced by the underground aquifer.
In some areas of the state, Timmons said, the brackish aquifers are not connected to any other source of water. In those places, the water is a nonrenewable resource.
She said if someone plans to invest millions of dollars on a desalination facility, they need to make sure that there is enough brackish water to last more than ten years.
“There has to be substantial research in any given location (where) we want to explore desal,” she said.
But just knowing where the brackish supplies are and how much water is in the aquifers is not enough. Timmons said it’s also important to know what chemical constituents are in the brackish water.
“It’s not just your plain old you know, sodium chloride, seawater,” she said. “You also have things like silicate minerals that are going to have to be filtered out you’re going to have different types of salts, not just sodium and chloride, you might have calcium and sulfate instead. So those molecules are going to require different treatment technologies.”
A small bird floats on an evaporation pond, which collects sediments from brackish water as it evaporates, at The Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. (Liam DeBonis for NM Political Report)
It’s also important for people to know how drawing the brackish water out from beneath the surface will impact the ground.
In the Deming area, pumping of groundwater—even freshwater supplies—has led to what is known as subsidence where the ground sinks.
“We still need to fully map our aquifers in New Mexico and develop groundwater and surface water models to better manage this resource,” D’Antonio said. “That will require measuring and metering our water use along with monitoring our groundwater elevations.”
Metropolitan areas interested too
As New Mexico looks to grow despite the arid environment and decreasing supplies, a couple of cities have looked toward the brackish water supplies as a possible solution.
For more than two decades, the City of Alamogordo has been studying the possibility of using desalination to treat brackish water. In 2000, Alamogordo filed an application with the Office of the State Engineer to use about 10,000 acre-feet of brackish groundwater from a series of wells in the Snake Tank field. Alamogordo’s brackish water reverse osmosis treatment plant took about two decades to complete.
Farther north, Sandoval County began looking at treated brackish water for industrial purposes about two decades ago and contracted with a company based out of Scottsdale, Arizona, known as New Mexico Water, LLC. This company provided information to the New Mexico Environment Department this spring about their effort.
The company is hoping to develop a desalination and mineral recovery plant with an estimated price tag of $800 million at a location near Placitas. This effort is known as the Rio West Water Project and, while it has been in the works for years, it has been slow to materialize.
“Future development in the properties West of Albuquerque and Rio Rancho depends on making additional water sources available for industrial development including support of future data centers, green hydrogen facilities and others,” the company states in the information provided to the state.
New Mexico Water would take brackish supplies from the San Andreas/Glorieta unit, which is a confined aquifer about 3,500 feet below the surface in the southeastern San Juan Basin.
“Significant process engineering, hydro-geologic investigations and piloting have taken place on this endeavor over the last decade and a half to develop a sound and achievable project.” Gary Lee, the project engineer, said in a document submitted to NMED.
Protecting agricultural producers
While D’Antonio supports the strategic water supply, he said there is a potential that the industrial use of brackish water could compete with agricultural uses.
“Depending on what projects or uses are prioritized, the industrial use of treated brackish water could compete for the same water that the agricultural users would attempt to use,” he said.
D’Antonio said it could also open the door for increased opportunities to expand the use of treated brackish water into other regulated uses that could support economic development and even provide drought mitigation.
Some of the examples he gave are growing grass on fallow lands to promote natural carbon sequestration and using the treated water from green hydrogen production, which is something the governor also highlighted when announcing the proposed strategic water supply.
Already, some agricultural producers rely on saline water supplies either for irrigation purposes or to provide water for livestock.
Water storage tanks at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. (Liam DeBonis for NM Political Report)
Rebecca Roose, the governor’s infrastructure advisor, said there will be safeguards in any future strategic water supply legislation to ensure those agricultural supplies are not impacted.
“We’re talking about different water than the water that farmers have allocated and are relying upon,” she said.
Legislation that was introduced late in this year’s legislative session and failed to pass included a definition of brackish water that required it to be sourced from aquifers at least 2,500 feet below the surface and with total dissolved solid levels of at least 1,000 milligrams per liter.
“The depth of the well is one safeguard that we’ve identified to hardwire into the program so that it’s clear to everybody, including anybody who’s implementing the program from state agency level that we’re talking about these brackish wells, and those are unallocated sources of water,” Roose said.
Malynda Capelle manages the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo where researchers including universities and businesses are experimenting on ways to increase the efficiency of desalination.
There are ten different pads at the facility that can support individual projects and there are three storage tanks for brackish water.
“The future water supplies will require some level of water treatment, possibly desalination,” she said.
This facility is unique. Capelle said she is not aware of anyone else who is doing the level of research on brackish water that is occurring at the facility in Alamogordo. However, there is a research facility that is looking at desalination of seawater in California and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation also has a facility in Yuma, Arizona, that does small scale, internal research on desalination.
“States like New Mexico and others, we need to get creative with figuring out different ways to fill up the bucket…we’re all going to be competing over the same freshwater sources. So I think we do need to get creative,” she said.
Capelle said that one of the main critiques she hears about desalination is that it is expensive and uses a lot of energy. She acknowledges that desalination is more expensive and energy intensive than freshwater treatment.
“Those were the easy sources. That’s why we use them first,” she said.
At the same time, Capelle said other options are to pipe water hundreds of miles, which can be challenging, expensive and energy intensive.
D’Antonio also identified the cost of building a desalination facility and the energy required as some of the biggest challenges, along with finding the best option for disposing of the concentrate.
But, as a former state engineer and a member of the New Mexico Desalination Association, he sees opportunities for brackish water and the strategic water supply.
