Water runs down a spillway at the Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. Rockfalls, fires and mudslides in recent years have caused frequent shutdowns of plant operations. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
{The Colorado Water Conservation Board] unanimously agreed Tuesday to hear out Front Range water operatorsโ concerns about a Western Slope plan to purchase historic Colorado River water rights.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, negotiated a $99 million deal to purchase water rights tied to the century-old Shoshone Power Plant, owned by a subsidiary of Xcel Energy.
The River District and the Front Range groups โ Aurora Water, Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water โ all want to maintain the historical flows past Shoshone to provide predictable water supplies long into the future. They mainly disagree about the amount of water involved. Front Range providers say, if the number is too high, it could hamper their ability to provide water to millions of people.
In June, the Front Range water managers asked the Colorado Water Conservation Board to hold a hearing to air concerns. That hearing will be held during the boardโs meeting, Sept. 16-18.
โWe look forward to the hearing, and we appreciate the effort and the time that you and the staff have put into this effort,โ Andy Mueller, the River Districtโs general manager, said during the board meeting Tuesday. โ[We] look forward to finishing this in September.โ
The decision Tuesday also opened up a seven-day period, ending July 9, for others to ask to join the September hearing. The board will share updates with the public on its website.
The hearing is part of a larger [CWCB Instream and water court] process to decide whether Shoshone Power Plantโs water rights can become an environmental water right, called an instream flow right. These rights aim to keep water in rivers to help aquatic ecosystems.
Photo: 1950 โPublic Service Damโ (Shoshone Dam) in Colorado River near Glenwood Springs Colorado.
In this case, the environmental water right would focus on a 2.4-mile stretch between Shoshoneโs intake dam, which takes water out of the Colorado River, and the end of its penstocks, which return all of Shoshoneโs water to the river. The power plant is tucked into Glenwood Canyon along Interstate 70 a few miles east of Glenwood Springs.
At times, the power plant sucks nearly all of the Colorado Riverโs flow โ depending on the amount of water in the river above the dam โ through its turbines before returning it to the river channel. When this happens, the 2.4-mile stretch immediately below the dam is reduced to a narrow channel of water.
The environmental flow right would allow water managers to keep more water in that stretch of the river to help fish and other aquatic species. If approved, it would be the largest, most influential instream flow right in the stateโs portfolio. The Colorado water board has until Sept. 18 to make its decision.
The Colorado River District wants to purchase the water rights as part of a larger plan to permanently shore up water supplies for Western Slope communities, which have long worried that Shoshoneโs flows could change if Xcel decided to shut down the power plant or sell the water rights.
The district has a purchase agreement with Xcel Energy to buy the rights and lease the water back to Xcel to generate electricity. One of the terms of the deal is getting the instream flow use approved by the state.
The Front Range water providers and water managers want to prevent any changes to Shoshoneโs water rights from harming their water supplies.
Shoshoneโs water rights are like the bottom blocks in a game of Jenga: change to the rights could cause ripple effects statewide, in part, because of their age, location and amount of water.
Shoshoneโs oldest water right can impact up to 10,600 other upstream water rights because of the plantโs geographic location, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. Those junior water users include Front Range water managers, like Denver Water and Northern Water, that send water to millions of people.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
The Front Range water operators want to resolve their concerns about the historical flows through Shoshone during the instream flow approval process this summer.
The Colorado River District says their questions can be resolved during the subsequent water court proceedings, where opposing parties will have another opportunity to voice their concerns and make sure their water supplies arenโt negatively impacted.
โWe are deeply concerned that the Front Range entities requesting this contested hearing are asking the CWCB to encroach on the jurisdiction of water court,โ the district said in a prepared statement Tuesday.
Shoshone Falls hydroelectric generation station via USGenWeb
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website. (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
July 2, 2025
Four major Front Range water providers โ Denver Water, Aurora Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Water โ will presentย their concerns about the purchaseย of theย Shoshone Power Plantย water rights by the Colorado River District during a hearing in September before the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The board during a special meeting Tuesday decided to hold the hearing to hash out the urban utilitiesโ concerns about how much water should be allocated to the right. The board must decide by September whether to approve the new use of the water right proposed by the district…The Colorado River District, a taxpayer-funded agency that works to protect Western Slope water,ย in 2023 announced a $99 million dealย to buy the water rights from Xcel Energy, which owns the power plant. The purchase โ a decades-long effort by the district โ will ensure that water will continue to flow west past the plant tucked into Glenwood Canyon and downstream to the towns, farms and others who rely on the Colorado River even if the century-old power plant were decommissioned.
Each of the Front Range utilities have said they do not oppose the purchase itself. They do, however, question the river districtโs calculations of how much water has been used historically under the rights. Under Colorado water law, that number will determine how much water must flow through the plant in the future. The districtโs calculations are too high, the four utilities argue, and would leave them with less water from the Colorado River for their own uses. The river district has repeatedly said it plans to maintain the status quo and will not use more water than has been used in the past. Disputes about the amount of water historically used under a water right should be settled in water court, the districtโs general manager Andy Mueller said Tuesday in a statement.
โWe are deeply concerned that the Front Range entities requesting this contested hearing are asking the CWCB to encroach on the jurisdiction of water court,โ Mueller said. โโฆ We believe maintaining public trust relies on following the right path and avoiding political intrusion.โ
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):
June 28, 2025
Utah Sen. Mike Lee withdrew his land-sale provision from the Senate reconciliation budget bill Saturday evening.
โI was unable to secure clear, enforceable safeguards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families โ not to China, not to Blackrock, and not to any foreign interest,โ Lee posted on X. โFor that reason, Iโve made the decision to withdraw the federal land sales provision from the bill.โ
The Republican had sought to require the sale of Bureau of Land Management property โ owned by all Americans โ to help Western communities resolve affordable housing worries. Critics said existing laws allow such sales and that the measure violated a core western value โ public access to public land.
More than one million acres of public land were at stake. The provision required the government to auction the property rapidly and with curtailed public involvement.
Conservationists, hunters and anglers and outdoor recreation businesses erupted in virtual applause after Lee conceded. Opposition across the West stirred thousands to rally in support of continued ownership of and access to their publicly owned property.
โPublic lands are the cornerstone of our conservation legacy,โ Chris Wood, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited said in a statement heralding the provisionโs demise.
Others were less reserved.
โTotal faceplant,โ wrote Land Tawney, co-chair of American Hunters & Anglers.
โHe rewrote his scheme multiple times,โ Tawney said of Lee. โAnd tonight? He yanked his own language from the bill,โ Tawney wrote in a statement.
On Oct. 2, 2024, a geyser erupted in Toyah, a town in west Texas 50 miles from the New Mexico border. This was not a case of water miraculously appearing in the desert, a deliverance from the areaโs long-standing drought. Rather, it was an environmental disaster: a blowout from an orphaned oil and gas well.
What gushed from the ground wasnโt actually water, but rather a vile brine of heavy metals, radioactive substances, chemical additives and noxious organics โ the by-product of fracking.
The Toyah incident is the latest of at least eight leaks over the preceding 12 months in the Permian Basin, a fracking hub across west Texas and southeastern New Mexico. It highlights the increasingly urgent challenge of what to do with frackingโs wastewater โ what fossil fuel companies euphemistically call โproduced water.โ But some New Mexico legislators have a solution in mind: For the last few years, theyโve proposed reusing the wastewater off the oil field for industrial purposes, such as data center cooling and hydrogen production.
Part of their argument is that New Mexico desperately needs water. More than 90% of its residents live in areas facing drought. In the next 50 years, the already-arid state will see its ground- and fresh water sources shrink by 25%.
Political pressure is mounting on New Mexicoโs lawmakers to tap into fracking wastewater as a new resource. Environmental groups, however, strongly oppose the idea, arguing that there is still no way to make the wastewater safe for off-field use. Year after year, the New Mexico Legislature finds itself at a crossroads.
โWe are, as a state, very beholden to oil and gas,โ said Carlos Matutes, the New Mexico director at the advocacy group GreenLatinos thatโs part of the coalition opposing produced water reuse. Any bill that sanctions produced water, he said, โis almost guaranteed to come back.โ
PRODUCED WATER is an existential dilemma for the oil and gas industry. Fracking involves blasting underground rock with water to free up trapped oil and gas, but when that water returns to the surface, it is laden with contaminants it picks up from the earth. Every barrel of hydrocarbons reaped also generates up to 10 barrels of contaminated water. In 2021 alone, New Mexico was spewing 147 million gallons of toxic wastewater daily.
Drilling companies usually dispose of wastewater in dedicated injection wells. Water, however, does what water always does: It flows where it wishes, heedless of human-drawn boundaries. And it can travel for miles underground, then burst forth from improperly sealed oil wells, as it did with Toyah. (So far, no company has claimed ownership of the well, though its use dates back to 1961.) Even wastewater that stays underground finds ways to revolt โ by triggering earthquakes. As fracking operations have ramped up over the last decade, so too has the tally of tremors. In the past year alone, New Mexico experienced over 2,500 quakes, most of them concentrated in the southeastern corner of the state, where fracking is most flagrant. In comparison, only 45 tremors rumbled the state in 2017.
Currently, most of New Mexicoโs produced water is either injected underground or transported across state lines for disposal elsewhere. By contrast, neighboring Texas permits repurposing treated wastewater for other uses or discharging it into the environment.
Produced water. Graphic credit: U.S. Department of Energy
In late 2023, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham floated a strategic water supply proposal to follow in the footsteps of its neighbor. Initially, she proposed investing $500 million of state funds in treating produced water. But that measure dried up in legislative budget negotiations. In subsequent revisions, Lujan Grisham has watered down the funding allocation, from $250 million in 2024 to $75 millionin 2025. Each time, pushback from environmental groups helped flush produced water treatment from the proposals altogether.
Even if the plan had sailed through, though, it would not have recouped a significant amount of water, said Rachel Conn, the deputy director of the water conservation organization Amigos Bravos. Removing contaminants from fracking wastewater requires copious energy to boil off and squeeze fresh water from dissolved toxins. Her team estimates that it costs at least $2 to treat a barrel, twice as much as it costs to send it down an injection well. The total amount could easily top $1 billion a year. (In Texas, oil companies pay more, as much as $10 per barrel for treatment.) Given the high costs, Conn said that the amount of water the strategic water supply could afford to treat would meet no more than 1% of New Mexicoโs water needs โ a literal drop in the bucket.
Additionally, environmental organizations like Amigos Bravos have raised concerns about the safety of fracking wastewater, whether itโs treated or untreated. Radioactivity levels around several injection wells in Ohio and West Virginiaexceed the federal safety limit by several hundred-fold; and in one Pennsylvanian river, radium still persists among mussels even five years after the last discharge of produced water.
The complex cocktail of chemicals found in produced water makes it hard to characterize, said Bonnie McDevitt, a research physical scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey. Companies usually guard the chemical additives in their fracking fluid as a trade secret. Toxicity requirements cannot cover every contaminant present, essentially leaving some questionable compounds completely unregulated. That means that even if the treated wastewater technically meets drinking water standards, it may not necessarily be safe to drink. Environmental advocates are calling for testing limits on 600 compounds potentially found in fracking wastewater before it can be used off fracking fields.
But the fossil fuel industry insists that the treatment technology is ready; Ryan Hall, the director of technical operations at NGL Energy Partners, said, โWe can treat to any spec.โ As one of the nationโs largest handlers of the industryโs wastewater, his company manages 2.5 million barrels from the Permian Basin, mainly by disposing of it in injection wells. NGL Energy has also explored wastewater treatment in some states, and Hall said it is eager to start in New Mexico once authorities give the legislative greenlight.
The New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium, which is partially funded by oil and gas companies, is currently leading the effort to develop purportedly safe and affordable treatment methods. The instituteโs recent projects include advancing various separation technologies and studying the health impacts of produced water on indicator species, like aquatic microbes and plants. โIโm with the environmental groups,โ said Pei Xu, the instituteโs research director and an environmental engineer at New Mexico State University. โWe also want this water to be very safe. I think we have made a lot of very good progress.โ
THE BATTLE BETWEEN industry and environmental groups is heating up. In April, New Mexicoโs Water Quality Control Commission announced that it would allow pilot treatment projects to discharge up to 84,000 gallons of wastewater into groundwater daily. Environmental groups filed court briefs and staged a protest outside the Capitol, and 27 state legislators wrote a letter to the commission urging it to reconsider. In a follow-up hearing on May 13, the commission rescinded its April decision and reinstituted the ban.
What environmental groups want, ideally, is to end fracking altogether. But thatโs unlikely to happen anytime soon: New Mexico is economically dependent on oil and gas, ranking second in the nationโs top fossil fuel-producing states. Industry has a solid grip on politics here โ roughly 60% of Lujan Grishamโs 2017-2022 campaign contributions came from the stateโs largest oil corporations.
At the very least, environmental groups say, taxpayer dollars shouldnโt be used to solve a problem of the industryโs own making. โIt should be the industryโs responsibility to clean up that produced water,โ Conn said. Her suggestion: Reuse the wastewater for future fracking. About 60% of wastewater is recycled on oil fields; Conn says bumping the rate to 90% could save 4 billion gallons of fresh water โ more than all the produced water that the strategic water supply proposal would treat.
Meanwhile, drilling shows no signs of slowing down. Across the Permian playa, pumpjacks rise like giant birds pecking at the ground. Strewn alongside these steel flocks are miles-deep injection wells, each designated by a comparatively squat wellhead that often comes in the shape of a cross โ a headstone for an otherwise unmarked grave for the vast refuse that refuses to go quietly.
Environmental groups protest outside New Mexicoโs Capitol after the state announced it would allow pilot treatment projects to discharge up to 84,000 gallons of wastewater into groundwater daily. Courtesy of New Energy Economy
Four major Front Range water agencies have requested a state hearing to fully air their objections to a Western Slope plan to purchase historic, coveted Colorado River water rights.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District, which represents 15 Western Slope counties, is leading the effort to purchase the $99 million water rights tied to the century-old Shoshone Power Plant, owned by a subsidiary of Xcel Energy. The district wants to buy the rights to protect historical water resources for Western Slope communities long into the future.
Aurora Water, Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities and Northern Waterย also want to maintain the historical flows past Shoshone which provides stability for their water supplies. They just disagree over the numbers, namely how much water is included in the deal. If the number is too high, it could throw a wrench in their water systems.
The stateโs water board, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, will decide duringย a special meeting Tuesdayย whether to grant the hearing requests.
โIf, as the River District asserts, the status quo will be maintained, this acquisition can be a win-win for both the Front Range and the West Slope,โ wrote Marshall Brown, general manager of Aurora Water in a letter on June 9. โHowever โฆ we have significant concerns.โ
The Colorado River District already has passed a few hurdles in its years long effort to purchase the powerful water rights for Shoshone, located just east of Glenwood Springs.
It has a purchase agreement with Xcel Energy. A diverse array of Western Slope cities, agricultural groups, the Colorado legislature and others have promised millions of dollars toward the asking price.
Democratic and Republican Congressional representatives from Colorado have spoken in support of the purchase. U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican from Grand Junction, asked Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to release the funds in a committee meeting this month.
120 days to decide
The district is moving on with its next step: working with the state to use the water rights to help protect the environment. This is where the concerns over historical flows come in.
The River District wants Shoshoneโs rights to be used to keep water in the Colorado River near the power plant in Glenwood Canyon to benefit aquatic ecosystems when the power plant isnโt generating electricity.
The additional environmental use would secure the flow of water past the power plant, even if the plant goes out of commission โ maintaining the status quo flows permanently. That water could otherwise be used further upstream.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board, faces a September deadline to decide whether to approve this new environmental use, called an instream flow right.
The four Front Range water managers were the only entities to submit notices within that 20-day window.
They want to recalculate how much water has been used at Shoshone in past decades before the matter goes to water court, where opposing parties will have another opportunity to voice their concerns and make sure their water supplies arenโt negatively impacted.
Collectively, the four agencies help deliver water to over 3 million people along the Front Range cities and northeastern plains.
In its letter, Aurora Water said the river districtโs estimate could overstate historic use by up to 300,000 acre-feet. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households. The utility did not respond in time for publication.
Northern Water is concerned about its ability to fill Green Mountain Reservoir in Summit County, which depends in part on downstream water rights, like Shoshoneโs. The reservoir delivers water to the Western Slope, including to a 15-mile stretch of the Colorado River that provides vital habitat for endangered and threatened fish.
Colorado Springs Utilitiesโ letter said a too-high estimate could cut into the amount of water the provider can divert from the Blue River and the Homestake Water Project, which directs water from the Western Slope to the Eastern Slope.
Denver Water cited similar concerns, saying the proposal, as is, will change the โstatus quoโ in ways that would harm the utilityโs ability to provide water to over 1.5 million people during severe or prolonged drought.
Colorado Springs and Denver Water declined to comment further, referring to their written letters.
If the Colorado Water Conservation Board approves the hearing request, people will have until July 9 to ask to join the hearing process, said Rob Viehl, chief of the Stream and Lake Protection Section at the Colorado Water Conservation Board. The board will share updates with the public on its website and decide the date of the hearing during its meeting Tuesday.
Shoshone hydroelectric generation plant Glenwood Canyon via the Colorado River DistrictShoshone Falls hydroelectric generation station via USGenWebThe blown-out penstock in 2007 at the Shoshone plant. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismXcel truck at Shoshone plant. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismThe penstocks feeding the Shoshone hydropower plant on the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismThe Shoshone plant and boat ramp on the Colorado River. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismThe Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon, captured here in June 2018, uses water diverted from the Colorado River to make power, and it controls a key water right on the Western Slope. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismShoshone Hydroelectric plant. Photo credit: The Colorado River DistrictThis historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photoPhoto: 1950 โPublic Service Damโ (Shoshone Dam) in Colorado River near Glenwood Springs Colorado.View of Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant construction in Glenwood Canyon (Garfield County) Colorado; shows the Colorado River, the dam, sheds, a footbridge, and the workmen’s camp. Creator: McClure, Louis Charles, 1867-1957. Credit: Denver Public Library Digital CollectionsThe twin turbines of Xcel Energyโs Shoshone hydroelectric power plant in Glenwood Canyon can generate 15 megawatts. The plant was down for about a year and a half, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen JournalismWater runs down a spillway at the Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. Rockfalls, fires and mudslides in recent years have caused frequent shutdowns of plant operations. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen JournalismThe Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. The River District has made a deal with Xcel Energy to buy the water rights associated with the plant to keep water flowing on the Western Slope. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
[Colorado U.S.] Senator John Hickenlooper is looking into the proposal to create a U.S. Wildland Fire Service and what it could mean for wildfire response and resources
President Donald Trumpโs 2026 budget proposal outlines plans to create a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service by combining the wildfire assets currently distributed between the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. The budget request states that the โdispersed natureโ of the federal wildfire program โcreates significant coordination and cost inefficiencies that result in sub-optimal performance.โ It would house the U.S. Wildland Fire Service in the Department of Interior. But in a letter to the Senate earlier this month, a nonprofit group representing thousands of U.S. Forest Service retirees, including seven previous chiefs of the agency, raised concern that consolidating federal firefighting operations would be โa costly mistake.โ
โWildfire management is more than extinguishing fires,โ National Association of Forest Service Retirees Chair Steve Ellis wrote in the letter. โThe critical linkage between fire suppression and forest management, including fuels reduction and prescribed fire, must be maintained. Severing forest management and forest managers from fire suppression will make firefighting less safe and put communities at greater risk.โ
In addition to relocating firefighting operations, Trumpโs budget request for the Forest Service asks Congress to zero out millions of dollars of funding, including for forestry research and grants that support state, tribal and private forestry efforts. It also proposes cuts of $392 million to the Forest Service management budget and $391 million to forest operations…Ellis, who worked for the federal government for 38 years in both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, said โthe fire program is integrated into almost everything the Forest Service does.โ From forest thinning to prescribed burns, prevention and suppression, Ellis said strategies have to be integrated into the broader forest management goals. By removing firefighting operations from the Forest Service, the proposal could divorce firefighting from land management, he added…
When asked about the U.S. Wildland Fire Service proposal, White House Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers pointed to the Los Angeles wildfires that killed 30 people, forced 200,000 to evacuate and burned 57,000 acres earlier this year…But Ellis questioned whether a consolidated federal firefighting agency like the U.S. Wildland Fire Service would have done anything to prevent or lessen the impacts of the Los Angeles fires. In his experience, Ellis said the fire program in the United States is โpretty seamlessโ with different agencies not only working with each other but also collaborating with state and local partners to combat wildfires.
