Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Jerd Smith):

December 23, 2025

A private development company is investing $150 million in an ambitious plan to harvest groundwater lying beneath sprawling northern Colorado ranches to serve fast-growing towns along the Interstate 25 corridor.

FrontRange H2O, backed by a Texas oil and real estate company, is behind the venture. The firm has been operating in Colorado for more than 20 years, treating and delivering wastewater from oil wells for oil industry reuse on the West Slope, and overseeing extensive real estate holdings in Denver and elsewhere, according to Brent Waller, who is president of the Loveland-based company.

“We were recycling produced water before it was cool,” Waller said. Produced water describes wastewater that is generated through oil production.

Experts say the large-scale, private urban water development  is the first of its kind in Colorado and could help  thirsty towns like Fort Collins and Loveland shore up their water systems.

But others worry that the privatization of water in the state could lead to price hikes and might also, because of its reliance on nonrenewable groundwater, undermine the state’s future water security.

Still, Front Range H20 believes its system will deliver water at less cost and sooner than other government-backed projects.

Until now, Colorado communities have relied on water that is captured, stored and treated by public, nonprofit water utilities, such as Denver Water. The agency is an independent entity governed by commissioners who are appointed by the Denver mayor. In other cases, cities operate their own water systems. Public entities such as these are required by law to regulate water rates, to issue bonds to finance their work, and they are subject to oversight by elected or appointed bodies.

But FrontRange H2O is a private company that is using millions of dollars in private financing to secure the water rights, obtain state permission to drill the groundwater wells, and to build a water treatment system and pipeline to carry the water. Although it must obtain state permission to drill the wells and build the water treatment plant, it is not subject to the same public oversight as a public government system would be.

“This kind of thing is common in Texas and Arizona, particularly with groundwater, but it is unique in Colorado,” said Adam Jokerst, Rocky Mountain regional director for WestWater Research, based in Fort Collins. Jokerst is a groundwater expert who has consulted with Front Range H2O on its northern Colorado plans.

FrontRange H2O refers to its current project as VitaH2O. Nine wells drilled into the aquifer are expected to generate up to 5,000 acre-feet of water initially, Waller said. An acre foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons of water and is eough to serve to two to four urban households for one year. The water  will be treated at a new plant north of Nunn and then delivered down to Cobb Lake, a reservoir owned by the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, or FCLWD.

The district was in the news earlier this year when it opted out of a large-scale water and reservoir project run by Northern Water known as NISP, the Northern Integrated Supply Project. It will instead partner with VitaH2O.

As the project moves forward, Waller said FCLWD will contribute an additional $150 million to help complete the new water supply project. Chris Pletcher, general manager of FCLWD, declined an interview request. The water district was NISP’s largest customer and was on track to pay $400 million to help build the giant system.

Colorado derives most of its water supplies from melting snows that fill its streams and rivers, but large swaths of the state, including Douglas County, rely heavily on wells drilled deep into aquifers, many of which are not recharged through rain and snow.

As the state grows, the pressure to tap these nonrenewable waters is growing as well.

According to the Colorado Division of Water Resources, interest in drilling high producing groundwater wells in northern Colorado is growing.

“There has been more activity in this area in the last 10 years,” said Tracy Kosloff, deputy state engineer at Colorado’s Division of Water Resources.

Major players in the area include Front Range H2O and the city of Greeley, among others.

The interest in nonrenewable groundwater worries people like Steve Boand, a former Douglas County commissioner and water consultant who has watched his region’s nonrenewable groundwater supplies shrink as they are used by fast-growing towns like Parker and Castle Rock.

Any project that relies on nonrenewable groundwater is problematic, Boand said.

“In general, sustainable water supplies are the preferred source,” Boand said, noting that Douglas County water providers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to recycle water and tap rivers and streams to wean themselves off nonrenewable groundwater. Their hope is, eventually, to use their aquifers only in drought years when surface supplies are scarce.

And that is part of the plan with VitaH2O, Waller said. The project will use surface supplies that the Fort Collins-Loveland district already owns to recharge the aquifers they plan to withdraw water from, in hopes that the treated water being pumped back into the ground in wet years will extend the life of the nonrenewable aquifers.

Under Colorado water law, groundwater can be drilled by whomever owns the land above the aquifer, but they must demonstrate that they are extracting water gradually and must prove it will last at least 100 years.

Waller said he believes the surface supplies that VitaH2O will inject back into the aquifers in wet years will extend the life of the system beyond 100 years, to 300 years or more.

East of Waller’s development, the city of Greeley has already invested $85 million in developing an aquifer system under the Terry Ranch that will supply water in drought years and will also store treated water, according to Sean Chambers, Greeley’s director of water and sewer utilities.

“What you are seeing now is a new approach to diversifying surface water supplies with this deep aquifer, nonrenewable groundwater … and there is a rush on that,” Chambers said.

Looming in the background is Northern Water’s NISP project. It was originally designed to serve 15 entities, but three have already pulled out, including the largest, the Fort Collins-Loveland district. Waller said he is in talks with several other communities, including Wellington and Eaton, who are looking for an alternative to the costly $2.7 billion NISP, which will rely on renewable water supplies from the Poudre and South Platte rivers.

Brad Wind, general manager of Northern Water, said NISP’s growing cost is prompting long-time supporters to rethink their participation and that some will inevitably go with other providers, such as VitaH2O.

“People have some hard choices to make,” Wind said.

How much water is available to be mined from these aquifers isn’t clear yet, though developers such as Waller and Greeley have invested heavily in doing the hydrological analysis that gives them an estimate of what is available.

But overuse is a major concern and Chambers says that is a key issue the city is addressing as it develops its system.

“Collectively we will have to find ways over time to make sure that northern Colorado and other communities that rely on this water don’t just mine it to extinction … Greeley goes into this effort with our eyes very wide open about that,” Chambers said.

“This is a resource that should last for 10 generations or longer and provide a runway for public officials to figure out how to build resilience into all of our sources of supply,” he said.

Boand isn’t convinced that the recharge technologies and state rules designed to make the water last longer are going to be enough to protect the aquifers.

“Recharge has been somewhat successful but everybody has talked about it as if it is the great salvation, even though it is very much in the testing phase,” Boand said. “And it takes the same attention to detail that running a nuclear power plant takes … lots of engineers and lots of scientists.”

Another concern with having a private company develop a major public water supply is the stability of the company and the water system if the company should fail.

Waller says his company’s contracts provide protection for that possibility.

“If we go belly up, five years or 10 years down the road, the water districts and participants have the right to step in and take over the system. There are controls in place,” Waller said. They expect to deliver water in the first quarter of 2029.

As with most new water projects, developers go through a special court review where they must prove their water estimates are accurate and that their water use won’t harm others. Waller said his company’s water court application was filed in October.

And it is being closely watched.

Chambers, with the city of Greeley, is concerned that the VitaH2O project may impact the Terry Ranch project, which lies nearby. He said he expects to fight to defend Greeley’s rights and will object to anything he sees as threatening.

“We intend to be an objector in the water court process to protect our decree and our investments,” he said.