“Many western states are using desalination plants to augment their freshwater supplies,” D’Antonio said. “The Strategic Water Supply would greatly benefit New Mexico to aggressively jump into the desalination business by funding a few pilot projects around the state. This should be done in conjunction with ensuring the protection of public health and the environment of the treated brackish water reuse.”
This story was produced by New Mexico Political Report, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Brett Fleck stands by the Arizona Canal in Peoria, Ariz. on March 18, 2024. The water department he manages is focused on making sure taps keep flowing in the long term, even as Peoria’s main source of water shrinks. (Alex Hager / KUNC)
Brett Fleck does not have an easy job. He manages water for a city in the desert. He has to keep taps flowing while facing a complicated equation: The city is growing — attracting big business and thousands of new residents every year — but its main source of water is shrinking.
Standing on the edge of a sun-baked canal with palm trees lining its banks, Fleck watched water flow into the pipes that supply the Phoenix suburb of Peoria, Arizona.
“We’re really having a complete changeover in how people view the Colorado River from a reliability standpoint,” he said.
The river, which accounts for about 60% of the city’s supply, is stretched thin. Its water is used by 40 million people from Wyoming to Mexico. Climate change is shrinking its supply, and the federal government is scrambling to boost depleted reservoirs. The Biden Administration has poured money on the problem, allocating $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act for Colorado River projects.
Across the seven U.S. states that use its water, that money has been used to save water in a number of ways — from patching up leaky canals to paying farmers to pause crop planting. A relatively small chunk of that money has gone to cities, but it’s being welcomed with open arms in the Phoenix metro area.
Peoria’s water department is one of seven in Arizona getting paid by the federal government to leave some of its supplies in Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir. In May 2023, the Biden Administration announced it would set aside $157 million for a handful of Arizona cities and one mining company to cut back on their take from the Colorado River.
Following that money and seeing how cities are spending the federal cash reveals a major trend in Arizona’s water management.
The sun sets behind Phoenix on June 14, 2024. The city and its suburbs are attracting new residents and businesses despite shrinking water supplies. Local leaders say they have plans for expensive engineering projects that will help keep taps flowing for decades to come. (Alex Hager / KUNC)
The Biden administration framed the spending effort as “water conservation,” but Arizona’s municipal water leaders aren’t using it to make changes traditionally thought of as conservation. Instead of paying for small tweaks to water use – like encouraging residents to install low-flow showerheads or rip out their thirsty lawns – many are thinking bigger, putting their multimillion dollar checks towards billion dollar infrastructure projects that are aimed at keeping taps flowing for decades to come.
Basically, cities like Peoria are planning to engineer their way out of the problem.
“When you don’t have that reliability,” Fleck said, “You have to make additional investments for alternatives, backup supplies, etc. That’s what it really takes to make sense of the world that we live in now.”
A changing mindset
Much ink has been spilled about the future of life in Phoenix. The sprawling metro area – referred to by locals as “The Valley” – is home to about 5 million people. A booming economy and strikingly wide suburban sprawl are pushing its borders further into once-unoccupied dusty expanses in nearly every direction. Meanwhile, climate change has inspired growing skepticism about the long-term sustainability of that growth.
Scorching temperatures, which consistently peak above 110 degrees in the summer, and much-publicized threats to its major sources of water, have accelerated calls in the national media for central Arizona to pump the brakes on expansion.
But on the ground, the people that run water departments in cities and suburbs project optimism.
“We have to plan ahead and say, ‘It’s not enough to have enough water to live this year, this month, two years, or five years,” said Cynthia Campbell, a water management advisor for the City of Phoenix. “We plan for 100, and that’s the way we’ve approached it in Arizona. That, I think, is the secret sauce that keeps us sustainable.”
Downtown Phoenix viewed from City Hall on March 4, 2024. The city’s water leaders say they’re nearing the ceiling on how much water can be saved through traditional conservation, and are instead turning their eyes and budgets toward new technology that will help decrease demand for water from the Colorado River and underground aquifers. (Alex Hager / KUNC)
Campbell described shifting attitudes in Phoenix-area water management. Dwindling water supplies have, for years, forced those cities to do more with less. She explained how Phoenix uses less water now than it did two decades ago, despite significant population growth. The city mostly chalks that up to more efficient water use by homes and businesses, specifically highlighting water that was conserved through more efficient outdoor watering for lawns and plants.
But now, those practices are getting closer to the ceiling in terms of how much water they can save, and new residents keep arriving.
“At some point in time, there does have to be a recognition of the scope of the problem,” Campbell said. “You just can’t conserve your way out of it.”
That mindset has put one word on the lips of many water managers in central Arizona: augmentation.
Engineering a way to more water
The word “augmentation” has different definitions depending on who you ask, but it generally means water departments are focused on adding new water supplies, rather than just using less of the water they already have.
Peoria and Phoenix water leaders highlighted two expensive infrastructure projects that fall into the augmentation category. The first is a massive renovation of a nearby dam that would make its reservoir bigger, allowing cities in the area to store more water during wet winters.
The Bartlett Dam holds back a reservoir about an hour’s drive northeast of Phoenix. Over time, the reservoir has gotten shallower, as sediment in the water settles to the bottom and piles up, reducing the amount of water storage. Bartlett Reservoir and nearby Horseshoe Reservoir have lost a combined 45,000 acre-feet of their total holding capacity. By comparison, Peoria, a city of nearly 200,000 people, gets a total of 35,000 acre-feet of water delivered each year.
Because the reservoirs reach capacity more quickly, water managers have been forced to release excess water instead of storing it for dryer times. A proposed expansion of the dam would make it easier to store that water by making Bartlett Dam about 100 feet taller. Peoria and Phoenix are among 22 cities, tribes and farm districts that are interested in chipping in for the project, which is projected to cost about $1 billion.