There it is again โ the invocation for most of the 20th century. But โ wait: arenโt we in the 21st century? Well, really โ not yet in any way that matters. President Biden tried, through his big beautiful legislative acts (two of them), to nudge and cajole us into the early 21st century: beginning to commence to proceed to address the scientific reality of a climate that our created realities have been inadvertently changing for the worse, and the socioeconomic realities of an increasingly inequitable society that unbridled private capitalism has been advertently imposing on us all. But Bidenโs acts no longer address our official realities.
The new official reality, which wants to take us back to the good old days of the mid-20th century, includes a full restitution of the fossil energies (including beautiful clean coal) that, a mere seven months ago, we were told we needed to stop using as soon as we possibly could for the sake of our continued existence on the planet. Trump may have missed a couple โfirst dayโ promises โ low grocery prices and peace in the Ukraine โ but one first-day promise he did fulfill was issuing an executive order on January 20, 2025 for โUnleashing American Energy,โ colloquially known as โDrill, baby, drill.โ
Therein, Trump explained that โin recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these (fossil) resources,โ inflicting โhigh energy costs upon our citizens โฆ driving up the cost of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing, while weakening our national security.โ Trump proclaimed that this constituted a โNational Energy Emergencyโ caused by President Biden and other liberals obsessed by a โclimate crisisโ that is now, almost magically, no longer an official part of American reality.
Biden-era policies, according to this MAGA narrative, kept energy development off of the public lands by โlocking the lands upโ for conservation, preservation and recreation, making Bidenโs administration responsible for our high gasoline and home-heating prices. And the Trump administration was going to reverse that by reopening the public lands for the O&G industry to drill new wells, increasing the supply of gas and oil to both bring down O&G costs and re-establish Americaโs global energy dominance โ a dominance in O&G production that we already in fact have.
Trumpโs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed this up February 3, 2025 with a seven-page order revoking all of President Bidenโs energy-related executive orders dating back to 2021, and replacing them with orders specific to โdrill, baby, drill.โ
But there is a problem they are not acknowledging, however: is the O&G industry really going to get out there and โdrill, baby, drillโ?The truth, as usual with Trump, lies elsewhereโฆ.
Letโs take a look at how the leasing process goes, on our Bureau of Land Management lands (with similar rules on the National Forests):
First, someone from the public โ usually someone from the O&G industry โ expresses interest in a piece of land for oil or gas production. The BLM then has to prepare a lease sale for that land. Biden rules put in force last year (now rescinded) restricted this to lands with some probability of actual O&G resources in the land.
Once requested lands are mapped into lease units (maximum lease 2,560 acres in the lower 48 states, 5,760 acres in Alaska), the BLM holds quarterly auctions to lease the mapped units. The 2024 rules (now rescinded) raised the minimum bid from $2/acre to $10/acre, and also declined to sell the leases when there was no competitive bidding. The leases are for 10 years (renewable in some cases), with rental at $3/acre for the first two years, $5/acre for the next six years, and $15/acre for any year thereafter โ obvious incentive to get a lease into production.
Before leaseholders can do anything on the land, they need to put up a bond to cover the cost of closing-off and site reclamation when they abandon the well (after 4 years with no action). The minimum bond was increased in 2024 from $10,000 to $150,000, making forfeiture painful (now rescinded).
When leaseholders are ready to โdevelopโ a lease, they apply for a drilling permit. If their drilling plan is approved by the BLM (more than 95 percent are), they pay a permitting fee (minimum $10,000) and can then โdrill, baby, drill.โ Biden rules (now reduced again) charged a 16.67 percent royalty to the government on what they produce.
Oil wells can be operated as long as they are profitable, with lease extensions. When they are no longer producing enough to profitably cover lease rent plus operating expenses, the company owning the lease is responsible for closing down the well and restoring the land.
Did the โBiden-eraโ government โshut downโ this leasing and permitting process, โlocking outโ energy development, as the Trump administration and the O&G industry claim? Hardly; thatโs just more Trumpty-Dumpty fake news. Anyone with a cultural memory that goes back further than 2025 will remember that environmental interests were constantly haranguing the Biden administration to stop the leasing on public lands, since it undermined the administrationโs other efforts to address the climate crisis, which was then officially part of our reality, like it or not. It is also part of our reality, however, that our need for gasoline and natural gas has not diminished much, and Biden had to work for a balance no one liked. Anyone wanting to revisit the kind of pressure from both sides that Biden and his Interior Department encountered on such issues could look at this AP story about leases in Alaskaโs far frozen north.
Thereโs a more important fact (remember โfactsโ?) to keep in mind about the leasing situation, however, and Trumpish complaints that the government is blocking our energy dominance on the planet: 25 million acres of public land are currently reserved in O&G leases, but at least a third of that, maybe more, is in leases that have not been developed. Let me say that again: the O&G industry already holds several thousand leases that it has not begun to bring into production.
Two questions rise: Why are they not developing these leases on which they are paying rent? And why are they agitating for even more leases?
The answer to the first question is the most obvious: they do not want to bring more wells into production because the price of a barrel of oil has been dropping below their industrial break-even price of around $65/barrel. Energy production is governed to some extent by a calculation called the ER:EI โ โEnergy Return on Energy Investment.โ In the good old days of 30-cents-a-gallon gasoline, oil was โgushingโ abundantly from wells. The ER:EI of oil then ranged from 20:1 upward, depending on how fast it flowed and how far it had to go to market โ meaning 20 barrels were produced for every barrel-equivalent of energy invested.
The miracle of โfrackingโ opened up vast new regions from which oil could be squeezed, but fracked oil does not gush; instead it has to be freed from rock formations with complex and expensive drilling and pumping procedures. The ER:EI of fracked petroleum and natural gas is 5:1 or often lower. The O&G frackers need barrel prices above $65 to even begin making a profit.
Recent rumors of war in the Mideast have pushed the price up to the $70-75/barrel range, but that is a fluctuating situation that will not be reflected at the gas pump. And that may be countered by the OPEC+ nations (all the Arabian nation-states plus Russia and a handful of other non-Arabian states), who just upped the ante. They still have oil they can access at an ER:EI significantly above that of the United States frackers โ and they recently voted to increase their production June 1 by an additional 411,000 barrels a day, which pretty well insures that the global prices of a barrel will not go up to where United States frackers will want to start developing the thousands of leases they are paying rent on. Unless, perhaps, Trump decides to put a tariff on OPEC oil and gas, with all the political chaos that would create โ including driving up the price of gasoline and heating gas here.
So therein lies the truth about who is responsible for persisting higher gas prices: it wasnโt the Biden administration shutting off opportunities; it was the O&G industries refusing to develop low-cost public-land opportunities they already owned โ not wanting to produce oil and gas at a loss as a patriotic MAGA gesture. America has no more โcheapโ oil with the massive profitability of a high ER:EI.
But at any rate, if we do actually have a โnational energy emergency,โ it is certainly not going to be resolved by putting a lot more public land up for leases to โunleashโ Americaโs fossil energy, with more than a third of the public land already leased but not developed due to low energy prices. A January lease offer โ Bidenโs last โ in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had no bidders.
So why the big push for more public lands leasing?
Well, in Trumpland it may not be about lower prices for consumers at all, but about industrial control in the public lands. An O&G lease, so long as the rent is paid โ pocket change for the industry โ amounts to a priority use on public lands managed for multiple uses. So long as a lease remains undeveloped, it canโt be fenced; it is open for grazing cattle, hikers, bikers and other โmultiple-usersโ to wander over. But the O&G company has the priority use on the land, and if it decides to develop the lease, the surface land needed for the drilling and pumping operations becomes single-use land, with a road leading into it โ no longer really โpublicโ or โmultiple useโ for so long as the well operates.
As noted in the leasing and permitting process outlined above, the drilling company has to put up a bond assuring that it will properly shut down and plug the well and reclaim the area when the well runs out. The historic $10,000 bond was so low that companies found it cheaper to just forfeit the bond and leave it leaking methane into the atmosphere, polluting the underground water table, and surrounded by the refuse from the fracking operation. The Biden administration raised the bond for a permit to drill to $150,000, about twice the current average reclamation cost, and enough to make some miners/drillers to think twice about just abandoning the well. Now, of course, that Biden-era move toward good sense is being rescinded.
How many โorphaned wellsโ are there (abandoned with little or no reclamation)? No one seems to know for sure. The EPA estimates there are as many as four million abandoned wells nationwide, most plugged to some degree with known owners and operators; but some 100-150 thousand of the abandoned wells are orphaned โ no financially solvent owner-operator can be found, and many of those are not plugged, and are emitting methane into the atmosphere and oil and toxic fracking fluids into water tables. Those numbers are more guesstimates than estimates, and no one really knows how many of the orphaned wells are on public lands, but we taxpayers will end up paying to plug, clean up and maintain the orphans, as (chronically inadequate) budgets allow (2024 information).
There may be another rationale behind the O&G industriesโ desire for more leasing and permitting, when they arenโt developing a third of what they already have. There is a huge overlap between the 90 percent of BLM land that is open for O&G leasing at the request of the industry, and the BLM land that is suitable for the development of the massive solar, wind and geothermal renewable energy resources that will be needed when American reality again encompasses the climate crisis. Leasing processes have been worked out for renewable energy development โ somewhat more rigorous than those for the O&G industry โ and many of the suitable sites find an O&G lease right in the middle of them, with its undeveloped use priority. The developers of the renewables have to buy surface-use waivers from the O&G leaseholders โ unless the O&G leaseholders donโt want to give up the chance to develop their non-renewables.
Well โ enough said on this. I hope this disabuses you of the Trumpty-Burgumty nonsense about a โnational energy emergencyโ that can be resolved through a wide-open assault on our public lands. Thatโs the good news; the bad news is the fact that gasoline at the pump is probably never going to go down much, so long as a barrel of oil has to bring more than $70 to the fossil-fuel producer.
An intelligent and forward-looking society would be working to gently and fairly phase out the truculent O&G industries, and phase in the renewable energy resources with a lot of job creation โ which the Biden administration, now seemingly maligned by everyone, was actually trying to do with the two big beautiful infrastructure acts that the Trumpty-Burgumties are trying to rescind as thoroughly as possible, for no discernible reasons other than their own โcreative reality,โ and of course, with Trump, vengeance on his enemies.
The Trumpty-Burgumty teams have come up with some other plans for the public lands, including selling off some of them โ a lemon from which it might actually be possible to squeeze some lemonade, depending on how it shakes out. More about that in the future, when we see if it stays in the Big Piggy Billโฆ.
Next post โ back to the Colorado River where, believe it or not, things are pretty much still where they were a year ago โ which is to say โa standstillโ โ at least in terms of a new management plan for the post-2026 era. Stay tuned.
Oil and gas infrastructure is seen on the Roan Plateau in far western Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)
Public lands are the birthright of every American. One of the great privileges of living in this country is the ability to access hundreds of millions of acres to enjoy the great outdoors โ all for free.
People care about and use public lands for many reasons. From hunters and anglers to miners and ranchers, hikers and mountain bikersโthere is something for almost everyone on public lands. But what if you live in a city and never set foot on public lands? Why care about them then?
Log Meadow, California | Maiya Greenwood
Not everyone hunts, fishes, mines, ranches, hikes, or bikes; but everyone, truly everyone, depends on clean water. The big secret about public lands is that they are arguably the countryโs single biggest clean water provider. According to the US Forest Service, National Forests are the largest source of municipal water supply in the nation, serving over 60 million people in 3,400 communities across 33 states. Many of the countryโs largest urban areas, including Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, and Atlanta receive a significant portion of their water supply from national forests.
Healthy forests and grasslands perform many of the functions of traditional water infrastructure. They store water, filter pollutants, and transport clean water to downstream communities. And they do it naturally โ essentially for free. When rivers are damaged from land uses on public lands, we all pay the price โ literally; we all pay more in taxes and utility bills to clean up the water.
What happens on the publicโs land also happens to the publicโs water. The importance of managing public lands for the benefit of public water is so fundamental, it has been a pillar of public lands management agenciesโ missions since their inception over a century ago. For example, The Organic Act of 1897[1]ย that created the US Forest Service stated:
A two-track road cuts through Bureau of Land Management property west of Pinedale in April 2024. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):
June 25, 2025
In the face of a backlash, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee has revamped his public land sell-off measure to target only Bureau of Land Management holdings while also declaring, โweโre just getting started.โ
A reconciliation budget proposal revised by Leeโs Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee targets BLM land within five miles of undefined โpopulation centers.โ It puts checkerboard BLM holdings back on a priority list for his โmandatory disposalโ measure and takes lands under permit for grazing off the auction block.
The revision would shift 15% of revenue to local governments and conservation. The bill would appropriate $5 million to carry out the mandatory sales, which are designed to be offered within 60 days of passage and regularly thereafter.
Lee has not said or mapped how much land must be sold, ostensibly for affordable housing.
โWe havenโt put out maps because there are a whole bunch of criteria established by the legislation, and those criteria are very difficult to reduce to a map,โ Lee told conservative radio host Charlie Kirk in a video posted on X.
But opposition to Leeโs measure comes from โall walks of life,โ said Land Tawney, former president and CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. That includes โDemocrats, Independents, Republicans, hunters, anglers, bird watchers, kayakers, ranchers [and] loggers,โ he said Wednesday at a roundtable hosted by Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.
Heinrich excoriated Leeโs measure.
โEighty-five percent of the money from these sales would go to pay for tax cuts,โ Heinrich said. โThat means that folks like Elon Musk, who already own[s] 4,400 acres of land in Texas [worth] some $3.4 billion, will make money off the public lands that should belong to the American people.
โThatโs horseshit,โ Heinrich said.
A spectrum of opposition
Leeโs plan to include U.S. Forest Service land in the โmandatory disposalโ provision flunked a parliamentarianโs rules test that limits reconciliation budget measures to relevant budget matters. The revised provision must undergo the same scrutiny, Democrats say.
Heinrich poo-pooed the notion that Leeโs measure would result in affordable housing. โAn out-of-town billionaire can show up, buy a 100-acre parcel and throw a trophy home on it,โ he said.
Powell resident Mike Tracy criticized Leeโs linking of public land and affordable housing.
โIf you put those two concepts in the same sentence,โ he said of Leeโs proposal, โit makes them seem somehow related, maybe even somehow causal.
โIt makes people not feel comfortable speaking out against it because who wants to be against affordable housing?โ he said at the roundtable. โI donโt think itโs proper to say that theyโre related.โ
U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, had a message for Lee. โDonโt come into our states and dictate what should be done.
โIt is clear theyโre trying to sell this public land to pay for this reconciliation package, which gives tax cuts to billionaires,โ she said. โThatโs what this is about.โ
โRight now, we are pissed,โ said hunting advocate Tawney, who represented American Hunters and Anglers. โThey want to defund, dismantle and then divest,โ he said of President Donald Trumpโs administration.
Native American tribes are upset, too, said Hilary Tompkins, former solicitor for the Department of the Interior.
โThe Southern Ute Indian tribe in southwestern Colorado is concerned because they have off-reservation hunting and fishing rights on an area that includes BLM lands,โ she said. โThey have not heard from anyone who is advocating for this proposal about the impact on those off-reservation treaty rights.โ
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon sees opportunities to resolve the stateโs challenges with the checkerboard land ownership pattern along the Union Pacific Railroad line, said Jess Johnson, government affairs director with the Wyoming Wildlife Federation.
โI want to figure out how we do this in a Wyoming way,โ she said of the checkerboard conundrum. โThis budget reconciliation is not it.โ
Not sensitive lands?
Wyomingโs U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, Republicans who continue to support Trumpโs agenda, did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment about the backlash. โIt is clear that our congressional delegation isnโt in it for Wyoming,โ the stateโs Democratic Party chair, Lucas Fralick, said in a statement.
Lee, however, explained some of his thinking.
โIโm working closely with the Trump administration to ensure that any federal land sales serve the American people โ not foreign governments, not the Chinese Communist Party, and not massive corporations looking to pad their portfolios,โ he said in a post. โThis land must go to American families. Period.โ
In the radio interview, he said opposition was ginned up.
American Enterprise Instituteโs proposed Freedom City sites on BLM land near Grand Junction, Colorado.
โThe left is working overtime to dupe conservatives about my federal land sale bill,โ he said. โThis is just basically surplus land thatโs suitable for housing because itโs right next to where people live.โ
He characterized critics as having an agenda. โWhat Iโve heard is that people on the left generally want people moving from rural areas into urban areas, more suburban areas and from single-family housing into multi-family housing, higher density housing units,โ he said. โThey believe that thatโs good for them, perhaps for Mother Earth, or whatever their reasons might be.
โThese are not sensitive lands,โ Lee said of the targeted BLM parcels. โThey are not lands that are out there, that are part of an environment thatโs appropriate for hunting, for hiking, for fishing, etc.โ
Wyomingโs Johnson challenged that notion at the roundtable. She said she arrowed her first mule deer on public land near town.
โI was on this amazing parcel of public land โ tiny,โ she said. โItโs little. Itโs one to three miles from Lander. Itโs BLM. Itโs really nothing special to look at, except it is everything to me.โ
An image of the ruins of Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon (New Mexico, United States); shown is the complex’s great kiva. By National Park Service (United States) – Chaco Canyon National Historical Park: Photo Gallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1536637
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Arlyssa D. Becenti). Here’s an excerpt:
June 25, 2025
Key Points
The National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution seeking new protections for Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.
The group says the Trump administration wants to rescind an administrative order that created a 10-mile buffer around Chaco Canyon, barring oil and gas drilling for 20 years.
The resolution has renewed a rift between other tribes and the Navajo Nation, which says the 10-mile buffer could cost local residents royalties from gas and mineral extraction.
The oldest and largest organization representing tribal governments is urging action to protect Chaco Canyon from oil and gas leasing, amid what its leaders say are growing threats from the Trump administration’s energy policies. The National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution urging action to restart efforts to protect Chaco Canyon and the public lands surrounding it, and to pass the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act, which would create a permanent 10-mile buffer zone around the site restricting oil, gas and mineral extraction. Trump has ordered federal agencies to prioritize energy and mineral extraction on public lands. Supporters of the buffer say that a shift in policy risks damage to Chaco Canyon, but residents with land allotments in the region argue that the buffer could deprive them of an income. With the resolution, the NCAI joins other tribes, elected officials and environmental organizations opposing a proposal to revoke Public Land Order 7923, which withdraws approximately 336,404 acres of federal land from new oil and gas leasing within a 10-mile area around Chaco Canyon for 20 years…
On June 6, New Mexicoโs senators and congressional delegation sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum expressing support for the 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Canyon. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujรกn, along with Reps. Melanie Stansbury, Teresa Leger Fernรกndez, and Gabe Vasquez, all Democrats, signed the letter, which voiced concern over the Interior Department’s move to begin revoking the public lands order…The letter said Interior has yet to adequately consult tribal nations on Chaco Canyon protections. A May 9 letter from the Bureau of Land Management, an Interior agency, announced a general tribal consultation for May 28, 2025, which gave less than 30 daysโ notice and was short of the departmentโs own consultation standards. The letter also claimed that many affected Pueblos were not directly notified, and that BLMโs informal virtual presentation lacked the detail and structure needed for meaningful dialogue or informed tribal input According to the bureauโs own estimates, the 10-mile withdrawal area protects approximately 4,730 documented archaeological sites while oil and gas operators forgo development of only a few dozen wells, stated the letter.
The Navajo Nation is embroiled in a lawsuit against Haaland and the Interior Department, filed in a New Mexico federal court three days before President Donald Trump took office. The suit argues that Interior’s plan to withdraw land from new oil and gas leasing violated the law and could cost land allottees millions of dollars in royalties.
Sen. Mike Lee, the Utah Republican and Trump sycophant, has slightly backed off on his proposal to sell-off public lands, but only slightly.
Lee posted the following on X/Twitter at 5:42 a.m. today:
Big sigh of relief? Nope. Sure, itโs great heโs removing Forest Service land from the pool of land eligible for โdisposal.โ This means the Hidden Valley/Falls Creek areanear Durango is out of danger, as are parcels near Flagstaff and Boise and Santa Fe that could have ended up on the auction block under the original provision. The 5-mile limit from population centers will also take some remote BLM parcels out of consideration โ parcels that wouldnโt have been prioritized, anyway.
The change reduces the size of the pool of available land, and presumably also reduces the amount of land that would be sold to between 1.25 million and 1.9 million acres. Thatโs still a crap-ton of public lands that will be privatized, cluttered up with houses and roads and cul-de-sacs and power lines and so forth, and to which the public will lose access. If this goes forward, you can plan on houses popping up on some of your favorite hiking, trail-running, or biking areas.
And it still includes places like:
Animas Mountain and upper Horse Gulch near Durango;ย
swaths of BLM land near Naturita and Nucla, Colorado;ย
BLM land, including wilderness study areas, near Moab (wilderness study areas and areas of critical environmental concern are not exempted from the sell off);
parcels that abut Zion National Parkโs boundaries (within five miles of Springdale and Rockville);
the lower slopes of Jumbo Mountain near Paonia;ย
parcels on Las Vegasโs fringe, along with tracts around Mesquite and Moapa that the Freedom Cities folks have their eyes on;ย
other Freedom City-proposed parcels near Fruita and Grand Junction;
the list goes on and on. (To get an idea just check out the Wilderness Society map, ignore the green areas, and look for โpopulation centersโ around the brass-colored areas to see what might be eligible).
Lee says he will protect ranchers, which may or may not mean his provision would again leave out land that is in active grazing allotments. He doesnโt explain what the hell he means by โFREEDOM ZONES,โ except to imply that he wouldnโt let any foreigners buy the land(?). Lee once again doesnโt mention a damned thing about affordable housing, meaning heโs just fine with public lands being used for luxury developments or even multi-million dollar mansions.
Oh, and then thereโs that little aside about the Byrd Rule. Yeah, that might get in Leeโs way. See, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the public land sell off provision, along with several other sections relating to energy development on public lands, were subject to a 60-vote threshold. This means they would likely be dropped from the reconciliation bill altogether, since leaving it in could sink the entire โBig Beautifulโ whatever. Still, the GOP has a thing about ignoring the parliamentarian and the usual rules, and Lee indicated he would push on with this concept in one form or another. So now is not the time to back down.
The public lands sell-off provision has generated a huge amount of outrage and public push back, which is clearly working (after all, why else would Lee make those changes?). But itโs not the only or even the worst thing the MAGA folks are inflicting on the American publicโs lands.
For example, yesterday Agriculture Secretary Brooke announced that the U.S. Forest Service plans to repeal the Clinton-era Roadless Rule, which blocks roadbuilding and other development on about 58 million acres of Forest Service land. If the rollback survives inevitable legal challenges, it will open up a lot of forest to logging.
Glen Canyon Dam, January 2022. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
๐ฅต Aridification Watch ๐ซ
To be a Colorado River watcher is to ride a slow-motion emotional roller coaster. We reached extreme highs during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, fell into a two-decade depression beginning in 2002 โ with ebullient spikes in 2005, 2008, 2011, 2019 โ and then the bountiful winter of 2023 came along and was followed up by a not-so-sad 2024.
It was enough to convince us we were recovering, and we could quit therapy, cut back on the meds, and stop worrying (all figuratively, of course). During this period of relative abundance, all of the studies about climate heating diminishing snowpacks and threatening the Westโs lifeline seemed a bit abstract: Scary, sure, but we still had years and years before it manifested itself.
Yeah, no. It turns out that 2023 was just another manic and anomalous episode that falsely lulled us into complacency. And now that it has past, weโve been sent spiraling back down into a deep aridification-sparked depression (somewhat figuratively speaking).
The snowpack-meagre 2025 winter delivered the first buzzkill to the Upper Colorado River Basin, followed by a warm and dry and dismal spring. Now, Lake Powellโs surface level is flatlining just as it should be shooting upward, an indicator that the river is back to its new normal. That is to say it is once again shrinking, and the gap between how much water has been allocated to the riverโs users and whatโs actually in there continues to grow. Which is to say, weโre still f&$#ed, and getting even more so with each passing year.
In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamationโs latest projection has Lake Powell possibly dropping below the minimum power pool, or the level at which hydropower production shuts down, as soon as the end of 2026. Mind you, thatโs their worst case scenario, but these forecasts often lean towards optimism. Most notable is how dramatically the forecast has changed since April, a difference that is visible in the graph below.
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 23, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
Thereโs a break in the clouds that have hovered over Colorado River negotiations for more than a year. State water leaders appear to be coalescing behind a new proposal for sharing the river after talks were stuck in a deadlock for more than a year.
The river is used by nearly 40 million people across seven states and Mexico, but itโs shrinking due to climate change. As a result, state leaders need to rein in demand. For months, they were mired in a standoff about how to interpret a century-old legal agreement. The new proposal is completely different.
Instead of those states leaning on old rules that donโt account for climate change, theyโre proposing a new system that divides the river based on how much water is in it today.
โWe finally have an approach that at least allows a glimmer of hope that the laying down of arms is possible,โ said John Fleck, a writer and water policy researcher at the University of New Mexico.
The long, tense negotiations have mostly been stuck on one issue: How much water should the Upper Basin states โ Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico โ send downstream from their largest reservoir, Lake Powell?
The new plan says the amount should be based on a three-year rolling average of the โnatural flowsโ in the river โ basically, how much water would flow through it if human dams and diversion werenโt in the way.
States would still have to negotiate the exact percentage of those โnatural flowsโ that would go downstream to the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada. Picking that number will likely be difficult, but the fact that states are willing to base it on current climate conditions represents a major philosophical shift in how the river is divided.
โThis new approach gets beyond the obsessively arcane discussions about various interpretations of laws written 100 years ago, with people hoping that their lawyers’ arguments can mean they get more water,โ Fleck said. โIt says, โLook, we all have to share this river. We have to do some math about how much water it really has.โโ
Nevada’s John Entsminger, Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke, and California’s JB Hamby sit on a panel of state water leaders at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. Arizona’s Tom Buschatzke (center) brought details of a Colorado River plan to the public, and said it “allows for a fair division of what Mother Nature provides to us. Alex Hager/KUNC
Details of the plan first emerged in a meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, where the stateโs water leaders gather to discuss Arizonaโs position in multistate talks. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, described the plan as โinnovative.โ
โI was very pessimistic that we were on a path towards litigation,โ he said. โIโm more optimistic now that we can avoid that path if we can make this work.โ
Buschatzke emphasized that the proposal is in its early stages. The concept is now heading to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water agency which manages dams and reservoirs in the West. Employees there will run models to figure out exactly how much water would flow between the two basins.
State and federal leaders are in a crunch to finalize new water sharing rules before a 2026 deadline, when the current rules expire.
โIt is still just a concept,โ Buschatzke said. โWe havenโt agreed to anything at this point, but we agreed to test it.โ
Colorado, which often speaks on behalf of all four Upper Basin states, appears cautiously supportive of the plan.
โColorado remains committed to developing supply-driven, sustainable operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,โ Becky Mitchell, Coloradoโs top water negotiator, wrote to KUNC in a statement. โThe natural flow approach is one way to achieve this, if it is done right.โ
Colorado and its allies initially dug in their heels on aย very specific interpretationย of the 1922 Colorado River compact, arguing that they shouldnโt have to take new cutbacks to their water supplies since theyย feel the impactsย ofย climate change-fueled shortages more than their downstream neighbors.
โThere is no doubt that Arizona views things differently than the Upper Division States, and a successful framework will set aside our differing views and focus instead on the health and sustainability of the Colorado River System for all who depend upon it,โ Mitchell wrote.
This story was published in partnership with Public Domain.
Last year, as Utah prepared to file a federal lawsuit aiming to take control of millions of acres of federal public land within its borders, state officials sought help swaying public opinion in their favor. So they turned to a group of public relations professionals at Penna Powers, a media and branding firm based in Salt Lake City.
Backed with a commitment of more than two million in tax-payer funds, the firm sprang into action. One of the early orders of business was studying the opposition. In June 2024, an assistant attorney general sent an email to numerous state government colleagues and Penna Powers staffers that contained a video from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) in which the well-known hunter and media personality Randy Newberg described the dangers of transferring federal land to state control. โIt doesnโt matter how many promises are made,โ warned Newberg, โthe financial realities would force states to sell off our public lands.โ
Noting that organizations like TRCP are good at connecting with โtraditionally conservativeโ audiences, the Utah official told his colleagues that โour PR efforts will largely depend on how well we can anticipate and effectively respond to these expected criticisms.โ
โThat definitely helps us know what we need to counter the opposition,โ added Redge Johnson, director of Utahโs Public Lands Policy and Coordinating Office, or PLPCO, which has played a central role in organizing the stateโs campaign to seize federal land.
Throughout 2024, Penna Powers put together an elaborate PR and media campaign to do just that โ counter the opposition and build support for Utahโs efforts. They churned out videos, newspaper ads, social media spots and more. They hired actors, ran focus groups and helped prominent Utah politicians write talking points. In at least one instance, Penna Powers relied on AI to help create voice-overs in videos. In another instance, PLPCO staffers warned Penna Powers not to use too much scenic imagery in the campaign for fear it might undermine their efforts. They called the campaign โStand for Our Land,โ and those who worked on it were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. โThe Office of the Attorney General is taking this NDA extremely seriously,โ wrote one government official.
Hundreds of records reviewed by Public Domain shed light on the key players involved in this campaign and the strategies they used to persuade the public in their favor. Among other themes, their campaign relentlessly portrays the federal government as an absentee landlord that mismanages land and cuts off access to the public domain. Utah, on the other hand, is painted as a benevolent force working to ensure public land access. The campaign โ like the lawsuit it was meant to support โ seeks one principal outcome: federal land disposal. Utah has identified some 18.5 million acres of federal land within the stateโs boundaries that are currently administered by the Bureau of Land Management on behalf of all Americans โ and it wants those lands for itself.
Penna Powers, meanwhile, landed a big pay day. The contract between the PR firm and PLPCO runs until 2029 for a total cost of some $2.6 million.
In response to queries, PLPCO in a written statement said that,โUtah believes in protecting access to public lands for all users of all ages and abilities, and we are committed to actively managing these lands for generations to come. Utah is home to five national parks, several national monuments, and many other natural wonders. The state has always welcomed, and will continue to welcome visitors from around the world to visit and enjoy all that this great state has to offer.โ Penna Powers did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, critics of the Utah PR effort called it a โpropagandaโ campaign meant to mislead Utahns and the general public.
โPenna Powers worked hand-in-hand with the state of Utah to craft a misleading message about the stateโs land grab lawsuit,โ said Kate Groetzinger, communications manager at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group. โThey made it seem like forcibly taking ownership of public lands would help recreationists and ranchers, when the real goal of this lawsuit was to increase extraction and privatize national public lands in Utah. This campaign is the very definition of propaganda โ misleading political messaging paid for by taxpayers.โ
UTAHโS EFFORT TO take control of federal lands kicked off in earnest in 2012, when Utahโs then-Governor Gary Herbert signed into law the Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act, demanding state control of the majority of federal public land in Utah. โThis is only the first step in a long process,โ Herbert said at the time, โbut it is a step we must take.โ In 2018, Senator Mike Lee, a leading proponent of the land transfer movement, shared similar sentiments during a speech to the conservative Sutherland Institute in Salt Lake City. The campaign for land transfer, he said, โwill take years, and the fight will be brutal.โ Indeed, just last week, Lee put forward a proposal in the GOPโs massive reconciliation bill that would force the sell off of millions of acres of federal land in the Western U.S.
Utahโs actions to seize control of federal land have only grown more aggressive as the years have progressed. In August last year, it filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to strip federal ownership over some 18.5 million acres of BLM land within Utah. It claims these lands are โunappropriated,โ a novel argument meant to create a legal distinction between national parks, forests and monuments, and large swaths of BLM land across the West. If successful, Utahโs lawsuit would deprive the vast majority of Americans of their ownership stake in such BLM lands. Tribal nations, meanwhile, have been staunch opponents of Utahโs lawsuit, which the Ute Indian Tribe described as an โexistential threatโ to the tribe and its reservation lands.
In January this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear Utahโs case. It remains unclear whether Utah will refile its lawsuit in lower court, but its efforts to seize federal land are a generational project.
Regardless, Utah, faces a major public opinion hurdle. A large majority of Western voters are opposed to the idea of state control over federal public lands, according to Colorado Collegeโs annual polling. Even in Utah, some 57% of voters oppose public land transfers. That is where Penna Powers comes in. The firm worked to reshape public opinion in the stateโs favor, with a focus on building support among Utah residents as well as key decision makers at the national level.
โThe Stand for Our Land public education campaign is informing Utahns about the management of public lands, and how federal agencies are restricting access to public lands and ignoring local concerns,โ wrote PLPCO in a statement. โThe Bureau of Land Management closed over 2,000 miles of Utah roads on public lands in the past two years.โ
A centerpiece of Penna Powersโ effort has been glossy videos that portray federal land agencies as an exclusionary force bent on keeping people off the public domain. In one video, Penna Powers and PLPCO hired a voice actor to portray a โdisabled camperโ in a wheelchair on a camping trip with her family. โBecause of my disability I need to reach campsites in a motorized vehicle,โ the actor said. โIf I lose road access, I lose the ability to do something I love with my family. Thatโs why I think Utah should be managing Utah land.โ The actor who was selected to voice the video does not appear to use a wheelchair or mobility aid in social media posts and other records reviewed by Public Domain. PLPCO appears to have had many of those involved in its video shoots also sign NDAs. A talent agent for the actor in question did not provide comment at the time of publication.
Redge Johnson, the executive director of PLPCO, was particularly keen on the โdisabled camperโ storyline, among others. He asked about a video that combined the โdisabled camperโ story with one about an off-highway vehicles business. โI really want that video in the folder, it tells a great story,โ he wrote to Penna Powers staffer Allyse Christensen, who worked on the Stand for Our Land campaign.
Others, like disability community advocate Syren Nagakyrie, said Utahโs use of a โdisabled camperโ storyline to promote its political agenda is โdisingenuous.โ
WESTERN PUBLIC LANDS ARE HABITAT FOR ARIDLAND BIRDS
This map shows the cumulative range for 30 aridland bird species in North America, with the vast majority of that range falling within the boundaries of federal and state public lands. Source: Aridland bird data from Bird Conservation Regions, Bird Studies Canada and NABCI. Public lands map from GISGeography.com.
The Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments was ultimately given $75,000 for the study, and it picked Jackson-based Y2 Consultants to complete the analysis. When the 357-page study was completed the following fall, state land managers and lawmakers were warned that they lacked staff and resources to take over control of 25 million acres of Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Reclamation property that fell within state boundaries.
A two-track road cuts through Bureau of Land Management property west of Pinedale in April 2024. Such tracts of public land could be on the chopping block because of federal budget reconciliation text that seeks to sell between 2-3 million acres of the federal estate. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
โUltimately, without significant changes to federal law, the greatest challenge would be that the state would be inheriting the same bureaucratic maze of overlapping, entwined, often conflicting federal mandates established in the labyrinth of laws and directives laid out by Congress,โ the 2016 Y2 Consultants report stated. โThe land management trials, conundrums, and conflicts encountered would largely be the same for the state that exist under present [federal] management.โ
The first author listed on the report, a slot that typically denotes the lead, was Brenda Younkin, a natural resource specialist who co-founded Y2 Consultants with her husband, Zia Yasrobi.
On Wednesday, Politicoโs E&E News publicized that Younkin had been appointed by the Trump administration and had started working in a senior advisor post at the Bureau of Land Management, where sheโd report to its acting director, Jon Raby. Trumpโs first pick to lead the BLM, Colorado oil and gas advocate Kathleen Sgamma, withdrew her bid after it was revealed that sheโd written a memo expressing โdisgustโ for โPresident Trumpโs role in spreading misinformation that incitedโ the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
WyoFile was unable to reach Younkin for an interview Friday, but an auto-response from her Y2 Consultants email address confirmed a โleave of absenceโ because of a new gig with the U.S. Department of the Interior, the BLMโs government parent.
The Bureau of Land Managementโs 245 million surface acres, depicted in yellow in this map, account for about 10% of the United Statesโ landmass. (Library of Congress)
According to her biography and past interviews, Younkin has worked in the public lands and ranching sphere her entire career.
In statements made to the Cowboy State Daily, U.S. Sens. Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso both lauded Younkinโs appointment.
โThe more Wyoming voices we can have in the room, the better off we will all be,โ Barrasso told the outlet.
Younkin joins a handful of other Wyoming residents whoโve gone to work for the Trump administrationโs Interior Department via political appointments, or who have been nominated for positions.
Wyoming Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik speaks at a Game and Fish Commission meeting in Douglas in September 2024. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Last, southwestern Wyoming big game hunting advocate Josh Coursey was appointed to a Fish and Wildlife Service post, pulling him away from the Muley Fanatic Foundation, which he co-founded. That group has since gone on record opposing a provision expected to be yoked into the so-called โOne Big Beautiful Bill Actโ that would mandate the sale of an estimated 2-3 million acres of federal land in 11 western states.
โPublic lands need to stay in public hands and the Muley Fanatic Foundation opposes anything or anyone that threatens our lands that we hold dear for personal use,โ President and CEO Joey Faigle told WyoFile in a written statement. โThe public land sales being included in the reconciliation needs to stop now.โ
If the public land sale mandates donโt stop, the amount of land that Younkin, the Jackson Hole consultant, will be tasked with overseeing at the Bureau of Land Management will shrink.
The disposal language in the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources legislative text demands selling between 0.5% and 0.75% of the BLM and U.S. Forest Serviceโs 438 million surface acres within the next five years. Although just a fraction of the agenciesโ overall holdings, itโd translate to doing away with public lands that collectively add up to an area no smaller than Yellowstone National Park.