Water is released from behind Bartlett Dam in March 2023 after a wet winter. Cities that use water stored behind the dam want to fund a $1 billion expansion of the dam to make sure that extra water can be stored instead of released downstream. (Michael McNamara / Salt River Project)
The dam holds back water from the Verde River, part of the broader Salt River watershed, whose supplies are managed separately from the Colorado River. But increasing the amount of stored water from that system could help cities ease up on their Colorado River reliance.
A second idea that falls into the augmentation category represents an entirely different way of “adding” water to the system, and it’s part of a regional trend: cleaning up sewage and making it drinkable again.
Water managers refer to the practice as “advanced water purification,” or “wastewater recycling,” and it’s stirring up a lot of excitement – and big investment – in a number of places that share similar anxieties about shrinking supplies from the Colorado River.
Small cities are eyeing the expensive new technology for the future, and big ones are already putting shovels in dirt.
In Phoenix, the city council greenlit a $300 million construction project to revive a shuttered water treatment plant in the city’s far northern reaches, which officials said would lay the groundwork for installing equipment to turn wastewater into clean drinking water.
Elsewhere in the Colorado River basin, big cities are forging ahead with the practice. In the Los Angeles Metro area, the main water distributor proposed a $3.4 billion wastewater recycling facility, and has rallied hundreds of millions of dollars in support from out-of-state water agencies that could buy California’s unused Colorado River water if the new facility is a success. In Colorado, the state government passed first-of-its-kind legislation that would make it easier for cities to bring the new water treatment tech online, and some cities say they’re 3-5 years away from building it.
Beneath the surface
Phoenix-area water managers have to keep a lot of balls in the air at once. The water flowing through their pipes comes from a few sources, each with very different challenges.
The Colorado River, which mostly begins as snowmelt in the faraway Rocky Mountains, comes to the metro via the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile canal that cuts through the desert. The Salt and Verde Rivers bring snow and runoff from a watershed that covers the colder, higher-altitude parts of Arizona. And one source starts much closer to home: groundwater.
That last water source, at least recently, has proven the trickiest to manage. Groundwater use and management have become hot-button political issues in Arizona as experts raise alarm about underground stores of water that are shrinking fast, including some that, once drained, would take generations to refill.
Water experts say all of the most pressing water issues facing Arizona cities – the shrinking Colorado River, the overtaxed underground aquifers, and work to augment existing supplies – are all smaller pieces of a bigger puzzle.
Kathryn Sorensen, a former director of Phoenix’s water department, said Colorado River shortages will probably turn up the pressure on groundwater.
“Our aquifers, while large and plentiful, are also fossil aquifers, so if we pump them out too quickly, then it’s just gone,” said Sorensen, who now researches water policy at Arizona State University. “So these types of things like advanced water purification, augmentation, additional conservation efforts, those all play into avoiding the use of those fossil groundwater supplies.”
Sorensen described the groundwater supplies – and whether or not they’re managed sustainably – as pivotally important to Arizona’s long-term future.
“If we’re going to continue to have the sort of economic opportunities we have here and the quality of life that we have here a few generations from now,” she said, “It’s really of utmost importance that we protect groundwater today.”
‘There’s not a lot of gambling going on here’
Groundwater has become the latest issue to help fuel a wave of national attention on the long-term viability of Phoenix as a place for people to live.
Articles with headlines like “How long can the world’s ‘least sustainable’ city survive?” have helped to crystalize nationwide skepticism about central Arizona’s future. In 2023, state officials put a pause on some new subdivisions because they couldn’t draw enough water from underground. The announcement launched a flurry of news coverage. The New York Times framed it as “the beginning of the end” for development around Phoenix.
In that article, Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s governor, is quoted as saying, “We are not out of water and we will not be running out of water.”
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs speaks in Tucson, Ariz. on March 13, 2024. State leaders have been forced to advocate for policies that respond to the Phoenix area’s water supply crunch while simultaneously trying to tamp down any fears that the city and suburbs might not be a good place to live and work. (Alex Hager / KUNC)
Hobbs and other leaders in the state have been forced into a bit of a juggling act. Some are trying to advocate for policies that respond to the Phoenix area’s water supply crunch while simultaneously trying to tamp down any fears that the city and suburbs might not be a good place to live and work.
Campbell, who advises Phoenix’s political leaders on water decisions, said she’s confident that people who buy a house or open a business in Phoenix will have water in the future, because those policymakers are feeling a lot of pressure to make sure growth is sustainable.
“They know that the moment there’s a crack in the armor,” she said, “The moment that we have to turn off a tap, every national media outlet will cover it, and it will have a devastating effect on our economy. So there’s not a lot of gambling going on here.”
What ‘sustainable’ growth looks like
Sustainable growth certainly weighs on the mind of water manager Brett Fleck in Peoria.
The city itself touted its status as one of the nation’s top “boomtowns,” growing by 19% in the five-year stretch between 2016 and 2021. It recently paved the way for a massive, $2 billion microchip operation. Amkor Technology’s 56-acre facility in Peoria is set to be the nation’s largest semiconductor packaging and test facility, and will likely use a massive amount of water.
“Do I think Arizona can continue to grow sustainably? As long as we continue to make the investments and plan, absolutely,” he said. “The day that we stop making those investments in our sustainability is the day that we probably shouldn’t be growing anymore.”
Fleck said his city is working with Amkor to create a system that brings recycled water to the facility, so the semiconductor operation doesn’t draw from the drinking supply.
Brett Fleck shows where Colorado River water enters the city’s water treatment facility in Peoria, Ariz. on March 18, 2024. The city has plans to build new water purification technology that will turn sewage into usable water, decreasing the strain on the Colorado River and groundwater. (Alex Hager / KUNC)
At a relatively small water treatment plant on Peoria’s western edge, the city’s water system is getting upgraded in real time and the facility is quickly expanding its footprint.
“This water reclamation facility is really the start of Peoria’s water future,” Fleck said as workers in hard hats crisscrossed the dirt expanse behind him.
Treated water from the plant could see a few fates, Fleck said. It may be pumped into underground storage, sent to the giant new microchip facility, or maybe even purified to drinking standards and sent back into pipes. The latter is probably a decade from reality.
“It’s all based on funding,” Fleck said.
Now that cities around Arizona are seeing the promise of new technology and methods to get more out of their endangered water supplies, the massive cost of those projects stands as the biggest hurdle to their implementation. Fleck said the billions of federal dollars being sent to remedy the Southwest’s water woes pale in comparison to the tens or hundreds of billions needed to build needed infrastructure.
“Unfortunately, it’s a drop in the bucket,” he said. “However, at least we’re headed in the right direction. So at least we’re making those investments, and we’re recognizing that we need to make those investments to pivot away from our very large reliance on Colorado River supplies.”
Armed with a combination of federal, state, and local money, cities all around the Phoenix area are moving in that direction. Tempe, for example, has similar plans to Peoria and plans to open a water recycling facility by 2025. Nearby Scottsdale hosts one of only three water treatment facilities in the nation that is part of a pilot program for advanced water purification, and is poised to bring it into regular use.
An uncertain future
Arizona’s city leaders say they’re doing all they can to fend off anxiety about an uncertain future for water supply. Two big factors, largely out of those cities’ hands, mean that anxiety is justified.
The first is funding. Large-scale, high-tech water projects that come with nine- or ten-figure price tags benefit greatly from federal help. The Biden Administration has spent an amount of money that one water expert called, “the largest investment in drinking water infrastructure and water supply infrastructure that we’ve seen in a generation.”
Future administrations might not be so spendy.
“Federal funding is always a dicey proposition,” said Sorensen, the ASU water researcher. “Relying on annual appropriations, it can be hinky, especially when you have to compete with other very worthy federal priorities.”
The second big cause for uncertainty is the messy, ongoing negotiation process that will result in new rules for sharing the Colorado River. The current rules for divvying up its water expire in 2026, and the people in charge of writing new ones are stuck in a heated standoff.
Those people are negotiators from the seven states that use its water. Despite their differences, they generally agree that climate change has shrunk the amount of water in the river, and states need to cut back on demand accordingly.
Tom Buschatzke (right), Arizona’s top water negotiator, sits on a panel about Colorado River management in Boulder, Colo. on June 6, 2024. Every proposed water cutback plan, even the one co-signed by Arizona itself, puts more of Arizona’s water on the chopping block than any other state. (Alex Hager / KUNC)
Their disagreements, though – sometimes rooted in century-old rivalries between states – mean that it’s not clear exactly how much water, if any, each state should lose.
But every proposed cutback plan, even the one co-signed by Arizona itself, puts more of Arizona’s water on the chopping block than any other state.
That is due to a system called prior appropriation, which serves as the bedrock of Colorado River management. In short, it means that the first person to use water will be the last to lose it in times of shortage. And when it comes to Colorado River use, Arizona sits in a more vulnerable legal position.
The canal that carries water to central Arizona from the Colorado river was authorized in 1968, and the users who depend on its water are first in line to have their water taken away when reservoirs are low.
Sorensen said that fact is a major motivator for Arizona’s water leaders to make sure they manage supplies in a sustainable way.
“We’ve known since 1968 that our water was first to be cut when there wasn’t enough to go around, and that has made us prepare very methodically for those cuts,” Sorensen said. “The pressure has certainly been turned up, but it’s pressure that’s always existed.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. It was produced in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Runyon reported the six-episode narrative series for KUNC, the NPR station for northern Colorado, before joining The Water Desk in September 2023.
The Water Desk Co-director Luke Runyon
The series follows the length of the Colorado River from its headwaters in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains to its delta in northern Mexico, highlighting the communities and individuals grappling with water scarcity along the way.
Best podcast in small market radio in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming in the regional Edward R. Murrow awards from Radio Television Digital News Association
First place for Best Podcast among extra-large newsrooms in the Society of Professional Journalists’ annual Top of the Rockies contest, which includes news organizations in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico
Runyon began reporting for the series in 2021, and developed the concept during his Ted Scripps fellowship at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism. He reported, wrote and produced the series. Johanna Zorn edited the project. Jason Paton sound designed and mixed the series.
Reporting for “Thirst Gap” was made possible in part with an award from The Water Desk, along with support from the Walton Family Foundation, the Colorado Water Center and the Colorado State University Office of Engagement and Extension.
Leslie Hagenstein indicates where the New Fork River flows through her property on Mar. 27, 2024. She signed up for a program that pays her to pause irrigation on her land in order to save Colorado River water. Some experts say the System Conservation Pilot Program, or SCPP, is costly and may not be the most effective way to save Colorado River water. (Alex Hager/KUNC)
Wyoming native Leslie Hagenstein lives on the ranch where she grew up and remembers her grandmother and father delivering milk in glass bottles from the family’s Mount Airy Dairy.
The cottonwood-lined property, at the foot of the Wind River Mountains south of Pinedale, is not only home to Hagenstein, her older sister and their dogs, but to bald eagles and moose. But this summer, for the second year in a row, water from Pine Creek will not turn 600 acres of grass and alfalfa a lush green.