War, tariffs and inflation are not the only things driving up the price of food. Widespread drought is also looming over what people around the world eat. In Brazil, parched coffee farms have affected latte prices everywhere. In the Midwestern United States,ย years of poor rainshave led ranchers to cull cattle herds and have raised beef prices toย their highest levels ever. In China, one of the nationโsย key wheat-producing regions,ย the Yellow River Basin, is withering under unusually hot, dry conditions. Germany had itsย driest spring since 1931, though rains in recent weeks have allayed concerns about its wheat and barley crops. Ukraineย andย Russia, rivals on the battlefield, are also facing the threat of drought for their wheat crops. Both countries are breadbaskets for millions of people far and wide. Morocco, for instance, now in its sixth year of drought, has relied increasingly on wheat imports from Russia. Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and exacerbating extreme weather. Droughts can be particularly risky as the production of important foods becomes increasingly concentrated. For example, much of the worldโs coffee comes from Brazil, cacao from Ivory Coast and Ghana in West Africa, and corn from Brazil, China and the American Midwest…Around the world, most people get their calories from three staple grains โ rice, wheat and corn โ which means that weather hazards to places where they are produced can have big repercussions for food security. Bad weather in one or two of those regions can destabilize the global supply…
Sandwiches, instant noodles, rotis. Wheat, in all its forms, has become one of the worldโs most commonly eaten grains, second only to rice. That makes it one of the most closely watched crops in the era of extreme weather. Wheat is also often closely guarded. Take India, for instance. Prompted by an intense heat wave in 2022, the Indian government banned wheat exports in order to stockpile it at home…
Summer barbecue season is approaching just as the price of beef has topped records. Ground beef in the United States is close to $6 per pound, and steak is nearly twice that…A few factors are driving the price rise, including soaring insurance costs for farmers and the abiding demand for beef. But central to the rising cost of beef is a drought that has stretched across the Midwestern United States over the past several years. The conditions have dried up a lot of grazing land. Cattle herd numbers are at their lowest in 70 years.
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
June 18, 2025
Key Points
Arizona officials present details of a new proposal to share future shortages on the Colorado River.
The “supply-driven” solution would base allocations on the river’s actual flows, not on storage in the reservoirs.
Upper Basin states say the plan has problems, but Gov. Katie Hobbs insisted Arizona will defend its river allocation and demand other states take cuts.
Negotiators for the seven states arguing over diminished Colorado River water are discussing an option they hope will end their deadlock, one that Arizona officials say would focus less on who gets what and more on what the river can realistically provide. Theyโre calling it the โsupply-drivenโ solution, Arizona Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said, and it links the required water deliveries out ofย Glen Canyon Damย to what might naturally be flowing downstream at Lees Ferry if the dam werenโt there. The Rocky Mountain states upstream from there would have to let that amount pass, and the Southwestern states would have to live within its limits. Itโs intended as a fair way of adapting โ and shrinking โ the regionโs use of a river whose flow was once thought to exceed 15 million acre-feet of water a year but, in the last 25 years, has averaged 12.4 million…
Jennifer Pitt and Brad Udall at the Getches-Wilkinson Center/Water and Tribes Initiative conference June 5, 2025. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
So far, agreement about whatโs fairย has appeared distant.ย The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada have the bulk of the regionโs population and farm production, and have fully developed and then started to cut back on the half of the riverโs flow that the compact awarded them. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have not fully developed their share of the water โ a share that no longer fully exists. They have balked at cutting their existing uses to meet the compactโs requirement that they send at least half of the riverโs flow of a century ago now that a changing climate has exposed the folly of the compactโs numbers. The supply-driven model would generally mandate a flow past Lees Ferry to the Southwestern states equal to a rolling three-year average of the natural flow that the mountain snowmelt provides, Buschatzke said. There would be upper and lower bounds on that number, to account for needs such as protecting reservoir levels that are safe for Glen Canyon and Hoover dam operations. Those bounds are as yet unidentified.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The long-term drying of the American Southwest poses a gathering and measurable threat to hydropower generation in the Colorado River basin.
Should Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam, continue to shrink, a substantial drop in the damโs hydropower output is on the horizon.
The diminished state of the lake and the potential severe drop in electricity supply illustrate the consequences of a warming climate for the region. Built in the throes of the Great Depression, Hoover was the signature project of a country displaying its grit and engineering prowess to tame the Westโs mightiest rivers to irrigate farmland and build cities. Today the dam is an aging asset buffeted by hydrological change and generating half the power that it did just a generation ago.
According to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the basinโs large dams, if Lake Mead falls another 20 feet, Hoover Damโs capacity to generate electricity would be slashed by 70 percent from its current level.
If there is a reason not to be especially alarmed itโs this: Hoover is just a small piece of the regionโs electric power infrastructure. Federal dams along the Colorado River account for just over 4 percent of Arizonaโs generating capacity, for instance.
Still, the cheap electricity is a lifeline for tribes and small rural electric providers. And the damโs ability to be quickly turned on and off helps regulate the peaks and troughs of electricity demand. Curtailing this source of inexpensive electricity would raise the cost of power in the region while also challenging the integration of renewable energy into the electric grid.
A hydropower shortfall will be โbad news for us,โ said Ed Gerak, executive director of the Irrigation and Electrical Districts Association of Arizona, which represents power providers that receive federal hydropower from Colorado River dams.
Lake Mead now sits at an elevation of 1,055 feet. The break point for hydropower is 1,035 feet. At that level, 12 older turbines at Hoover that are not designed for low reservoir levels would be shut down, Reclamation said. Five newer turbines installed a decade ago would continue to generate power.
The threat is real, especially as this yearโs runoff forecast for the basin continues to worsen. Every month, Reclamation updates its projection of reservoir levels over the next two years. The June update shows a 10 percent chance that Lake Mead breaches 1,035 feet in spring 2027.
In a worst-case scenario, the breach would happen at the end of 2026, just when current operating rules for Lake Mead and Lake Powell expire. The modeling indicates a similar chance that Lake Powell drops low enough in 2027 that Glen Canyon Dam, another key hydropower asset in the basin, stops producing electricity.
The probability that Lake Mead drops that far is small and laden with uncertainties about weather and water use. But it is large enough that Hooverโs power customers are signaling their concern.
Reclamation, for its part, acknowledges the problem at Hoover and is evaluating its options. The agency estimates that replacing the 12 turbines would cost $156 million.
โReclamation is assessing the cost-benefit analysis of replacing some of the older style turbines and the timeline for installation,โ the agency wrote in a statement to Circle of Blue. โOrdering new turbines is a lengthy process as they have to be designed, model tested, built and ultimately installed.โ
The dozen older turbines are not designed to operate at low reservoir levels. Dams like Hoover, which was completed in 1936, function based on the principle of hydraulic head, which is the difference in elevation between the top of the reservoir and the intake pipes for the damโs powerhouse. When the hydraulic head drops, so does the water pressure. That can trigger the formation of air bubbles in the water, which can gouge and damage the turbines in a process called cavitation.
The five turbines that would not be shut down are low-head units that can accommodate lower reservoir levels. Installed a decade ago at a cost of $42 million in response to a previous rapid decline in Lake Mead, they can operate down to 950 feet. (One of those five turbines is currently offline, and Reclamation does not have an estimate for when it will resume operating.)
Hoover Dam, at the center of the photo, forms Lake Mead, which is currently just 31 percent full. Photo ยฉ J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue
Hoover is already hobbled by low water. Power generation in 2023 was roughly half the output of 2000, the last year that Lake Mead was effectively full.
When Lake Mead is full, Hoover has a generating capacity of 2,080 megawatts, equivalent to a large coal-fired or nuclear power plant. Today its capacity is 1,304 MW. If the dozen older turbines go offline, it will drop again, to 382 MW.
These declines in hydropower generation have been felt by the customers who buy Hoover Damโs electricity, Gerak said. In a shortfall, they have to buy market-rate electricity. Depending on the season and power demand, market rates can be considerably more expensive.
Eric Witkoski is the executive director of the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, which manages the stateโs allocation of Hooverโs power. Witkoski said that rural electric companies in his state have a higher share of their electricity coming from the dams and would be most affected by a shortfall.
The value of Hooverโs electricity is measured not just in raw megawatts and dollars. It is a flexible power source that can be ramped up and down to match the regionโs daily and seasonal rhythms. Energy use rises in summer afternoons when air conditioning units are blasting and electricity-consuming household chores are at hand. It falls at night when cooler air prevails and washing machines are silent.
โThe beauty of hydropower is that itโs great for helping to stabilize and regulate the grid,โ Gerak said.
IEDA and other interest groups are pursuing a number of fixes. They are encouraging Reclamation and its parent agency the Interior Department to use federal infrastructure funds to install new low-head turbines or to request appropriations from Congress.
They are writing their congressional representatives in support of the Help Hoover Dam Act, a bill that would unlock some $50 million in ratepayer funds that had been set aside for pension benefits for federal employees. The trade groups claim that Congress funds the pension benefits through other means and that the funds could be spent on dam upgrades if Reclamation was given the authority to do so.
They also want to set up an organization modeled after the National Parks Foundation that can accept donations for dam operations and maintenance, including the visitor center, which is supported by power sales.
These fixes will take time. But as Lake Mead declines, the urgency to achieve them will intensify.
Steam rises above the cooling towers in The Dalles data center in Oregon (Google, 2020).
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
June 5, 2025
On Auroraโs eastern edge, where the bustle of metro Denver fades to farms, the first building of what will become the stateโs largest data center stands behind a wrought-iron fence. In another section of the 65-acre campus, front-end loaders are at work preparing for the foundation of another building. Seventeen miles west, in a dusty industrial nook of northern Denver, workers on a recent day scattered across a huge pit dug into the earth to lay the foundation for that cityโs newest data center. The two construction sites offer a glimpse into what a predicted boom in Coloradoโs data center industry may look like as the industry expands exponentially nationwide to meet the needs of Americansโ increasingly online lives โ and to provide the computing power demanded by artificial intelligence. The potential growth โ and repeated proposals for state incentives to expedite that development โ are creating concerns that the centersโ required power and cooling needs could keep Colorado from meeting its climate goals and drain already-stretched water resources…
Already, an โabsolute arms raceโ among data center developers has prompted the stateโs largest electricity provider to stop offering lower rates for the facilities, according to Xcel Energy executives. If all of the data centersโ requests to the utility for power were to come to fruition, Xcel would need to double its current generating power. When completed, the Aurora data center will be a 160 megawatt hyperscale facility that, at max capacity, could consume as much power as 176,000 homes. The northern Denver data center, once completed in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, could use a maximum of 805,000 gallons of water a day for cooling โ the same asย 16,100 Denveritesโ average daily indoor water use. Regulators, environmental advocates and data center representatives all say Colorado faces a critical moment: Can the state balance the desire from some government leadersย for the economic development brought by data centers with Coloradoโs climate goals and water realities? And can it do that while protecting electric customers from bearing the costs of the burgeoning industry?
The Central Arizona Project canal carries water through Phoenix in 2019. The project’s former general manager, Ted Cooke, was recently nominated to run the top federal agency for the Colorado River. Those who have worked with Cooke described him as a qualified expert. Ted Wood/The Water Desk
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 17, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
President Donald Trump has tapped longtime water manager Ted Cooke to be the next commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The nomination, submitted Mondayto the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, attempts to fill a pivotal role at the top federal agency for Western rivers, reservoirs and dams.
If confirmed, Cooke will become the main federal official overseeing Colorado River matters. His nomination comes at a tense time for the river. The seven states that use its water appear deadlocked in closed-door negotiations about sharing the shrinking water supply in the future.
Cooke will likely try to push those state negotiators toward agreement about who should feel the pain of water cutbacks and when. If they canโt reach a deal ahead of a 2026 deadline, the federal government can step in and make those decisions itself.
Cooke has spent most of his lengthy career with the Central Arizona Project, which brings Colorado River water to the Phoenix area. He first joined the agency in 2003, according to his LinkedIn page. He climbed the ranks and served as CAPโs general manager from 2015 to 2023.
Ted Cooke and Tom Buschatzke: Photo credit: Arizona Department of Water Resources
Water experts across the Colorado River basin, including some who have worked with him in the past, told KUNC they regard Cooke as a qualified technical expert. Sharon Megdal, whose tenure on CAPโs board of directors overlapped with Cookeโs time as general manager, said she had โgreat admirationโ for Cooke.
โHe’s thorough, he’s deliberative, he looks for solutions, and boy, we need to find solutions right now,โ said Megdal, who now directs the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. โMy observation of seeing him in action in tough situations shows that he’ll keep working until a resolution is reached or a solution is achieved, and I think that’s what we need now.โ
John Entsminger, Nevadaโs top water negotiator, called Cookeโs appointment a โgreat choice,โ and cited his work in shaping the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. If confirmed, Cooke will likely be in the same negotiating rooms as Entsminger.
โThere are times when [the Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner] has to level pretty realistic threats at everybody,โ Entsminger said. There’s also times when they have to be the mediatorโฆ I think Ted has both of those skills. I’ve seen him be pretty pointed, and I’ve seen him drive compromise.โ
The seven states working on the next set of rules for managing the Colorado River are currently split into two caucuses โ the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico and the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
The appointment of Cooke, a longtime Arizonan, could upset some on the other side of that divide. The Central Arizona Project, his former employer, is generally among the first entities to lose water under any plan for cutbacks.
Eric Kuhn is the former general manager of the Colorado River District. The taxpayer-funded agency was founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado. He said Cooke is qualified, but added “the nomination of someone from Arizona is interesting at a time when the Lower Division and the Upper Division states are far off.”
โI assume that he would recuse himself from decisions that could affect the CAP – which is just about any decision in the basin,โ Kuhn wrote to KUNC. โNone the less, his nomination is a plus for Arizona and the Lower Division States.โ
Negotiators from Colorado and New Mexico declined to comment, and negotiators from Wyoming and Utah did not get back to KUNC in time for publication. Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission and a former colleague of Cookeโs, also declined to comment.
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
June 18, 2025
Arizona yesterday finally moved the super-secret idea at the heart of current Colorado River negotiations out of the shadows.
The idea is deceptively simple: base Lake Powell releases on a percentage of the three-year rolling average of the Colorado Riverโs estimated โnatural flowโ at Lee Ferry. Allocate water based not on a century-old hydrologic mistake, but rather based on what the river actually has to offer. It presents an attractive alternative to the increasingly baroque and unproductive shitshow that had taken over interstate negotiations.
It has the great virtue of each basin getting out of the other basinโs business โ one clean, simple number. But establishing the right percentage remains the hard part. Make the percentage too high and the Upper Basin will have to cut users with pre-Compact water rights. Make the percentage too low and Lake Powell fills up while Central Arizona goes dry.
But some of the early modeling suggests that there may be a sweet spot where a combination of Lower Basin cuts along the lines of what the Lower Basin has already been willing to offer, combined with modest Upper Basin system conservation programs, might thread a needle that could allow the crafting of a compromise. This is very good news if the negotiators and the folks back home who have been egging them on can seize this opportunity to set aside parochial smallness and think at the basin scale.
The possibility of a new approach was hinted at a CU Boulderโs Colorado River conference two weeks ago (I spent most of the conference hidden away watching and listening on Zoom through a covid haze, so it might have just been a fever dream, but I thought I heard the hints), and Iโm told was a topic of some of the hallway conversations. But Tom Buschatzkeโs reveal at yesterdayโs meeting of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee (the closest thing we have to the much-needed C-SPAN for the Colorado River Basin) was the first public discussion of the hush-hush stuff that shouldnโt be quite so hush-hush given, yโknow, 40 million of us stakeholders.
The full slide deck from the Colorado River C-SPAN Arizona Reconsultation Committee is useful. Reclamationโs Dan Bunk, for example, shared a slide slowing the latest โmin probableโ forecast (hilarious typo โ โmin problemโ now corrected) showing the system tanking โ dropping below minimum power pool at Powell โ in winter 2026. The min probable forecast has been a useful guide lately, frankly, and the latest version is horrifying. (On any other day this would be the lead, and probably deserves its own post, but I try not to work on Wednesdays.)
In his brief slot on the panel, Udall was first a cheerleader for Colorado River problem solving but reminding listeners that climate change was the elephant in the room, as several speakers later in the conference acknowledged.
Following are his remarks, lightly edited:
Given the policy expertise on this panel, Iโm going to constrain my remarks to whatโs going on in the climate space. I want to make the following two points and end with a heartfelt plea.
Within this basin, we can and have worked together to deal with a really sticky, difficult issue like climate change, to inform decision-making given the right partners, including the federal government at the table. Point two is our current climate trajectory is beyond awful, and that makes our challenge even worse.
So let me get to point one. We can, in fact, work together on a really difficult issue. In late 2006 Terry Fulp (then regional director of the Lower Colorado Basin Region for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation), pulled together six different sciences to consider how a changing climate would impact runoff, to inform the 2007 Interim Guidelines EIS. That effort became Appendix U.
Interestingly, it was the first time climate science was incorporated into a major EIS. It was not particularly controversial, and it was done during a Republican administration. It set the stage for future (Bureau of) Reclamation climate change efforts, efforts that have continued to this day.
But put an asterisk next to that.
The next year (2008), the Water Utility Climate Alliance was formed by eight major national water providers, and four of those were actually in our basin: the San Diego County Water Authority, Denver Water, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Members have led the way in figuring out how to adapt to climate change, including hiring certain staff to deal with this. And a hat tip for this to both Jim (Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water) and Bill Hasencamp (Colorado River resources manager for Metropolitan).
Let me mention Reclamation again, because in 2009 Mike Connor, as a congressional staffer, wrote the SECURE Water Act, which made Reclamation perform a series of continuing climate change studies that are important to this day.
The lesson here is that when faced with such a daunting and unknown challenge, we actually can come together to discover scientific truths, but we need both federal and basic leadership to make this happen. Unfortunately, right now, one leg of this is seriously threatened, hence my asterisk.
My second point is about our awful moment, our global climate change trajectory. Hold on to your seats, because Iโm going to make you uncomfortable. The world is on track for 3 degrees Celsius warming by 2100. This far exceeds anything agreed to by the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. And frankly, terrifies scientists. Three Celsius is a projected average global warming, but over land, thatโs 5 Celsius. Converted into Fahrenheit, itโs nine Fahrenheit. Imagine every day, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Highs, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Lows, 9 Fahrenheit warmer. Thatโs a world unlike anything we currently know, and itโs going to challenge us all on every front.
And whatโs worse about this, and not particularly appreciated, is that to get to 3 Celsius, we need large global greenhouse emissions to continue through this century to 2100. So, it will continue to warm significantly beyond 2100. Nine Fahrenheit is not where we end up. Itโs kind of where we start.
This 3 Celsius outcome has been has been obvious for at least five years, as climate policy progress has stalled and even gone backwards. You know, post-Paris in 2015 there were all kinds of great net-zero by 2050 pledges by government and industry, including the fossil fuel industry.
But since then, the fossil fuel industry is trying to have it both ways. They love to tout these goals while at the same time talking to the shareholders about how theyโre going to expand production in ways that are completely incompatible with 2 Celsius. And there are about 25 large, mostly national oil companies that are living this lie. Each one thinks theyโre going to be the last one standing, selling a product thatโs fundamentally incompatible with a stable climate. [ed. emphasis mine]
If you think weโve got plenty of time to solve this, like 75 years, normally, Iโd agree with you. But think about whatโs happened over the past 35 years. Emissions have gone up 60% and continue to rise. With these bad actors and with banks willing to finance this and governments willing to subsidize it, what weโre witnessing is a monumental failure of both capitalism and governance.