On a blustery day in late March, Hagenstein stood in her fields, now brown and weed-choked, and explained why she cried after she chose to participate in a program that pays ranchers in the Upper Colorado River basin to leave their water in the river.
“You have these very lush grasses, and you have a canal or a ditch that’s full of this beautiful clear, gorgeous water that comes out of these beautiful mountains. It’s nirvana,” Hagenstein said. “And then last year, it looks like Armageddon. I mean, it’s nothing, it’s very sad, there’s just no growth at all. There’s no green.”
The Colorado River basin has endured decades of drier-than-normal conditions, and steady demand. That imbalance is draining its largest reservoirs, and making it nearly impossible for them to recover, putting the region’s water security in jeopardy. Reining in demand throughout the vast western watershed has become a drumbeat among policymakers at both the state and federal level. Hagenstein’s ranch is an example of what that intentional reduction in water use looks like.
A ditch runs dry through Leslie Hagenstein’s fields near Pinedale, Wyo. on Mar. 27, 2024. Through the federally-funded System Conservation Pilot Program, she was able to make 13 times more than she would have by leasing her fields out to grow hay. (Alex Hager/KUNC)
In Sublette County, Hagenstein said it’s rare for people to make a living solely on raising livestock and growing hay anymore. In addition to ranching, she worked as a nurse practitioner for more than 40 years before retiring. And when she looked at her bank accounts, she realized she needed a better way to meet expenses if she was going to keep the ranch afloat in the future. Hagenstein said it was a no-brainer. She signed up for the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP) in 2023. Through the federally funded program, she was able to make 13 times more than she would have by leasing it out to grow hay.
Since its inception as a mass experiment in water use reduction, the program has divided farmers and ranchers. Concerns over the high cost, the limited water savings, the difficulty in measuring and tracking conserved water, and the potential damage to local agricultural economies still linger. But without fully overhauling the West’s water rights system, few tools exist to get farmers and ranchers — the Colorado River’s majority users — to conserve voluntarily.
“I’m a Wyoming native,” Hagenstein said. “I don’t want to push our water downstream. I don’t want to disregard it. But I also have to survive in this landscape. And to survive in this landscape, you have to get creative.”
SCPP participation doubles in 2024
Driven by overuse, drought and climate change, water levels in Lake Powell fell to their lowest point ever in 2022. The nation’s second-largest reservoir provided a stark visual indicator of the Colorado River’s supply-demand imbalance. Those falling levels also threatened the ability to produce hydroelectric power and prompted officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to call on states for an unprecedented level of water conservation. The agency gave the seven states that use the Colorado River a tight deadline to save an additional 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to fill 1 acre of land to a height of 1 foot. One acre-foot generally provides enough water for one to two households for a year.)
States gave the federal government no plans to save that much water in one fell swoop, instead proposing a patchwork of smaller conservation measures aimed at boosting the reservoirs and avoiding infrastructural damage.
The Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC), an agency that brings together water leaders from Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, offered up the “5-Point Plan,” one arm of which was restarting the SCPP.
In 2023, after the federal government announced it would spend $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on Colorado River programs, the Upper Colorado River Commission decided to reboot the SCPP, which was first tested from 2015 to 2018. The program pays eligible water users in the four Upper Basin states to leave their fields dry for the irrigation season and let that water flow downstream.
But a hasty rollout to the SCPP in 2023 meant low participation numbers. Only 64 water-saving projects were approved, and about 38,000 acre-feet of water was conserved across the four states, which cost nearly $16 million. Water users complained about not having enough time to plan for the upcoming growing season and said an initial lowball offer from the UCRC of $150 per acre-foot was insulting and came with a complicated haggling process to get a higher payment. UCRC officials said the short notice and challenges with getting the word out about the program contributed to low participation numbers in 2023.
A University of Wyoming study surveyed the region’s growers about water conservation between November 2022 and March 2023. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in the Upper Basin were not even aware that the SCPP existed.
UCRC commissioners voted to run the program again in 2024, but said this time projects should focus on local drought resiliency on a longer-term basis. UCRC officials tweaked the program based on lessons learned in 2023, and the 2024 program had nearly double the participation, with 109 projects and nearly 64,000 acre-feet of water expected to be conserved.
“I view the doubling of interest and participation from one year to the next as a significant success,” UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom said.
What happens to conserved water?
Despite one of its stated intentions — protecting critical reservoir levels — water being left in streams by SCPP-participating irrigators is not tracked to Lake Powell, the storage bucket for the Upper Basin.
In total, across 2023 and 2024, the program spent $45 million to save a little more than 1% of the Colorado River water allocated to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.
Although engineers have calculated how much water is saved by individual projects, known as conserved consumptive use, officials are not measuring how much of that conserved water ends up in Lake Powell. And the laws that govern water rights allow downstream users to simply take the water that an upstream user participating in the SCPP leaves in the river, potentially canceling out the attempt at banking that water.
These types of temporary, voluntary and compensated conservation programs aren’t new to the Upper Basin. In addition to the pilot program from 2015 to 2018, the state of Colorado undertook a two-year study of the idea of a demand management program by convening nine work groups to examine the issue.
System conservation and demand management, while conceptually the same, have one big difference: A demand management program would track the water so that downstream users don’t grab it and create a special pool to store the conserved water in Lake Powell. With system conservation, the water simply becomes part of the Colorado River system, with no certainty about where it ends up.
This lack of accounting for the water has some asking whether the SCPP is accomplishing what it set out to do and whether it is worth the high cost to taxpayers.
Even if all the roughly 64,000 acre-feet from the SCPP in 2024 makes it to Lake Powell, it’s still a drop in the bucket for the reservoir; last year, 13.4 million acre-feet flowed into Lake Powell. The reservoir currently holds about 8.2 million acre-feet and has a capacity of about 25 million acre-feet.
“I still haven’t really seen evidence of total water savings or anything like that,” said Elizabeth Koebele, a professor of political science and director of the graduate program of hydrologic sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. Koebele wrote her doctoral dissertation on the first iteration of the SCPP. “As far as getting water to reservoirs, I’m not sure that we’ve seen a lot of success from the System Conservation Pilot Program so far.”
And the program has been expensive. For the 2024 iteration of the program, UCRC officials offered a fixed price per acre-foot that applicants could take or leave — no haggling this time. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming paid agricultural water users about $500 an acre-foot; the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry, New Mexico’s sole participant in 2023 and 2024, received $300 an acre-foot. Projects that involved municipal or industrial water use were compensated on a case-by-case basis, and those that involved leaving water in reservoirs were paid $150 an acre-foot. The majority of projects in both years involved taking water off fields for the whole season or part of the season, known as fallowing.
The UCRC doled out nearly $29 million in payments to water users in 2024. The program paid about $45 million to participants in 2023 and 2024 combined. Some participants are using these payments to upgrade their irrigation systems, Cullom said, which helps maintain the vitality of local agriculture.
But even with this amount of money spent, Koebele said it may still not cover the costs to participants for things such as long term impacts to soil health that come with taking water off fields for a season or two. After the infusion of IRA money runs out, it’s unclear how such a program would be funded in the future.
“I also worry that we don’t have an endless supply of money to compensate users for conservation in the basin,” Koebele said. “And perhaps we need to be thinking about — rather than doing temporary conservation — investments in longer-term conservation beyond what we’re already doing.”
The Green River flows through Sublette County, Wyo. on Mar. 27, 2024. Snowmelt-fed rivers and streams near the Colorado River’s headwaters have been at the heart of recent negotiations about the region’s water future. (Alex Hager/KUNC)
Western Slope water managers critical of SCPP
Some groups have concerns with the SCPP beyond its issues with accounting for how much water ends up in Lake Powell.
The Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District represents 15 counties on Colorado’s Western Slope. Their mission is to protect, conserve, use and develop the water within its boundaries, which has often meant fighting Front Range entities that want to take more from the headwaters of the Colorado River in the form of transmountain diversions. Sometimes, that means voicing concerns about conservation programs that it thinks have the potential to harm Western Slope water users.
River District officials have been vocal critics of the SCPP, pointing out the ways that it could, if not done carefully, harm certain water users and rural agricultural communities. Because of the way water left in the stream by participants in the SCPP can be picked up by the next water user in line, some of which are Front Range cities, at least two of the projects this year could result in less — not more — water in the Colorado River, according to comments that the River District submitted to the state of Colorado. (One of these projects dropped out in 2024.)
“Without significant improvements, it would be hard for the River District to support additional expenditures on system conservation,” said Peter Fleming, the district’s general counsel.
The River District had also wanted a say in the SCPP process in 2023, going as far as creating their own checklist for deciding project approval, but UCRC officials said the commission had sole authority to approve projects.
Water users from all sectors — including agriculture, cities and industry — are allowed to participate in the program, but, in practice, all of the 2023 and 2024 projects in Colorado involve Western Slope agricultural water users. That’s partly because the price that the SCPP offered was less than the market value of water on the Front Range.
“If you’re simply basing it on a set dollar value per acre-foot, you’re going to result in disproportionate impacts to areas of the state where the economic value of water is not as high as others,” Fleming said. “You’re going to end up with all the water coming from the Western Slope. … You shouldn’t create sacrificial lambs.”
Upper Basin facing increased pressure
The Upper Basin’s conservation program is playing out against the backdrop of watershedwide negotiations with the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) about how to share the river after the current guidelines governing river operations expire in 2026.
After failing to come to an agreement, the Upper and Lower basins submitted competing proposals to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Lower Basin officials committed to a baseline of 1.5 million acre-feet in cuts, plus more when conditions warrant. They also called for the Upper Basin to share in those additional cuts when reservoirs dip below a certain level.
Upper Basin officials have balked at the notion that their water users should share in any cuts, saying they already suffer shortages in dry years. The source of the problem, they say, is overuse by the Lower Basin.
Plus, without ever having violated the 1922 Colorado River Compact by using more than the 7.5 million acre-feet allotted to them, they say there’s no way to enforce mandatory cuts on the Upper Basin.
But under increased pressure from the Lower Basin, and facing a drier future as climate change continues to rob the Colorado River of flows, Upper Basin water managers have made one small concession. In their proposal, they have offered to continue “parallel activities” like the SCPP, but said these programs will be separate from any post-2026 agreement with the Lower Basin. The congressional authorization for the SCPP expires at the end of 2024, and it’s unclear whether water managers will implement a program in 2025 or beyond.
Inherent in the Upper Basin’s stance is a contradiction: Why maintain that both the source of the problem and responsibility for a solution rest with the Lower Basin, but then agree to do the SCPP or a conservation program like it?
“I think that they’re basically saying that the Lower Basin needs to get their act together before we actually really need to come to the table in a realistic way,” said Drew Bennett, a University of Wyoming professor of private-lands stewardship. “I think they feel like, ‘We don’t actually really need to do anything.’ That the SCPP is actually above and beyond what they need to be doing. Is that reality? I don’t know. But I think that’s sort of the message they’re trying to send in negotiations.”