Now, if this werenโt all bad enough for you, we now have an anti-knowledge president and his vile enablers systematically attacking all forms of knowledge using illegal and unconstitutional tactics. Nowhere has this been more true than in this climate science space, where theyโre going after anything and everything that has the word climate on it, every federal agency.
Iโll mention three here in our basin that are really critical: NOAA, the USGS and Reclamation. All of that climate work is in the sights of these vile enablers and the administration. Hence that nasty asterisk again. This administration aims to stop all work at preventing future greenhouse gas emissions as well as our ability to adapt to coming changes.
And 95% of what I can say on this panel about this is not suitable for this room, but letโs call it what it is: itโs insanity what theyโre doing.
There are also recent, strong signs that climate warming is speeding up. So 2023 and 2024 were 1.5 Celsius above a pre-Industrial average. And there, those two years have a trend line thatโs twice what weโre used to seeing, and it has climate scientists flummoxed about the reasons behind it.
So why talk about global climate issues in a conference about the Colorado River? Well, it should be obvious. There is no way this makes for a better world in which we live, a better world in which the Colorado River flows, and if you live in that world, tell me how to join in la-la land, because Iโd love to be there.
Iโm now convinced that we need to plan for the worst possible climate future, and thatโs somewhere around 10 million acre-feet runoff. But what it also means is taking a hard look at every existing agreement in the river. It either breaks them or substantially modifies them.
Let me get to my plea. These facts should be a call to action to everybody. Not only are we in a really deep climate hole, weโre continuing to dig. Absolutely the last thing we need is the federal government undercutting our efforts to meet the water supply challenges in this basin. Thereโs a term called the pessimism aversion trap. Iโm going to urge you not to fall on that. And itโs the tendency to look the other way when confronted with dark realities. We still control our destiny, even if the solutions seem daunting.
So Iโm going to ask for two things. One, obviously, fight back against all these harmful cutbacks to all aspects of our national climate effort, including the abandonment of science and scientists. Our federal allies are critical partners in this fight, and lasting damage has been done.
Second, some of you think that your job description doesnโt include worrying about reducing greenhouse gas emissions or what might happen at 2100 or beyond. I disagree. I plead with you to get serious about figuring out how to reduce the emissions of your organization and even your own personal emissions. I agree that individual actions arenโt going to solve this, but they send a really strong signal to everyone around us.
Finally, I need to apologize to and beg forgiveness our next speaker who deserves to follow someone far nicer than I am.
Hidden Valley on National Forest land near Durango, Colorado. This is the type of parcel that could be on the auction block if Sen. Mike Lee gets his way. Photo credit: The Land Desk
It is not hyperbole to say we are living in dark times.
The U.S. President is about to hold a multi-million-dollar, taxpayer-funded, dictator-style military parade โ for his frigging birthday. He activated the national guard and the marines to violently quell non-violent protests in Los Angeles. A U.S. senator was tackled, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed for deigning to ask a question of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a press conference in which she admitted that federal troops were in Los Angeles not to stop rioting, but to โliberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country.โ Oh โฆ
American democracy, morality, empathy, civil liberties, and the rule of law are all under attack, and the assailants are none other than the President, his administration, and a vast majority of congressional Republicans.
So when Sen. Mike Lee, the Jello-slurping Utah MAGA-ite, proposed selling off a mere one half of one percent of the nationโs public land, it might not seem worth squandering whatever remains of oneโs outrage on. But we โ as in the American people โ stand to lose a lot from this latest push to take public lands out of the publicโs hands.
Lee installed his amendment into the Energy and Natural Resources section of the so-called โBig, Beautiful Bill,โ which proposes to rescind environmental protections on millions of acres in Alaska, slash royalty rates for oil and gas, and revive noncompetitive leasing, among other mining- and drilling-friendly provisions.
Leeโs provision would require the Interior Secretary to โselect for disposal not less than .50% and not more than .75% of Bureau of Management land, and shall dispose of all right, title, and interest of the United States in and to those tractsโ and the Agriculture Secretary shall select for disposal .50% to .75% of National Forest System.โ Lands in national parks, monuments, or conservation areas, wilderness, wildlife refuges, and other protected areas would not be eligible for disposal.
While thatโs a tiny fraction of the nationโs public lands, it adds up to between 2 million and 3.2 million acres, which on the upper end is about equivalent to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments combined. The amendment would apply to every Western state except Montana, which was probably exempted in the hopes of winning Rep. Ryan Zinkeโs support.
While the amendment is purportedly to free up more land for affordable housing, there is nothing in the text restricting the end use of the land after itโs sold or transferred. It only requires someone nominating a parcel to specify what they plan to use land for and the extent to which development of the tract would address local housing needs (including housing supply and affordability).
It would prioritize tracts for disposal that are:
nominated by states or local governments
adjacent to existing developed areas
have access to existing infrastructure
suitable for residential housing
would reduce checkerboard land patterns
inefficient to manage.
At first glance, this appears relatively harmless: It would merely consolidate private holdings on the urban fringe, and ease the management nightmares of checkerboard land-ownership. But this is where I urge you to think about your favorite public land-adjacent community and consider what might parcels might be prioritized for disposal.
I went through this exercise somewhat inadvertently recently as I rode my bike on a trail through a place known as Hidden Valley on National Forest land north of town. The valley floor is nearly perfectly level, having been carved by a glacier many millennia ago, and bounded on two sides by bone-white sandstone cliffs. Up until the fifth century A.D., Pueblo people inhabited and farmed the valley, and the area continues to hold cultural and archaeological significance. Grass โ green during this time of year โ covers much of the valley. Cattails, nourished by the waters of Falls Creek, jut from the northern end.
Durango folks come up here to walk and seek solace from the din of humanity. They walk and bike and in the winter even ski and snowshoe here and coexist โ sometimes uneasily โ with bears and mountain lions and deer and elk and even rattlesnakes.
That this tract of public land would be sold off for development is almost unthinkable. And yet, it fits all of the criteria: It is just a few miles from town, is sandwiched between existing residential areas, is easily accessible and quite buildable, and infrastructure is already in place. Durango is grappling with a severe housing affordability crisis and Hidden Valley could theoretically support hundreds of housing units, alleviating some pressure on the real estate market. Unthinkable to you and I, yes. But keep in mind that it would be the Trump administration calling the shots on this one.
There are hundreds of other Hidden Valley-like tracts of land across the West, pieces of public land near communities that provide all kinds of benefits to wildlife and humans and the ecosystem and solitude. And if Mike Lee has his way, 3 million acres of these special places would go on the auction block, ultimately to be covered with homes, affordable or otherwise, and other development.
Fascinating observation from Jim Lochhead this morning at the Getches-Wilkinson Center Colorado River Conference about the nature of the current negotiations and the role of the federal government. It came during a panel moderated by Anne Castle focused on what we learned from the expiring 2007 river management guidelines, which are the subject of intense renegotiation among the seven basin states.
From the perspective of the panelโs charge โ what have we learned since the 2007 agreements โ the way I phrased that, the the way the current process is going, should seem weird to us: โintense negotiation among the seven basin states.โ
According to Lochhead, a Coloradan who was in the room for the โ07 negotiations, the current cloistered seven-state process is very different from what happened leading up to the โ07 agreement. In 2007, Lochhead explained, the states werenโt the decision maker, the federal government was the decision maker, playing a much more active role as facilitator compared to the current process, which has deferred to the states to come up with a deal.
This is not going well. At least I think itโs not going well. Who knows? Lochhead likened it to the selection of a pope, as we all await the puff of smoke. โThe current process seems to me to be like the conclave.โ
In my gossip network, Iโve heard good things about the current role being played by Scott Cameron, the Trump Administrationโs point person on this stuff. We will hear from him tomorrow. I look forward to that.
Other stuff from the morning sessions
Weirdly, after driving all the way to Colorado for the meeting, I spent the morning in my hotel room on Zoom โ a bit under the weather, not feeling up to the social battery drain of all those people, saving energy for tomorrow when Iโm moderating the closing panel. But what I lost in social capital construction and maintenance, I made up for in being able to focus on the talks. Among them.
Brad Udall, our modern-day E.C. LaRue, was pretty frank about the climate change trajectory, arguing that we need to prepare for a 10 million acre foot river. For those not steeped in the numbers, thatโs not very much water. The current climate trajectory, Brad said, is โbeyond awful.โ
Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis from the Gila River Indian Community argued that enduring solutions to the Colorado Riverโs problems will require federal financial help.
A couple of useful nuggets from my Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. One: Bill talked about a really interesting analysis his team has done of the Intentionally Created Surplus Program, which concludes that there is a lot more water in the reservoirs right now, including in Lake Powell, than would otherwise be the case. Theyโve briefed me on their analysis and shared the report with me, I just havenโt had the time to write about it yet, itโs super interesting.
Bill also talked about the weird state of the current state negotiations. One on one, people say theyโre interested in compromise, in finding an agreement. In the negotiating room, they stick to hard line positions. This circles back nicely to Lochheadโs point that last time around, this was a federal process, not a state-run process.
Anne Castle made an incredibly important point about the challenges face by the stateโs negotiators. They are sent into the room to advocate for their stateโs water supplies. They need permission from their constituents to compromise, to be able and willing to give up some water in order in the interests of the good of the basin.
Iโm calling it! Spring runoff appears to have peaked on most Western streams โ and almost definitely has done so on the streams in this yearโs Land Desk Super Predict the Peak Contest.
The good news is, the runoff was later and bigger than a lot of folks โ including myself โ predicted it would be. The bad news is that the flows were still downright pathetic compared to other years, even though in most cases the peak snowmelt was supplemented by heavy rain, meaning the runoff numbers donโt necessarily reflect a healthy snow year. Which is to say: The megadrought persists across much of the Western United States, with extreme conditions in the Southwest.
Unfortunately, we had very few entries this year, possibly because these things are really hard to predict. That said, it looks like Andrew High has a winning formula, at least on a few of these stream segments. Here are the winners and their predictions:
Animas:ย Andrew High, 2,710 cfs on May 21.
North Fork:ย Andrew High, 1,260 cfs on June 7.
Rio Grande:ย Jim OโDonnell, 1,150 cfs on May 15.ย
San Miguel:ย B Frank, 692 cfs on May 15.ย
Colorado:ย Andrew High, 13,160 cfs on June 13.
Congratulations, winners! Andrew, B, and Jim, please send me your mailing address and t-shirt size at landdesk@substack.com and Iโll get your prizes in the mail ASAP.
Now, on to the not so happy news. What a difference a year can make. Last year at this time, the West seemed to be on its way to being drought-free, with the exception of New Mexico. Now? Not so much. Itโs looking downright grim for New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Nevada, even though the Las Vegas area received a healthy dose of rain in May.
Source: National Drought Monitor.
And, after a couple years of respite, itโs time once again to start worrying about Lake Powell โ the barometer of the Colorado Riverโs health. Thus far this year, the volume of water flowing into the reservoir has been far lower than last year, which already was below normal. Judging by the runoff patterns so far, it appears as if Juneโs inflows may be even lower than Mayโs. If the rest of June is hot and dry, prompting greater evaporation from the reservoir, it could actually draw reservoir levels down this month during a time when water levels normally would rise.
The black bars show inflow volumes for the 2025 water year compared to the red bars for 2024. Source: USBR.
Normally Lake Powellโs surface level would jump substantially over the next month or so before dropping later in the summer after all of the mountain snowpack has completely melted. While reservoir levels are currently rising, it likely wonโt continue for long. Source: Lake Powell Water-Data
But one of those truths about the West, is that aridification provides no buffer against flooding โ especially flash-flooding. Some hikers found that out the hard way last week when a flash flood ripped down Big Horn Canyon in Utah, stranding them on the opposite side of the arroyo from their vehicle. They called for help and Bureau of Land Management rangers and Garfield County deputies responded and rescued the folks, according to the BLMโs Utah office. The Escalante River nearby jumped from 0 cfs to 1,200 cfs in just minutes around the same time. You can see some video of the flash flooding here: http://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1036784068519285
๐ Data Dump ๐
As long as weโre doing the graphs and charts thing, we might as well check in on that olโ Trumpian โenergy dominanceโ thing. The rig count โ which is a snapshot of the number of rigs actively drilling at any given time โ is the most accurate indicator of the oil and gas industryโs enthusiasm to extract the fossil fuels. And that verve appears to be waning under Trump. The number of rigs operating in the West has dropped since Trump took office, and is down significantly from the most recent peak in 2023 when, yes, Joe Biden was president and was supposedly waging a โwarโ on fossil fuels.
The red and blue shades indicate Republican and Democratic administrations, respectively. Source: Baker Hughes.
Colorado River Basin reservoir storage. Credit: InkStain.net
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (Jack Schmidt and John Fleck):
June 1, 2025
We now begin June, when the Colorado Riverโs two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, should be swelling with melting snow for use later this year and beyond, but that is not happening. Although Lake Powell is our reservoir and Lake Mead is theirs (or vice versa), the two reservoirs are effectively one very large facility located downstream from Upper Basin consumptive users and upstream from Lower Basin users. At least 60% of the total storage in 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation is in Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The total contents of the two reservoirs have been steadily declining since early July 2024 and continued to decline through at least 31 May 2025. Never in the past 15 years has the decline in total storage of Powell and Mead extended so late into spring. Current reservoir storage data are showing us, in real time, an ominous pattern familiar from past dry years: upstream use of water before it has a chance to get to Lake Powell combined with releases from Lake Mead to users further downstream is outpacing the melting snowpackโs ability to replenish the two reservoirs.
While the normal tools we use for measuring and managing use of Colorado River water โ the Consumptive Uses and Losses Reports and the Lower Basin decree accounting reports โ lag by weeks or even years, reservoir storage, which is the net difference between stream flow into reservoirs and what is released downstream or is lost to evaporation, provides the closest thing we have to an accurate, real-time measure of the Colorado River basinโs water budget. Right now, we are not doing well.
The duration of time this year during which total storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead has declined is unprecedented in the past 15 years. In a typical year, the steady decrease in the combined contents of Powell and Mead that begins the preceding summer ends in early May when Rocky Mountain snowmelt becomes significant. However, inflows to Lake Powell this year have yet to exceed releases from Lake Mead , and the total contents continue to decline, suggesting that this yearโs recovery in storage will be minimal.
Data from other years also suggests that reservoir recovery this year will be relatively small. This year, total unregulated inflow to Lake Powell is predicted to be 55% of normal. Based on past trends, net increase in total reservoir storage of the 46 reservoirs tracked by Reclamation will be ~1.2 million acre feet (af). By July, we are likely to resume draw down the basinโs reservoirs until the 2026 snowmelt season begins.
Presently, storage in the watershedโs reservoirs is comparable to conditions in late summer and fall 2021 when water managers expressed significant concern. The very wet conditions of 2023 averted a major crisis, but the system remains depleted. In 2024, total basin reservoir storage climbed by 2.5 million af, but subsequent drawdown of those reservoirs was 3.6 million af during the following 10 months. Although the net difference between reservoir gain and subsequent drawdown of 1.1 million af might be considered โbalancedโ in the context of the last 15 years, there is no question that we have begun to mine the bounty of 2023, and we are likely to continue to do so until at least spring 2026 unless we greatly reduce consumptive uses.
For too long, we have hoped that big wet years will occur with sufficient frequency to avert true crisis, but there have been too few of those wet years during the 21st century. Only three of the last 15 years have been sufficiently wet to result in a significant increase in reservoir storage given the magnitude of the basinโs consumptive uses. We canโt continue with a water management policy that hopes for another wet year. The basinโs water managers have no choice but to further reduce consumptive uses to sustainably manage the dwindling water supply.
In response to a previously posted mini-white paper on reservoir storage, a supportive friend commented, โNobody cares.โ Another friend said, โI donโt see how we can get agreement about recovering storage. Letโs hope for more wet years.โ We should care, and we need to try harder.
These mini-white papers seek to demonstrate that reservoir storage data, analyzed in aggregate, provide timely and accurate data relevant to understanding the reliability and security of the Colorado Riverโs water supply. These data are more precise, accurate, and timely than estimates of natural runoff, reservoir inflow, consumptive uses, or evaporation. Reservoir storage data provided by Reclamation are a significant contribution to transparency in water management. However, these data are under-utilized and under-analyzed and are typically reported without long-term context. We can do better.
These data can be used to develop an excellent correlation between April-July unregulated inflow to Lake Powell, forecast by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, and anticipated increase in basin-wide storage. Such an analysis strongly indicates that the 2025 snowmelt runoff will yield only a small increase in basin storage and necessitate greater reductions in consumptive use so as to better position the basinโs water users should next year also be dry.
In May 2022, a couple paused at once had been the bottom of the boat put-in ramp in Antelope Canyon to lok down on the receding waters of Lake Powell. The reservoir at that point was 22% full. Photo/Allen Best
ย Almost 300 water wonks converged on Boulder Thursday [June 3, 2025] for two days of sobering conversations about the riverโs future punctuated by frustration, pleas for creative solutions and references to everything from the musician Lizzo to the kids movie โFrozen.โ
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The Colorado River Basin is in dire straits: The water supply for 40 million people has been dwindling, and climatologists say the climate future is bleak. State officials have spent months mired in thorny negotiations over things like how to split painful water cuts in the driest conditions โ with scant progress to report publicly. The lack of progress and insight into the talks had some conference-goers feeling frustrated. Concerned. Uncertain.
High-ranking federal officials joined the Boulder event to reassert the federal governmentโs frequent role in talks over the Colorado Riverโs future: The parent ready to stop the car if the kids canโt stop fighting.
In the event that the states canโt agree on how to manage the riverโs reservoirs and water supply in a timely fashion, Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is ready to wield his federal authority over reservoirs, water contracts and more in the basin.
โHeโs not looking forward to that, but in the absence of a seven-state agreement, he will do it,โ Scott Cameron, the Department of the Interiorโs acting assistant secretary for water and science, said Friday at the 45th annual Conference on the Colorado River at the University of Coloradoโs Getches-Wilkinson Center.
The basinโs task is to submit a joint management proposal to the federal government for analysis. For months, however, theyโve been stuck working on separate ideas for how to manage the river.
Upper Basin states โ Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming โ are on one side, and Lower Basin states โ Arizona, California and Nevada โ on the other. The 30 tribal nations in the basin are advocating for their individual needs, as is Mexico.
Notably, the top state negotiators, except Californiaโs, skipped the Boulder conference this year, unlike in the past.
The Interior Department will analyze a joint basin proposal as part of a larger process to select draft alternatives and then settle on a final plan.
The final plan could determine everything from how key reservoirs store and release water to who takes cuts in dry years and how environments, like the Grand Canyon, will be impacted for years to come. It will impact water supplies for cities, like Denver, Phoenix and Los Angeles, ecosystems, a multibillion-dollar agricultural industry, hydroelectric power and more.
โThe time for action is now,โ Cameron told the gathering in a speech. โWe do not have a lot of time to waste, people.โ
Mounting challenges and a bleak climate future
The Bureau of Reclamation plans to release a draft outlining management options by the end of 2025 with a final plan in place by early summer 2026, Cameron said.