Docks and buoys, once floating atop dozens of feet of water, sit stranded on the sand at Lake Powell’s Bullfrog Marina on April 9, 2023. Record-low levels at the reservoir helped spur water officials to reboot the System Conservation Pilot Program. (Alex Hager/KUNC)
Grower attitudes key to program success
Some experts say the program’s real value is not getting water into depleted reservoirs. It is testing out a potential tool to help farmers and ranchers adapt to a future with less water. They frame it as an experiment that provides crucial information and lessons on how an Upper Basin conservation program could be scaled up. It also continues to ease water users into the concept of using less should a more permanent water conservation program come to pass.
“This program kind of, I think, helps grease the skids for that process that gets people comfortable for how it operates,” said Alex Funk, who worked for the Colorado Water Conservation Board in 2019 and helped to guide the state’s demand management study with regard to agricultural impacts. “Just seeing the doubling of the amount of acre-feet conserved under the second year and then the interest shows that, yeah, I think there could be some longevity to the program. … I think one has to be optimistic because I don’t see how the Upper Basin navigates a post-2026 future without such a program.”
Funk now works as senior counsel and director of water resources at the nonprofit Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The group receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also funds a portion of Colorado River coverage from KUNC and The Water Desk.
Cows graze in Routt County, Colo. on Oct. 8, 2021. Government-funded water conservation programs have divided farmers and ranchers. While the System Conservation Program initially had low buy-in, water officials say it helped them gather valuable data about working with growers. (Alex Hager/KUNC)
Cullom, executive director of the agency that runs the SCPP, pushed back on the idea that it is intended to help correct the supply/demand imbalance on the river, which he said is the fault of the Lower Basin.
“The intent of the program is to develop new tools for the upper division water users to adapt to a drier future,” he said. “We’re trying to develop tools that benefit the local communities and producers and water users in the four upper division states through drought resiliency, new tools, the ability to explore crop switching and irrigation efficiencies.”
Of all the challenges in setting up a program such as this — funding, pricing, calculating water saved, getting the word out — the biggest may be the attitudes of water users themselves, some of whom have a deep-seated mistrust of the federal government. Like Hagenstein, all of the water users that Aspen Journalism and KUNC interviewed for this story said financial reasons were the biggest driver behind their participation in the SCPP.
Bennett’s research also explained some of the reasons why growers may be hesitant to enroll in conservation programs such as the SCPP. It found that farmers and ranchers trusted local organizations to administer conservation programs significantly more than state or federal ones.
If demand management strategies were deployed, 74% of survey respondents said they’d prefer to have a local agency manage the program, as opposed to a state or federal agency. Only about 14% of growers said there is a high level of trust between water users and water management agencies in their states. The same percentage said their state’s planning process was adequate for dealing with water supply issues.
These findings point to a stumbling block that the UCRC and other agencies must overcome if they hope to create a longer-term conservation program.
Hagenstein, the Wyoming rancher, has experienced those attitudes firsthand. She has been on the receiving end of insults and name-calling because of her participation in the SCPP.
But Hagenstein says the SCPP has allowed her to have money in her pocket to continue ranching long term.
“I didn’t anticipate it would be so beneficial,” she said. “It bought us time to stay in ranching is the long and the short of it. So, I’m most grateful for the abundance that the federal government offered us. … You know, some would call it a golden goose.”
This story was reported and produced collaboratively by Aspen Journalism, a nonprofit, investigative news organization, and Northern Colorado-based public radio station KUNC, and is a part of KUNC’s ongoing coverage of the Colorado River supported by the Walton Family Foundation. Additional editing resources and other support for this story came from The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Deep snow in the Sierra Nevada, about 90 miles east of Sacramento, on March 3, 2023. Photo by Jonathan Wong, California Department of Water Resources.
For California’s Sierra Nevada, the winter of 2022-2023 delivered an epic snowpack that broke many records and busted a severe drought.
The exceptional season, dubbed the “snowpocalypse” by some, caused havoc during the winter and flooding later in the year while also replenishing reservoirs and making skiers happy—once the roads and resorts emerged from storm closures.
Both hazardous and helpful, the banner year was also of interest to snow scientists, such as Adrienne Marshall, an assistant professor of geology and geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden.
Marshall was lead author of a paper published in April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that introduces the term “snow deluge” to describe extreme snow years like the one California weathered.
I spoke with Marshall recently about the study and its conclusion that snow deluges are likely to decline in the decades ahead as human-caused climate change continues to warm the planet and make it more likely that rain, rather than snow, will fall.
The video below contains the full interview, and the Q&A that follows includes excerpts from the conversation, edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
May 7 interview with snow scientist Adrienne Marshall of the Colorado School of Mines
Could you please summarize the paper and its main findings?
In this paper, we were interested in looking at what’s happening with our biggest snow years. The snow community has had a lot of focus in the last several years on snow drought: what’s happening with changes in our lowest snow year, and how much more frequent should we expect those low snow years to get? But when we focus on the low snow years, there’s a little bit of a risk that we neglect to look at what’s happening with our biggest snow years. So when we saw the 2023 water year come along in California, it provided sort of a great study to dive into this question of biggest snow years.
We argue that we should call these big snow years “snow deluges.” We looked at how rare the snow deluge in California water year 2022-2023 was. Essentially, we see that it was, statewide, about a 1-in-54-year event is our best estimate.
There was a lot of discussion at the time of whether it was a record-breaking water year or not. We saw that about 42% of sites had the highest April 1 snow water equivalent ever recorded. That was more record-breaking sites than we saw in any other water year in California.
We were also interested in the extent to which the 2023 snow deluge and others like it are caused by relatively cool versus wet conditions. And maybe not surprisingly, we saw that both cool and wet conditions are required to have these snow deluges. You can get maybe average temperatures and average precipitation, but you really couldn’t have a very warm year and get a snow deluge.
Finally, we wanted to know what happens to our snow deluges in warmer climate scenarios. So we looked at the outputs of some climate models and found that it looks like—on average across climate models—we should expect our snow deluge years to decline in terms of the amount of snow we see on the ground. But they do decline less on a percentage basis than our average years.
How did you come up with the definition for a snow deluge?
There’s a little bit of a parallel here to snow drought—and drought in general—where generally there’s a lot of academic debate over how we should define these things.
In this case, we used April 1 snow water equivalent because that’s the type of data for which we have the longest record. Snow surveyors have been going out into the mountains to observe the amount of snow at individual locations for as long as 100 years or so, but they could only do that historically on a few days of the water year and commonly did it April 1st. So that’s a bit of a decision based on data availability.
Then we used a definition of looking at a 1-in-20-year return interval—the event that you would expect to see once every 20 years, statistically on average—as our cutoff threshold for what we call a snow deluge.
Employees of the California Department of Water Resources measure the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada on April 3, 2023. Photo: Kenneth James, California Department of Water Resources.
Did any of these findings surprise you?
Probably the most surprising was that the 2023 water year in California—we looked over November to March—was anomalously cold. And that was a little unexpected, particularly in the context of the record-breaking warm global temperatures. As far as I know, that’s just sort of an anomaly with respect to the rest of the global trend.
In terms of how we should expect the snow deluges to change, there are two competing factors happening. One is as conditions get warmer, of course we get less precipitation falling as snow, more falling as rain, and so we expect our total snow accumulations to decline. The other sort of competing component is as we get warmer conditions, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, so there’s an increasing probability of more precipitation intensity. Those two factors might counterbalance each other to some extent. We didn’t know for sure what the net effect would be and saw that it looks like the net effect is the warming having a bigger effect in terms of our snow accumulations.
Is it likely we’ll ever see another deluge like last year’s?
The 1-in-54-year event statistic that we came up with means that each year—over that same spatial area (California)—there’s a little under a 2% chance of an event that big happening again. That said, given our findings with the climate models, it looks like as our emissions rise and warming continues over time, that percentage and that probability is decreasing. So it’s getting less and less likely that we would see a snowfall event that big again. So I’m inclined to say that, statistically, it’s not likely that we should expect to see another year that big.
Marshall talks about her snow deluge research at the 91st Annual Western Snow Conference at Oregon State University in Corvallis on April 24, 2024. Photo by Mitch Tobin, The Water Desk.
What are you able to say about snow deluges in other parts of the West?
We did see a remarkable amount of consistency in terms of the climate model projections for changes in snow deluges. It was really across almost the entire Western U.S. that we saw the average of the nine climate models we looked at were projecting declines in snow deluges and smaller changes in the snow deluges than the median years. That was consistent across California, Colorado, and the rest of the Western U.S.
With atmospheric rivers, we hear they can be both beneficial and hazardous. Is it helpful to think of snow deluges in the same way?
It’s certainly true that they can be beneficial and hazardous, even if we were to just think about one industry, like winter recreation and skiing. Of course, it’s good to get lots of snow at your ski resorts. And there were parts of the year where people couldn’t access the ski resorts and they had to close.
Similarly, you might have snow deluges that are good at one time of year, like beneficial for our summer water supply, but detrimental to our infrastructure in the winter. Or, ecologically, it might be beneficial for one type of organism and detrimental for another. So they’re certainly complex in terms of their effects. I don’t know that you could isolate it to some quantity being good and then above that being bad because I think there’s a big dependence on good or bad for who, when and where, which would be great to dive into. It sounds like decades of research, too.
These maps visualize the Sierra Nevada’s snowpack on April 1, 2023. Snow water equivalent is a measure of how much water the snowpack contains. The right map shows the snowpack above 5,000 feet was more than 300% of average in some locations. Source: Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.
What are the implications for water managers?
A big snow year—a snow deluge—can certainly help refill our reservoirs, which we’ve seen. The fact that we see these (snow deluges) declining might suggest that we shouldn’t count on big snow years coming along periodically and saving us.
Snow tends to be more predictable from a water manager’s perspective in terms of when they’re going to get runoff because if we have precipitation falling as rain, then you’re just kind of constrained to the uncertainty of your seasonal weather, which is pretty hard to forecast. But if you have a whole bunch of snow sitting in the mountains above your watershed, you know it’s going to melt and the question is how much do you have out there, when will it melt, and should you release water now to maintain flood storage capacity or just expect that maybe you’ve already gotten most of your snow runoff for the year?
So losing that snow deluge is probably challenging from a water management perspective because those big snow years offer more predictability and more ability, potentially, to refill reservoirs than if you are just relying on rain, which is so much harder to predict on a seasonal scale.
Any other takeaways?
A very good question to think about is: how much can we save if we’re able to get ourselves on a lower warming scenario? So treat these projections of snow loss as very concerning projections to be aware of and that should inform our decisions about how hard we work to mitigate climate change, but not as fatalistic predictions. There is a lot that we can do societally to try to nudge ourselves ever towards those lower warming scenarios, and that is what we should be doing to save as much of our snowpack as we can.
Deep snow nearly buries a road sign along Highway 50 in El Dorado County, California, on March 3, 2023. At the time, nearby Sierra-at-Tahoe Ski Resort had already received nearly 500 inches during the snow deluge. Photo by Fred Greaves, California Department of Water Resources.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