But the negotiating challenges are significant. State officials face the political problem of bringing home a deal that includes water cuts. Policymakers distrust each other. Anxious water users are nixing ideas before they have time to grow into policy solutions.
L. to R. Chris Winter, Colby Pelligrino, Chuck Cullom June 4, 2025 during the “Turning Hindsight into Foresight: The Colorado River at a Crossroads” the annual Getches Wilikinson Center/Water & Tribes Initiative shindig in Boulder.
We have to let people develop their ideas, said Colby Pellegrino with the Southern Nevada Water Authority and part of the Nevada negotiating team.
โWeโve done a really crappy job of that. Everyone in this room,โ she said. โWe need to do more to support the compromise.โ
The basin states are already running behind schedule: In March, Upper Basin officials said the basin states had until May to submit their joint management proposal for federal analysis. But May passed, and nothing happened.
Itโs like watching the Catholic Churchโs secluded conclave to select the next pope, Jim Lochhead, former CEO of Denver Water and state negotiator, said.
โThe smoke is all black right now,โ he said. โIโm not hearing of any major breakthroughs.โ
Thatโs not for lack of effort: The states are meeting twice a month, and theyโre at the negotiating table together.
โWe know that we get the best solutions when the states work together,โ Coloradoโs top negotiator Becky Mitchell said in a prepared statement. (She wasnโt at the conference.) โI am focused on building a broad consensus to address the risks facing the Basin States.โ
One of those risks is a changing climate: The basin, along with the rest of the planet, is facing a โbeyond awfulโ climate future, said Brad Udall, senior research scientist at Colorado State University.
The world is on track to warm by 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, and continue warming from there. Itโs a future with even less water to share among the U.S., Mexico and 30 tribal nations โ and an outcome that, frankly, terrifies scientists, Udall said.
โThatโs a world unlike anything we currently know, and itโs going to challenge us all on every front,โ Udall told the gathering.
Searching for a unicorn
While some conference-goers were frustrated, speakers took the opportunity to pull lessons from past interstate negotiations and share their ideas for how to break the deadlock.
Tribal leaders called for continued and increased tribal involvement in the Colorado River talks.
โHonestly, I think if our state representatives are going to sit silent, then we have 30 tribal nations that are ready to take over and make a decision and save our river,โ said Lorelei Cloud, a member of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe bordered by Colorado and chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. โWeโve been doing it since time immemorial.โ
Some suggested solutions, like bringing in an external facilitator. Former negotiator and federal official Mike Connor said the states need to seize every olive branch and set aside personal agendas or political legacies. (This is where speakers turned to the โFrozenโ mantra: โLet it go.โ)
Jennifer Pitt of the National Audubon Society said building personal connections has been the key to progress in the past. Many people pushed for states to find creative solutions, like desalting seawater โ a very expensive solution with a relatively small benefit (the equivalent of Lizzoโs tiny, Valentino purse, one water expert said).
โPeople are trying to turn this thing upside down and sideways to find a unicorn,โ Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, said.
Concerns abounded. Lochhead said the basin had a once-in-a-generation influx of federal funding โ and blew it. Reclamationโs staff has been cut, something that Cameron said he was working to address. With shrinking water supplies, the basinโs communities are feeling the impacts of dry conditions more immediately than in the past.
Western Slope water leader Andy Mueller pushed for more information and faster action to help Colorado communities have more time to adapt and come up with water conservation plans.
โI think failure of our negotiators would be to fail to recognize that our hydrology could be just as bad as Brad Udall is predicting, or worse,โ Mueller said.
In May, hydrologists forecasted that spring runoff into Lake Powell would be the lowest in years. A month later, the projections have only gotten worse. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Centerย reported on June 1ย that the amount of water expected to flow into Lake Powell between April and July this year will be 45% of average. โAverage,โ in forecasting, refers to the average runoff between 1991 and 2020. The June forecast follows a consistent decline since the start of winter. Hydrologists said in December that Lake Powellโs runoff would be 92% of average. In January, the forecast dropped to 81%, then to 67% in February. The prediction pushed up to 70%ย in March,ย but fell to 55% in May, before dropping to 45% in June.
Jack Schmidt, a watershed sciences professor at Utah State University and director of the Center for Colorado River Studies, and John Fleck, a water professor at the University of New Mexico,ย released a studyย about the state of the Colorado Riverโs largest reservoirs on June 1. They wrote that instead of increasing with spring runoff flows, the amount of water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead has decreased through the end of May.
โNever in the past 15 years has the decline in total storage of Powell and Mead extended so late into spring,โ the study reads.
That decline is the result of chronic overuse, Schmidt and Fleck write, which is โoutpacing the melting snowpackโs ability to replenish the two reservoirs.โ
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:
June 7, 2025
Key Points (AI assisted summary)
After months of little progress and public battles, negotiators from the seven Colorado River states may have regained their footing toward a shortage-sharing agreement.
Officials say the Trump administration has engaged in the work to complete an agreement, spurring the states to resume talks. Without a deal, the federal government would impose its own plan.
An official said a new agreement could require changes in the bedrock laws that govern the river, suggesting that even the “Law of the River,” a 100-year old management framework, could face scrutiny.
Metaphors about divorce and grief defined an emotional presentation about the Colorado River in Boulder, Colorado, on June 6. Those metaphors, however, did not represent strife or disaster in stalled water negotiations, but apparent progress and the willingness to let go of past ideas and move toward compromise.
“We’ve heard about the stages of grief … about denial and anger and the need to be at bargaining,” said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission. “Well, I believe the basin states are there.”
Officials involved in tense negotiations over how to manage shortages on the Colorado River suggested thatย months of harsh talk and stalematesย have ended and negotiators are exploring new options…Federal officials indicated that even parts of the “Law of the River,” a 100-year-old legal framework that governs Colorado River allocations, could change as a result of the negotiations.
โWe’re trying to pivot to something else and be creative, and we have good engagement on that right now,” said Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority…While most of the negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states did not attend the conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the speakers who did attend were cautiously optimistic about their chances at making a deal.
Bill Hasencamp with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California speaks at the University of Colorado, Boulder on June 5, 2025. More than 300 Colorado River experts attended, but the region’s top water policymakers skipped the event. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 6, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Closed-door negotiations about the future of the Colorado River are at a standstill. The news of the day is that thereโs barely any news. So, when more than 300 water experts got together for an annual conference this week, they had little to do besides wring their hands, listen for crumbs of news, and talk about how they would do things differently if they were on the inside of those negotiations.
โThe current process to me kind of feels like the conclave,โ said Jim Lochhead, who formerly served as Coloradoโs top water negotiator.
Top policymakers caused a stir when they decided to skip the meeting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, withdrawing further into the shadows as tense talks about sharing water appear to be making little progress. The people excluded from those meetings โ scientists, academics, tribal leaders, environmental advocates and others with a stake in the river โ have been left waiting like the masses gathered in St. Peterโs Square.
โWeโre waiting for the black smoke or the white smoke to come out of the seven-state negotiating room,โ said Lochhead, who once served as CEO of Denver Water and now works as an independent consultant.
On the other side of this Colorado River โconclave,โ seven state-appointed negotiators are trying to come up with a new set of rules for sharing water after 2026. Theyโre under pressure to cut back on demand for water because the riverโs supply is shrinking due to climate change. Until they emerge with a new set of rules, farmers, cities and everyone else will be wondering if they will feel the sting of those cuts.
Across the Colorado River basin, those who depend on the riverโs water are making preparations however they can. Cities are spending big on technology that will help stretch out their water supplies if theyโre given less in the future. Tribes are trying to get a more formal role in river negotiations, so future water-sharing policies donโt leave them behind like so many in the past.
Efforts like those have been underway for years now. But in Boulder, as top state negotiators keep their heels firmly planted in incompatible policy positions and an unpredictable federal government has yet to appoint a top official to oversee Colorado River matters, everyone else was left to marinate in the anxiety that will linger until a new set of rules is formed.
Looking to the past
With little information about the future, the talks in Boulder mainly focused on lessons from history.
Some of those lessons were relatively recent. For example, Lochhead pointed to talks ahead of a 2007 plan that saw more than seven people in the negotiating room, including federal government representatives who were able to push the states towards consensus. He said todayโs negotiations would benefit from a similar approach.
Other lessons were more than a century old. Tribal leaders advocated for the presence of Indigenous interests in todayโs talks. Were they included in previous discussions, said Lorelei Cloud, things might be different today.
September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. The Colorado River flows past a measuring device at Lee’s Ferry in Arizona on Sept. 21, 1923. Speakers at a recent conference on the Colorado River drew lessons from history to inform the next chapter of water management in the region.. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.
โThe past century has really shown that the exclusion of tribal voices has really led to this crisis that we’re dealing with now in the basin,โ said Cloud, a member of the Southern Ute Tribe and the recently appointed chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. โIf we had just honored tribal sovereignty from years back, even from the beginning, we probably would have had serious offers that provided solutions to what we’re dealing with now. We wouldn’t be sitting here talking about hindsight to foresight.โ
Patty Limerick, a historian and author whose work focuses on the American West, also brought lessons from more than a century ago when she told the story of a man named E.C. LaRue.
LaRue was a federal engineer who studied the river in the early 1920s. He urged his higher-ups to be conservative in their estimates about the amount of water in the Colorado River. They largely ignored LaRue, instead signing legal agreements that promised more water than the river, in most years, is able to provide.
If policymakers had listened to LaRue more than a hundred years ago, some say, those who rely on the Colorado River today would not be in such a crisis.
Limerick finished describing LaRueโs tale and posed a question to the room.
โIs there a latter-day counterpart to E.C. LaRue to whom we should be paying attention?โ she asked. โIs that person among us?โ
Another speaker suggested that counterpart might be climate scientist Brad Udall. When he spoke shortly thereafter, his outlook was grim.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
โBeyond awfulโ forecasts
Udall and other scientists have provided a rare, uncomfortable dose of certainty to Colorado River talks: The planet is getting warmer, the Colorado River is losing water, and cutbacks to water demand are unavoidably necessary.
He told the audience to โhold on to [their] seatsโ before describing the climate forecast as โbeyond awful.โ
While his predictions are rarely rosy, Udall struck a more pessimistic tone than previous years, calling out fossil fuel companies and an โanti-knowledge president and his vile enablersโ for attacking science and efforts to gird the nation against the harms of climate change, including water shortages.
โNot only are we in a really deep climate hole,โ he said, โWe’re continuing to dig and absolutely the last thing we need is the federal government undercutting our efforts to meet the water supply challenges in this basin.โ
What the feds said
Those in attendance looking for crumbs of information about negotiations from state leaders were left empty-handed. But one federal representative, perhaps surprisingly, dropped a few tiny ones.
The federal government has stayed relatively tight-lipped on Colorado River matters since Donald Trump returned to the White House. In the administrationโs early days, it paused funding for water conservation and infrastructure projects. It has yet to appoint a new commissioner for the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency which manages dams and reservoirs across the West.
Scott Cameron, the Interior Department’s acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, speaks at a conference in Boulder, Colorado on June 6, 2025. He said federal officials are working closely with state negotiators to shape the next chapter of Colorado River management. Alex Hager/KUNC
With that role unfilled, the administrationโs highest-ranking official focused on Colorado River matters is Scott Cameron, a longtime federal official who currently serves as the Department of the Interiorโs acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science.
Cameron said heโs been meeting with state negotiators roughly โevery other week for the last eight weeksโ after his boss, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, said he wanted the departmentโs leadership to be โpersonally, intensely, and constantlyโ involved in discussions with the seven states. Cameron did, however, say he did not believe the states needed an external moderator to help break their deadlock.
โMy impression is they really want a deal, they really want to find a path forward to working together, and Iโm convinced that theyโre all sincere in that regard,โ he said.
Cameron also said he was โconstantlyโ asking Reclamationโs senior leadership to bolster the agencyโs staff on Colorado River matters as a way to โmitigate any unintended consequences of national level initiatives to reduce overall federal spending.โ
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Solar panels San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 3, 2025
Not much to like in this bill. But then, itโs only half-time. How hard will key Republicans in Senate push back?
Higher electricity rates? In Colorado as elsewhere, thatโs the given if the U.S. Senate adopts the recent budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives that would end a whole host of federal tax credits.
Tax credits shorn by the bill include those now available to consumer who purchase electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids
How exactly will that impact Glenwood Springs-based Holy Cross Energy? In the short term, the legislation adds uncertainty as the electric cooperative works to move from 80% emission-free energy in 2025 to its goal of 100% in the next five years. It serves the Aspen- and Vail-dominated resorts valleys.
Brighton-based United Power has a different problem posed by the sharp-elbowed bill if it remains intact after review by the U.S. Senate. An electrical cooperative also, United serves one of Coloradoโs fastest growing areas for population growth, but the electrical demand from new homes is dwarfed by that from new industrial and commercial development.
By a one-vote margin, the House approved the sweeping tax and spending bill on May 22. In addition to other sweeping provisions, the bill largely guts incentives created by Congress in 2022 in the Inflation Reduction Act to advance clean energy and storage. The IRA is widely regarded as the most significant climate change legislation ever adopted in the United States.
Supporters of the controversial bill included two Republicans from swing districts in Colorado, Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton and Jeff Hurd of Grand Junction. Two Republicans and all 212 Democrats voted against the bill. Another two Republicans did not vote and one merely registered presence.
Evans and Hurd were among 21 House Republicans who signed a letter in March that calls for preserving energy tax credits as necessary to โincrease domestic manufacturing, promote energy innovation and keep utility costs down.โ Hurd, but not Evans, was among 26 who signed a May letter calling for preservation of tax credits necessary to accelerate deployment of next-generation nuclear power technologies.
After the vote, Evans posted a press release that said the bill โeliminates Green New Deal-style giveaways.โ
Two days before the vote, President Donald Trump visited Capitol Hill to inform on-the-fence representatives that they could face primary opposition if they voted against what the president had called his โone big beautiful bill.โ Big Pivots requested comment of both Evans and Hurd but without response.
he Senate, where Republicans hold a three-vote advantage, may act on the budget bill as early as July. However, the Washington Post on Monday noted that four Republicans senators in April sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune cautioning against โthe full-scale repeal of current credits.โ
โWe just hit half-time. Weโre still very much in the middle of this game,โ said Harry Godfrey, who manages federal priorities for Advanced Energy United, a national industry association that monitors Colorado and 16 other states.
Differences would be negotiated by a conference committee before being returned to the two chambers for review.
โThey really went after just about everything that they could in the realm of clean energy and electric vehicles,โ said Will Toor, who directs the Colorado Energy Office.
โI would certainly hope that cooler and wiser heads will prevail in the Senate,โ Toor added. โThe benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act are widespread, not just for clean energy but for consumers and for jobs, especially in red states and districts. Weโre hopeful that the Senate will reject this incredibly unwise bill that was adopted by the House of Representatives.โ
Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, had described the bill as being โsomewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammerโ approach to the IRA. Abigail Ross Hopper, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, called it a โsledgehammer masquerading as a scalpel.โ
The IRA along with the earlier Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have produced a proliferation of announcements about expanding battery production and other business ventures along the Front Range.
For example, Louisville-based Solid Power is developing next-generation solid-state batteries and has agreements with EV manufacturers Ford and BMW. The companyโs business model assumes continued rapid expansion of the market for EVs. See October 2024 story.
Wind turbines near Pawnee Buttes in northeastern Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
Employment at the Vestas factories in Brighton and Windsor may suffer if clean energy incentives get gutted. The manufacturer of blades and nacelles for wind turbines invested $40 million at its plants. In the last year it hired 700 people in anticipation of orders for 1,000 turbines during 2025. Orders for wind turbines would be impacted by loss of the manufacturing production tax credit, according to Advanced Energy United.
At Namaste Solar, chief executive Jason Sharpe said he is unsure whether to plan for expansion or constriction.
โAs a business owner, how do you plan a business with this amount of uncertainty, trying to thread the needle between coping with political change and not creating panic among my employees? Itโs challenging,โ he said.
Namaste sees the bill having a target on residential solar because it would eliminate tax credits that homeowners can apply for directly.
The bill also has a provision that would disrupt the transfer of tax credits, harming existing renewable energy and storage projects and making funding more difficult for other, less proven technologies.
โIf Xcel Energy, for example, builds a large solar project, they might not have enough tax obligation to fully utilize the tax credit. So, they could sell that, or transfer it, to other investors to monetize the tax credit.โ
Advanced Energy Unitedโs Godfrey says that a conventional big bank will be more risk adverse, but the transferrable tax credit enlarges the pool of potential investors. As such, this sweetener, as the Economist describes it, will also be lost for nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage, technologies currently absent in Colorado but which remain theoretically possible. The State Land Board has leased subterranean rights to several parcels for carbon capture.
As for Coloradoโs solar sector Sharpe says Namaste will survive if the bill becomes law but with fewer employees. Now 20 years old, the company has 200 employees โWe will have a smaller market but not a zero market,โ he said.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet met last week with Sharpe as well as representatives of Vestas, electrical utilities, and others to hear how they saw the proposed shift in tax incentives impacting them.
โThis casts a broad shadow on lots of the progress that the state has made in terms of power supply,โ said Mark Gabriel, the CEO of United Power, in a later interview. The bill as written, if it becomes law, will impact โvirtually all of our members and virtually all of Colorado.โ
Project developers will find it more difficult to get financing, said Gabriel. Those projects that do go forward will cost more.
United serves 115,000 members across a 900-square mile service territory stretching from the oil-and-gas wells of the Wattenberg Field to the foothills west of Arvada. During the last four years demand in April, to cite just one month, has grown from 350 megawatts to 500 megawatts.
โI am a practical businessman. I donโt have dreadlocks. I donโt wear Birkenstocks. This is not a crusade,โ said Gabriel.
Resource adequacy and reliability lie at the heart of Gabrielโs concerns. Colorado has plans to close all of its coal plants in the next six years. Coal has become expensive when compared to renewables. Most Colorado utilities plan major investments in natural gas plants, and United Power has one nearing completion about 40 miles northeast of Denver.
United also plans new renewable generation and battery storage in what Gabriel calls a hyper-localization strategy. Cheap renewables from other states and time zones could be part of the long-term strategy, but getting new transmission built remains a daunting, long-term challenge.
โReplacing base-load generation takes time,โ said Gabriel. โThe transmission is not coming over the hill to save us between now and 2030. What resources can we install in a relatively expeditious manner? They tend to be solar and storage and some gas.โ
Perversely, the higher cost of electricity would also add to the cost of production of oil and gas in Colorado. Chevron, said Gabriel, has reported plans to drill 262 wells north of Denver in the Wattenberg Field, some of which is served by United.
โIf you think about it, oil and gas is moving to electrify many of their fields. Certainly, the folks in the mid-stream arena are under certain requirements of the state,โ Gabriel observed.
Xcel Energy CEO Robert Kenney was also at the meeting. He told Bennet that the existing tax credits will help Xcel reach its goals for emissions reduction while simultaneously reducing the cost of projects, all while keeping customersโ bills well below the national average.
In a filing with state regulators in October, Xcel said it needs 700 megawatts of new generating capacity, about two-thirds of it for a wave of new and large data centers.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, Coloradoโs second largest electrical wholesaler, said that the House version presents challenges to meeting its priorities of maintaining reliable and affordable energy for rural communities.
Residents of Castle Rock and other communities served by CORE Electrical Cooperative could also expect higher electricity prices. The utility, Coloradoโs largest in terms of members, has entered into contracts for renewable and battery projects. Any reduction of the tax credits will result in increased costs to COREโs members,โ said the utility in a statement. โThese tax credits are critical to keeping costs, and therefore rates, stable for our members.โ
Holy Cross Energy has no large data centers on its horizon and serves only a few gas wells in the Western Coloradoโs Piceance Basin. Growth in electrical demand from the Aspen and Vail-dominated resort valleys has been modest. It has a different challenge. It wants to erase all emissions from its electrical generation by 2030.
Bryan Hannegan, the chief executive, said six years ago that achieving 85% to 90% emissions-free energy would be the easier task. Holy Cross is close to complete. For 2025, the utility expects to surpass 80% emissions-free energy. That compares to 50% in 2022. Last October and again in April, it surpassed 90% emissions-free electricity.
Holy Cross did this while maintaining some of Coloradoโs lower electrical rates.
Now, the utility has started work on that last 10% to 15%. After securing large amounts of wind and solar energy from Coloradoโs eastern plains, Holy Cross now is focused on adding local resources with greater flexibility and in precise locations within its service territory or base-load generation that can be relied upon when the wind isnโt blowing and the sun isnโt shining. Geothermal is one of the options.
A program called Power+FLEX encourages Holy Cross members to install batteries that can benefit the homes and businesses where they are located but in a way that Holy Cross can draw upon them when needed to support the local power grid. Roughly 850 batteries have been installed as part of the program with a combined capacity for 4.25 megawatts.
The batteries are financed through a combination of upfront rebates, low-interest financing by the utility, the federal investment tax credit and the direct pay provisions in the current tax code. These provisions allow Holy Cross to subtract the value of the tax credit from the amount financed. Loss of the tax credit will make the batteries more expensive, dampening future demand.
Bryan Hannegan has been leading Holy Cross Energy in a quest to mostly end emissions in generation of electricity nad, possibly, become a model for larger utilities. Photo/Allen Best
On May 22, the same day the House passed its bill, Holy Cross issued a request for proposals for solar combined with battery storage and other technology that may allow it to produce 90% clean energy consistently in coming years.
โThese resources are different from what they were in the past: much more flexibility, much more localized, even specific locations. That reflects the success of the energy transition so far. To go further, we will need different things than what we have had in the past,โ said Hannegan.
How might the bids โ which are due by the end of June โ impact Holy Crossโs plans? The uncertainty about federal law will introduce a large amount of uncertainty, said Hannegan.
โThese tax changes will be far reaching throughout the entire energy system, and without some clarity, it is hard to say what those impacts will be,โ he said. โBut if you increase the cost of something, people tend to reduce their consumption of it.โ
In other words, if solar and energy storage become more expensive because tax credits go away, the costs to utilities will increase.
Wouldnโt it be fair for the renewable sector to stand on its own now? Prices for first wind and then solar have dropped with jaw-dropping speed during the last decades with energy storage now echoing their successes.
Namasteโs Sharpe says that time is approaching but has not yet arrived.
โI think we are getting close, and I do look forward to that day,โ he said, while noting that the fossil fuel industries had what he called a 200-year head start in their subsidies.
Solar, he said, has become the lowest cost resource and the fastest dispatching. But it does have a vulnerability, as does wind: variability.
โThe problem with high-penetration renewables is that variability,โ said Sharpe. โThat is the last hurdle.โ
Colorado โ and the world, actually โ are on the โcusp of what we need to get over that hurdle,โ said Sharpe, as we work on new storage technologies such as the Form Energy iron-air project in Pueblo. For that, innovation โ which has started coming in great spurts, particularly by companies along the Front Range โ must continue, and that innovation has been driven by the favorable tax credits.
โItโs wrong to abruptly end incentives at a time when we are on the cusp of innovation that will solve this problem,โ he said.
Public lands in Bears Ears National Monument. The Trump administration has indicated it may attempt to shrink the monumentโs boundaries once again, potentially removing this area near White Canyon from heightened protections. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Even before public lands lovers were still celebrating one small victory โ i.e. killing a budget bill amendment that would have sold off a half-million acres of federal holdings in Nevada and Utah โ the MAGA/Trump/GOP launched a multi-pronged assault on the places Americans hold dear.
The blows come from all three branches of the federal government and seem to be designed to unravel the nationโs framework of environmental protections that have been developed over the last 50 years and more. Meanwhile, the Trump administrationโs proposed 2026 budget would gut the agencies that oversee public lands and the programs aimed at stewarding them. Hereโs a breakdown of just some of the attacks:
Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
The Supreme Court rejected Apache Strongholdโs bid to block a land swap at Chiโchil Biลdagoteel, akaย Oak Flat, in central Arizona, clearing the way for Resolution Copperโs massive mine on sacred ground.
SCOTUS also overturned a lower courtโs decision to block federal approval of a proposed Utah railway that would ship Uinta Basin oil alongside the Colorado River and across multiple states to larger markets. More significantly, the ruling also limited the scope of federal environmental reviews to the direct impacts of a proposed project. This means the relevant federal agency need not consider effects of upstream oil and gas drilling facilitated by the railway, or those of processing and burning the oil downstream. The ruling will make it easier for corporations to build pipelines, highways, major oil and gas projects, and so forth.
Excerpt from the Supreme Courtโs decision on SEVEN COUNTY INFRASTRUCTURE COALITION ET AL. v. EAGLE COUNTY, COLORADO, ET AL.
The U.S. Interior Department egregiously fast-tracked its approval of the Velvet-Wood Mine in Utahโs Lisbon Valley and promised to do the same for similar projects on federal lands to address a purported โenergy emergency.โ
Interior alsoย expedited permittingย for geothermal energy developments on federal lands, beginning with three projects in Nevada.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum โ whose original appointment was endorsed by none other than outdoor retailer REI (remorsefully, it turns out) โ moved to roll backย protections on 13 million acresย of wilderness-quality lands on Alaskaโs North Slope, reopening it to oil and gas drilling, mining, and other development.
Sen. Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who apparently still holds Jell-O socials in his office every Wednesday, said he plans toย revive the public land sell-offย provision in the budget bill. So much for dodging that bullet!
The Trump administration has granted FAST-41 status to Laramide Resourcesโ proposedย La Jara Mesaย andย Crownpoint-Churchrockย uranium mines in New Mexico. The designation is aimed at streamlining permitting for the contested projects in the Grants area. However, the FAST-41 program does not compress the environmental review or licensing process as radically as the BLM did for the Velvet-Wood mine. The Environmental Impact Statement likely wonโt be completed until next November.
And then thereโs the Trump administrationโs proposed 2026 budget. A while back I gave a more general overview of the budget and the deep, deep cuts to almost everything except for defense, border security and Trumpโs golf trips. Now we have more detail in the form of the Technical Supplement to the 2026 budget.
Just like the overview, it would would tear apart the nationโs social safety net, set back science, destroy Americaโs global standing, erode education, eviscerate the federal workforce, rob communities and low-income households of vital funding, gut dozens of federal agencies, generally weaken regulatory oversight, and even transfer some national park units to states. You can read my take on that one here.
Yet the budget still increases the federal deficit โ even Elon Musk calls it an โabominationโ (harsh words coming from the guy who brought us the vehicular abomination known as the cybertruck) โ because it would hike spending to more than $1 trillion for the military industrial complex and the Department of Homeland Security. It would slash funding for nuclear energy research, but spend an additional $11 billion annually to build more nuclear weapons.
This time, Iโll focus on public lands (and related bureaus under the Interior Department and the USFS) because we only have so much space in these emails, and I only have enough self-medication to handle so much outrage and anxiety. Comparisons are between the 2024 actual expenditures and proposed spending for 2026. This is merely a sampling of some items that really stood out.
Cuts for the Bureau of Land Management:
1,157 full-time-equivalent staff positions (or about 20% of the entire full-time workforce)
– $216 million for personnel compensation
– $45 million for recreation management
– $17 million for energy and minerals
– $65 million for workforce and organizational support
– $30 million for aquatic resources management
– $114 million for wildlife habitat management
– $45 million for national monuments and national conservation areas
National Park Service
-$980 million (yes, you read that right: The agency that oversees Americaโs โBest Ideaโ is having its budget slashed by nearly a billion buckaroos โฆ).
– 5,518 full-time-equivalent employees (โฆ and the agency is losing over 40% of its full-time workforce).
U.S. Geological Survey
$563 million budget cut for the agency
– $281 million from ecosystems programs
– $46 million from natural hazards programs
– $74 million from water resources programs
– 2,067 full-time-equivalent employees (44% of the permanent workforce)
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
$149 million from the National Wildlife Refuge System
– $50 million from conservation and enforcement programs
– $16 million from habitat conservation
– $9 million from science support
– $33 million from state and tribal wildlife grants
– 1,785 full-time-equivalent employees (27% of the workforce
Bureau of Indian Affairs
$120 million from public safety and justice
– $625 million from gross outlays
– 282 full-time-equivalent employees
Bureau of Reclamation:
$253 million from water and energy management and development
– $51 million from fish and wildlife management and development
National Forest System
4,636 full-time-equivalent employees (or 33% of the workforce)
Other notes
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management would have its renewable energy program zeroed out, along with $51 million in cuts for its environmental programs. The Bureau would slash about 10% of its workforce.
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (which regulates offshore oil and gas operations on the Outer Continental Shelf) would see its budget cut by $150 million.
The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcementโs budget would be reduced by $15 million.
The strikes are coming so rapidly, and from so many different directions, that it has become difficult to keep track, let alone to fight back. That is by design, of course. Advocates can take to the courts to block some regulatory rollbacks, but they have little recourse against Supreme Court decisions. Citizens may be able to convince their congressional representatives to block public land sell-offs, but that draws attention away from lawmakersโ efforts to make it easier to drill and develop public lands.
The attacks will only intensify. The resistance must meet it with equal, opposing force.
๐ธย Parting Shotย ๐๏ธ
Sacred Datura in Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Sacred Datura in Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
A new U.S. Geological Survey study identifies Wyomingโs western border as part of a massive geothermal reserve. Geologists say it could be tapped to generate electricity equal to 10% of Americaโs current power supply.
A new federal assessment identified Wyoming as part of a massive underground geothermal energy resource that could generate electricity equal to 10% of America’s current power supply…A May U.S. Geological Survey’s report on geothermal systems in the Great Basin found that the arid lands of Nevada and adjoining parts of California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and a sliver of Wyoming’s western border with Idaho contain enough geothermal energy to generate 135 gigawatts of electricity from the upper 6 kilometers of the Earth’s crust. The assessment spotlights the potential for a dramatic increase in geothermal electricity production, which now provides less than 1% of the nation’s power supply. However, realizing this potential depends on widespread deployment of enhanced geothermal systems technology.
“USGS assessments of energy resources are about the future,” said Sarah Ryker, acting director of the USGS. “We focus on undiscovered resources that have yet to be fully explored, let alone developed.”
Enhanced geothermal systems involve engineers creating open fractures in impermeable rock, allowing water to circulate and extract heat to generate electricity…With the recent findings from the USGS, the current focus is on enhanced geothermal systems, which makes geothermal electricity generation possible in more places…Thatโs where fracking technology from the oil and gas industry comes in, which Wyoming knows well.ย
“We call it hydraulic stimulation. And oil and gas, they call it fracking. It’s the same physics, but it’s a different process,” Podgorney said.ย
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May 2024 to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Michael Karik). Here’s an excerpt:
Although she stood by her prior determination that the project permit was unlawful, a federal judge last week decided construction on a major Denver Water infrastructure project should continue for safety reasons…Earlier this spring, U.S. District Court Senior Judge Christine M. Arguello found that, as a result of federal law violations,ย the expansion of Gross Reservoir and Dam should cease permanentlyย and any further construction on the ongoing project would stop temporarily. The pause on construction, Arguello explained, would give her time to hear from engineers and determine what work would need to occur to make the dam safe…
However, on May 29, Arguello retreated from her prior bellicose tone.
“There is a risk of environmental injury and loss of human life if dam construction is halted for another two years while Denver Water re-designs the structure of the dam,” she wrote in her latest order. “Furthermore, the evidence shows that enjoining dam construction would harm Denver Water and the general public by requiring Denver Water to lay off much of its specialized workforce (which also harms those workers), as well as interfere with Denver Waterโs contracts with contractors supplying materials and labor for the Project, which in turn, would significantly increase the costs.”
Getting federal approval for permits to build bridges, wind farms, highways and other major infrastructure projects has long been a complicated and time-consuming process. Despite growing calls from both parties for Congress and federal agencies to reform that process, there had been few significant revisions โ until now. In one fell swoop, the U.S. Supreme Court has changed a big part of the game. Whether the effects are good or bad depends on the viewerโs perspective. Either way, there is a new interpretation in place for the law that is the centerpiece of the debate about permitting: theย National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, known as NEPA…
Decades ofย litigation about the scope of indirect effectsย have widened the required evaluation. Asย Iย explain it to my students, that logical and legal progression is reminiscent of the popular childrenโs bookย If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, in which granting a request for a cookie triggers a seemingly endless series of further requests โ for a glass of milk, a napkin and so on. For the highway example, the arguments went, even if the agency properly assessed the pollution from the cars, it also had to consider the new subdivisions, malls and jobs the new highway foreseeably could induce. The challenge for federal agencies was knowing how much of that potentially limitless series of indirect effects the courts would require them to evaluate.
The Uinta Basin is shown on this map, along with existing rail terminals in Carbon County, Utah, where limited amounts of the basinโs waxy crude is loaded into train cars. A proposal to create a direct rail link to the basin would provide shippers with enough transportation capacity to quadruple output.
L. to R. Chris Winter, Colby Pelligrino, Chuck Cullom.
I was at the Getches-Wilkinson Center & Water and Tribes Initiative shindig this week live-posting on BlueSky (Click the “Latest” tab). The question of whether the negotiators from the seven states were being candid about their proceedings came up. Colby Pelligrino described her frustration with folks jumping all over every proposal as unfair or damaging to their rights. They can’t make any progress towards building a solution if every proposal is prevented from going forward. Chuck Cullom let everyone know that the data the negotiators are working with is available.
Also, Eric Kuhn, maintained that since the Colorado River Compact was written for a river that doesn’t exist any longer parts need to be reworked. He emphasized living with the river we have.
With a deep sigh, he acknowledged that managing the vital river system โis a huge burdenโ for those mere mortals charged with that task.
Atlas bearing the weight of the current Post-2026 negotiations. Credit: ADWR
The Director included in his presentation to the conference audience an image he often uses when describing the on-going negotiations over new guidelines for river management: a depiction of the mythical Greek god Atlas holding up the world.
Buschatzke told the WRRC attendees that โone thing that Atlas had going for him that we donโt have is that Atlas was a god, and we are not gods, so it is a huge burden for us to try to deal with this river.โ
Divided into Upper and Lower Basins, comprised of seven U.S. states, the Colorado River system is operated by the Bureau of Reclamation under the terms of agreements that are scheduled to run out at the end of 2026. For well over a year, representatives of those seven states have been locked into often-intense negotiations over what the new operating guidelines should look like. Director Buschatzke is Arizonaโs representative to those negotiations.
Image credit: ADWR
The Director described Lower Basin conservation efforts in recent years. Among those efforts, the Lower Basin and the Republic of Mexico having combined to reduce consumptive use of river water by 20 percent since 2000. He also noted that Lower Basin states and Mexico have left enough water in Lake Mead, especially since 2014, to raise surface levels by more than 100 feet.
โWithout this, weโd be in a heap of trouble,โ he said. โWeโve shown that we can take proactive measures and weโve been successful in doing it.โ
That 100 feet of elevation in Lake Mead, he said, represents a little over 8 million acre-feet of conserved water.
โAnd Arizona itself has done 4.6 million acre-feet of that 8 million,โ said Director Buschatzke.
The Director emphasized his primary message as it relates to the river-management negotiations: Everyone who benefits from the river needs to contribute to conservation efforts on the river. His Upper Basin counterparts have rejected proposals to share any Colorado River water conservation efforts, he noted.
Image credit: ADWR
In a luncheon address preceding the Directorโs keynote, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs observed the importance of cooperation and collaboration in reaching agreement.
“Collaboration is the foundation of water policy and management discussions in which Arizona is on the cutting edge,” Governor Hobbs told conference attendees.
Collaboration proved a key element in two of the most important water-rights settlements in recent Arizona history.
Under Governor Hobbs, the State in 2024 concluded two tribal water settlements including four Native American tribes โ settlements that concluded Arizonaโs involvement in water-rights negotiations that in some cases had lasted decades.
Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a โlifelong passion for beautiful maps.โ It highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country โ in particular, those which feed the Mississippi River, in pink.
L. to R. Chris Winter, Colby Pelligrino, Chuck Cullom.
I was at the Getches-Wilkinson Center & Water and Tribes Initiative shindig this week live-posting on BlueSky (Click the “Latest” tab). The question of whether the negotiators from the seven states were being candid about their proceedings came up. Colby Pelligrino described her frustration with folks jumping all over every proposal as unfair or damaging to their rights. They can’t make any progress towards building a solution if every proposal is prevented from going forward.
Also, Eric Kuhn, maintained that since the Colorado River Compact was written for a river that doesn’t exist any longer parts need to be reworked. He emphasized living with the river we have.
Chuck Cullom let everyone know that the data the negotiators are working with is available.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a controversial Utah railway project that critics say erodes the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a bedrock of environmental law for the past half century.
The case centered on a proposed 88-mile railway that would connect the oil fields of northeastern Utah to a national rail network that runs along the Colorado River and on to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
The waxy crude oil is currently transported by truck over narrow mountain passes. Project proponents said shipping the fossil fuel by rail โ as many as 10 trains daily โ would be quicker and revitalize the local economy by quadrupling the Uinta Basinโs oil production, ICN previously reported,
In 2020, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition applied to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board for approval of the railroadโs construction. Under NEPA, the board was required to conduct an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to evaluate possible harms from the project and consider how they could be mitigated.
Environmental groups and Eagle County, Colorado, opposed the railway project. They cited the potential for derailments and spills into the Colorado River, the drinking water supply for 40 million people. Opponents were also concerned about increased air pollution in the Uinta Basin, where oil fields emit high levels of methane, a potent planet-warming greenhouse gas, as well as volatile organic compounds, some of which have been linked to increased risks of cancer.
Gulf Coast communities would also be harmed by air pollution when the crude oil was refined, opponents argued. The increased oil production and associated emissions would also drive climate change and its disastrous global effects: hurricanes, floods, droughts and extreme heat.
The Center for Biological Diversity, among the groups that had sued the Surface Transportation Board, said in a prepared statement that the ruling โrelieves federal agencies of the obligation to review all foreseeable environmental harms and grants them more leeway to decide what potential environmental harms to analyze, despite what communities may think is important. It tells agencies that they can ignore certain foreseeable impacts just because they are too remote in time or space.โ
In 2021, the board issued a 3,600-page EIS, which identified numerous โsignificant and adverse impacts that could occur as a result of the railroad lineโs construction and operationโ including disruptions to local wetlands, land use, and recreation,โ according to court documents.
The board nonetheless approved the railroad construction, concluding that the projectโs transportation and economic benefits outweighed its environmental impacts.
Opponents, including EarthJustice and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District Columbia. They argued the boardโs environmental review excluded impacts of the project on people living near the oil fields, as well as Gulf Coast residents.ย
The appellate court agreed. It ruled that the boardโs EIS impermissibly limited the analysis of upstream and downstream projects.
โThe appeals court had ruled that the federal agency that approved the railway failed in its obligations to consider the regional consequences of massively increased oil extraction on the Uinta Basin, the increased air pollution for the communities in Texas and Louisiana where the oil would be refined and the global climate consequences,โ said Dr. Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.
The Seven County Coalition and the railroad company then appealed to the Supreme Court.
โThe Supreme Courtโs ruling will allow all these consequences to unfold without meaningful restraint,โ Moench said. โThis court has made a name for itself making rulings that mock science and common sense and fail to protect the common good. This unfortunate ruling fits that same pattern.โ
The Uinta Basin lies in the northeast corner of Utah and has seen oil and gas development since 1925. The proposed railway could take one of three potential routes โ the favored of which would run through 390 acres of state lands and 401 acres of roadless U.S. Forest Service lands.
James St. John/CC via Flickr
NEPA has been federal law since 1970. It doesnโt prescribe specific environmental decisions, but it does establish a process to ensure federal agencies follow proper procedure in permitting. It can be a laborious, time-consuming process, but requires an agency to be thorough in assessing potential environmental impacts while giving the public adequate opportunity to comment.
NEPA doesnโt necessarily halt projects but it can force project developers to pursue alternatives that protect environmentally sensitive areas and communities.
In his first term, Trump rolled back some aspects of NEPA, including weakening requirements to consider cumulative impacts of a project and the effects of climate change. Shortly after taking office this year, Trump signaled he plans to further streamline NEPA to expedite its approval process, especially for energy projects.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by President Trump in his first term, wrote the opinion on behalf of four other members of the court. โNEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents (who may not always be entirely motivated by concern for the environment) to try to stop or at least slow down new infrastructure and construction projects,โ Kavanaugh wrote.
Courts should โafford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness,โ Kavanaugh wrote. โNEPA does not allow courts, under the guise of judicial review of agency compliance with NEPA, to delay or block agency projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand.โ
The 8-0 decision excluded Justice Neil Gorsuch, who recused himself because of his close connection to billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, who would economically benefit from the project.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor differed with Kavanaugh on his rationale for the ruling, but agreed on the outcome. She wrote that NEPA didnโt require the board to consider the effects of oil drilling and refining because those activities were outside its authority. โEven a foreseeable environmental effect is outside of NEPAโs scope if the agency could not lawfully decide to modify or reject the proposed action on account of it.โ
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Sotomayor in the concurrence.
The coalition was represented by Jay Johnson of Venable LLP, who said the ruling โrestores much-needed balance to the federal environmental review process.โ
Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, the projectโs public partner, said the decision affirms the years of work and collaboration that have gone into making the Uinta Basin Railway a reality. โIt represents a turning point for rural Utahโbringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options and opening new doors for investment and economic stability.โ
Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said despite the courtโs ruling, โweโll keep fighting to make sure this railway is never built.โ
Roller-compacted concrete will be placed on top of the existing dam to raise it to a new height of 471 feet. A total of 118 new steps will make up the new dam. Image credit: Denver Water.
Afederal judge will allow Denver Water to continue work on a $531 million project to raise a dam in Boulder County, dealing a blow to environmentalists who had hoped to stop the construction.
However, Senior U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello in her ruling May 29 prohibited Denver Water from filling Gross Reservoir until federal environmental permits can be rewritten by the Army Corps of Engineers.
โThere is no evidence that there would be additional environmental injury resulting from completion of the dam construction. In fact, the opposite is true,โ Arguello wrote. โThere is a risk of environmental injury and loss of human life if dam construction is halted for another two years while Denver Water redesigns the structure of the dam and gets that re-design approved byโ the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
FERC is involved because of the hydroelectric plant at the base of the dam.
Denver Waterโs general counsel, Jessica Brody, said Friday her agency was pleased the judge recognized the safety issues in leaving the dam half-built.
โWeโre relieved that the judge understood and appreciated the safety issues. We are relieved as well that she understood the impact to Denver Waterโs customers,โ Brody said.
The construction is expected to be completed this year, she said. In the meantime, she said, her agency will move forward in asking a federal appeals panel to rule on whether key environmental permits need to be rewritten, as Arguello has ordered.
If the permits are redone, it could mean that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will determine that the metro Denver water provider, which serves 1.5 million people, needs less water from the Fraser River to fill an expanded Gross Reservoir than the original permit authorized.
Save The Colorado, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said Friday morning that it will defend the portion of the Thursday ruling that could prevent or reduce additional diversions from the Fraser River, a key tributary in the Upper Colorado River system.
โImportantly,โ said Save The Coloradoโs Gary Wockner, โher original 86-page ruling still stands โฆ so they canโt cut trees and they canโt put water in it until it is all resolved.โ
Denver Water is helping ensure its future water security with the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. When the project is complete, it will nearly triple the Boulder County reservoirโs capacity to 119,000 acre-feet. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
How the case progressed
In her April 3 ruling, Arguello said Denver Water had acted recklessly in proceeding with construction in 2022, knowing that important legal questions were being challenged by Save The Colorado, the Sierra Club and others.
The massive construction project to raise the dam 131 feet and triple the capacity of Gross Reservoir has sparked fierce opposition in Boulder County and prompted several legal challenges from Save The Colorado, a group that advocates on behalf of rivers. Though its early lawsuits failed, the group in 2022 won an appeal that put the legal battle back in play. Despite months of settlement talks, no agreement was reached.
Denver Water first moved to raise Gross Dam more than 20 years ago when the water provider began designing the expansion and seeking the necessary federal and state permits. Denver Water has said raising the dam and increasing capacity of the reservoir is necessary to ensure it has enough water throughout its delivery system and to help with future water supplies as climate change continues to reduce streamflows.
After years of engineering, environmental studies and federal and state analyses, Denver received a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and construction began in 2022.
Arguelloโs April 3 ruling said, in part, that the Army Corps should have considered whether ongoing climate change and drought would leave the Colorado River and Western Slope waterways too depleted to safely allow transfer of Denver Waterโs rights into a larger Gross Reservoir for Front Range water users.
At the same time, she ordered a permanent injunction prohibiting enlargement of the reservoir, including tree removal and water diversion, and impacts to wildlife.
Almost immediately, Denver Water filed for temporary relief from the order, saying, in part, that it would be unsafe to stop work as the incomplete concrete walls towered above Gross Reservoir.
Arguello granted that request, too, allowing Denver to continue work on the dam considered necessary for safety.
In aย 36-page ruling, Supreme Court justices said the Surface Transportation Board, a federal agency that oversees rail transit, had sufficiently considered the proposalโs environmental impacts when it approved the plan in 2021.ย Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing the opinion for the other justices, said the board โidentified and analyzed numerous โsignificant and adverse impacts that could occur as a resultโ of the railroad lineโs construction and operation โ including disruptions to local wetlands, land use, and recreation.โ
[…]
The planย had been on holdย after a lower appeals court in 2023 ruled in favor of a lawsuit brought by Eagle County and five environmental groups that claimed the transportation boardโs review had underestimated the railwayโs environmental impact.ย The lawsuit garnered support from a coalition of local governments, including Pitkin, Routt, Grand and Boulder counties, the cities of Basalt, Avon, Minturn, Red Cliff, Crested Butte, Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction, and the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments…
At the heart of the lawsuit and the question before the Supreme Court was whether the transportation board had sufficiently followed the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA,ย when it approved the railway…The 55-year-old law requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of their decisions, and the transportation board issued a 3,600-page environmental analysis as part of that review.ย
The sun shines on homes in Phoenix, Arizona on October 19, 2024. A significant portion of the Colorado River basin’s groundwater losses came from Arizona, but the new study says those losses might have been worse without state regulations. Experts are now calling for more regulations around groundwater pumping to stem further depletion. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 2, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
The Colorado River basin has lost huge volumes of groundwater over the past two decades according to a new report from researchers at Arizona State University.Researchers used data from NASA satellites to map the rapidly-depleting resource.
The region, which includes seven Western states, has lost 27.8 million acre-feet of groundwater since 2003. Thatโs roughly the volume of Lake Mead, the nationโs largest reservoir.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The findings add a layer of complication for the already-stressed Colorado River. As demand for its water outpaces supply, more users may be turning to groundwater instead, which is often less regulated than water from above-ground rivers and streams.
The majority of water conservation work throughout the Colorado River basin has been focused on cutbacks to surface water use. Some river experts say the focus should be broader.
Brian Richter analyzes water policy and science as president of Sustainable Waters. He was not an author of the study but says its findings show the need for a โholistic perspectiveโ on water management from the regionโs leaders.
โIt suggests that we have to become more aggressive and more urgent in our reduction of our overall consumption of water,โ he said.
Creating a balance of water that’s taken from aquifers and water that replenishes aquifers is an important aspect of making sure water will be available when itโs needed. Image from โGetting down to facts: A Visual Guide to Water in the Pinal Active Management Area,โ courtesy of Ashley Hullinger and the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center
The study found that groundwater losses in the Colorado River basin were 2.4 times greater than the amount of water lost from the surfaces of Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and a number of other smaller reservoirs that store Colorado River water. The study highlights agricultureโs outsized water use in the Colorado River basin, and said that industry could suffer some of the greatest consequences if the region keeps sapping limited water supplies.
Most of the losses happened in the riverโs Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada. The study says Arizonaโs โActive Management Areas,โ which the state set up to regulate groundwater withdrawal, may have helped slow depletion.
Kathleen Ferris, an architect of Arizonaโs groundwater laws, said much more work is needed to protect groundwater.
โWe are not on track,โ said Ferris, who was not involved in the study. โWe are way behind the eight ball, and I’m really sad that nothing seems to get done. We should have been thinking about this issue 25 years ago.โ
Ferris is now a senior research fellow at Arizona State Universityโs Kyl Center for Water Policy.
As experts call for more robust groundwater management policies, Richter said this study presents a small silver lining: scientists are producing better data than ever before, giving policymakers a better sense of the regionโs water problems.
โFrom a public policy standpoint, this is bad news,โ he said. โThis tells us that it’s worse than we thought, because now we understand what’s going on underground as well. From a science perspective, this kind of study is good news, because it says that we are now much more capable of accurately describing a water problem like what we’re experiencing in the Colorado River system.โ
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
May 31, 2025
Concerningly low amounts of water are flowing from Rocky Mountain snowpack this spring, a summer of drought looms across swaths of the West, and the negotiators tasked with devising aย sustainable long-term water planย for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River are running out of time. Commissioners from the seven states in the Colorado River Basin โ Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, California and Nevada โ must create a plan that will govern how those states divvy up the riverโs water after theย current guidelines expire at the end of 2026. As the river shrinks due to drought and climate change, the negotiators must decide who will take less water โ and they need to do so in the next few months.
โThe way the law of the river is set up, this is a decision that takes the seven states, and there are so many stakeholders and users who depend on that,โ said Jennifer Pitt, Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society. โWe are really at their mercy and we are just about out of time.โ
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
Those who depend on the river are already dealing with uncertainty: this seasonโs mountainย snowpack is expected to deliver about half the median amount of waterย to the systemโs two major reservoirs, which are already two-thirds empty. Years of drought not balanced by decreases in water consumption haveย drained Lake Mead and Lake Powell, and aridification fueled by climate change is expected to continue toย reduce the flowย of the river that makes modern life possible across the Southwest. The Colorado River irrigates more thanย 5 million acres of farmlandย โ including water supplies for much of the nationโs winter vegetables โ and comprises large portions of many Western citiesโ water portfolio, saidย Brad Udall, senior water and climate research scholar at Colorado State Universityโs Colorado Water Institute.
Corn ethanol, also known as grain alcohol, has been burned in gasoline engines and human stomachs since before Henry Ford was born. Itโs hard on both, so until 35 years ago it never caught on much, at least not for engines.
But in 1990, Congress amended the Clean Air Act, requiring gasoline to be spiked with an oxygen-containing compound to reduce carbon monoxide. With the help of corn-belt farmers and public officials, the oxygenate of choice became corn-based ethanol. Now, most gasoline sold in the United States contains at least 10 percent ethanol, also called โgasohol.โ
Fifty ethanol plants produced 900 million gallons of ethanol in 1990. In 2024, 191 ethanol plants produced a record 16.22 billion gallons. From the corn belt, ethanol production has spread West. Today, ethanol is produced in Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Arizona and California.
Though it is hyped as an elixir for what ails the earth, ethanol has long been a disaster that we canโt seem to remedy. Calling it wasteful and inefficient doesnโt begin to list its drawbacks: It costs more to produce than gasoline, reduces mileage, corrodes gas tanks and car engines, pollutes air and water, and, by requiring more energy to produce than it yields, increases Americaโs dependence on foreign oil.
While gasohol releases less carbon monoxide than gasoline, it emits more smog-producing volatile organic compounds. And ethanol plants produce more pollutants than oil refineries, including high levels of carcinogens, thereby routinely violating already relaxed pollution permits. In 2007, under industry pressure, ethanol plants were exempted from the EPAโs most stringent pollution regulations.
Of all crops grown in the United States, corn demands the most massive fixes of herbicides, insecticides, and chemical fertilizers, while creating the most soil erosion. Producing each gallon of ethanol also results in 12 gallons of sewage-like effluent, part of the toxic, oxygen-swilling stew of nitrates, chemical poisons and dirt that gets excreted from corn monocultures.
From Kentucky to Wyoming, this runoff pollutes the Mississippi River system, harming aquatic animals all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, where it expands a bacteria-infested, algae-clogged, anaerobic โDead Zone.โ In 2024, this Dead Zone was about the size of New Jersey.
Thanks to billions of dollars in tax credits, rebates, grants and other subsidies pumped into corn ethanol production, farmers are motivated to convert marginal ag land to corn plantations. Some farmers even drain wetlands, the most productive of all wildlife habitats.
Cornell University professor David Pimentel, who died in 2019, was the first agricultural scientist to expose ethanol production as a boondoggle. While his data are old, they provide a snapshot of our current situation and a valuable model for groups like the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit โholding polluters and government agencies accountable under the law,โ as it digs out the real costs of gasohol.
Without even factoring in the fuel required to ship ethanol to blending sites, Pimentel found that it takes about 70 percent more energy to produce ethanol than we get from it. Then, figuring in state and federal subsidies, he found that ethanol costs $2.24 a gallon to produce, compared with 63 cents for gasoline.
Pimentel determined that allocating corn to ethanol production also raises ethical questions: โAbusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning.โ
And Pimentel chided the U.S. Department of Agriculture for taking planting and yield data only from states with the best soils and productivity. The Department also didnโt fully take into account fossil-fuel expenditure for operation and repair of farm machinery or for production of fertilizers made from natural gas.
What stymies reform? Agricultural communities have built valuable support from the bottom upโfrom local agricultural communities and regional politicians to U.S. presidents such as Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The beneficiaries of Americaโs ethanol addiction have become behemoths that get bigger and hungrier with each feeding.
If President Trump really wants to cut wasteful and inefficient spending, decrease our dependence on foreign oil and prove that he wants America to have โamong the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet,โ he needs to end what now amounts to government-forced gasohol use.
Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a longtime environmental writer.
On its surface, floating solar appears to conserve water while generating carbon-free electricity. River managers are cautious, but some say the West canโt afford to wait.
GILA RIVER INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz.โAbout 33 miles south of Phoenix, Interstate 10 bisects a line of solar panels traversing the desert like an iridescent snake. The solar farmโs shape follows the path of a canal, with panels serving as awnings to shade the gently flowing water from the unforgiving heat and wind of the Sonoran Desert.
The panels began generating power last November for the Akimel Oโotham and Pee Posh tribesโknown together as the Gila River Indian Community, or GRICโon their reservation in south-central Arizona, and they are the first of their kind in the U.S. The community is studying the effects of these panels on the water in the canal, hopeful that they will protect a precious resource from the desertโs unflinching sun and wind.
In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely-watched water users in the West in the process.
The communityโs investments come at a critical time for the Colorado River, which supplies water to about 40 million people across seven Western states, Mexico and 30 tribes, including GRIC. Annual consumption from the river regularly exceeds its supply, and a decades-long drought, fueled in part by climate change, continues to leave water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead dangerously low.
Covering water with solar panels is not a new idea. But for some it represents an elegant mitigation of water shortages in the West. Doing so could reduce evaporation, generate more carbon-free electricity and require dams to run less frequently to produce power.
But, so far, the technology has not been included in the ongoing Colorado River negotiations between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada, tribes and Mexico. All are expected to eventually agree on cuts to the systemโs water allocations to maintain the riverโs ability to provide water and electricity for residents and farms, and keep its ecosystem alive.
โPeople in the U.S. donโt know about [floating solar] yet,โ said Scott Young, a former policy analyst in the Nevada state legislatureโs counsel bureau. โTheyโre not willing to look at it and try and factor itโ into the negotiations.
Several Western water managers Inside Climate News contacted for this story said they were open to learning more about floating solarโColorado has even studied the technology through pilot projects. But, outside of GRICโs project, none knew of any plans to deploy floating solar anywhere in the basin. Some listed costly and unusual construction methods and potentially modest water savings as the primary obstacles to floating solar maturing in the U.S.
A Tantalizing Technology With Tradeoffs
A winery in Napa County, California, deployed the first floating solar panels in the U.S. on an irrigation pond in 2007. The country was still years away from passing federal legislation to combat the climate crisis, and the technology matured here haltingly. As recently as 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis, most of the worldโs 13 gigawatts of floating solar capacity had been built in Asia.
Unlike many Asian countries, the U.S. has an abundance of undeveloped land where solar could be constructed, said Prateek Joshi, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who has studied floating solar, among other forms of energy. โEven though [floating solar] may play a smaller role, I think itโs a critical role in just diversifying our energy mix and also reducing the burden of land use,โ he said.
This February, NREL published a study that found floating solar on the reservoirs behind federally owned dams could provide enough electricity to power 100 million U.S. homes annually, but only if all the developable space on each reservoir were used.
Lake Powell could host almost 15 gigawatts of floating solar using about 23 percent of its surface area, and Lake Mead could generate over 17 gigawatts of power on 28 percent of its surface. Such large-scale development is โprobably not going to be the case,โ Joshi said, but even if a project used only a fraction of the developable area, โthereโs a lot of power you could get from a relatively small percentage of these Colorado Basin reservoirs.โ
The study did not measure how much water evaporation floating solar would prevent, but previous NREL research has shown that photovoltaic panelsโsometimes called โfloatovoltaicsโ when they are deployed on reservoirsโcould also save water by changing the way hydropower is deployed.
Some of a damโs energy could come from solar panels floating on its reservoir to prevent water from being released solely to generate electricity. As late as December, when a typical Western dam would be running low, lakes with floating solar could still have enough water to produce hydropower, reducing reliance on more expensive backup energy from gas-fired power plants.
Joshi has spoken with developers and water managers about floating solar before, and said there is โan eagerness to get this [technology] going.โ The technology, however, is not flawless.
Hoover Dam with Lake Mead in the background December 3, 2024.
Paddling Powell. Photo by Jonathan P. Thompson.
Solar arrays can be around 20 percent more expensive to install on water than land, largely because of the added cost of buoys that keep the panels afloat, according to a 2021 NREL report. The waterโs cooling effect can boost panel efficiency, but floating solar panels may produce slightly less energy than a similarly sized array on land because they canโt be tilted as directly toward the sun as land-based panels.
And while the panels likely reduce water loss from reservoirs, they may also increase a water bodyโs emissions of greenhouse gases, which in turn warm the climate and increase evaporation. This January, researchers at Cornell University found that floating solar covering more than 70 percent of a pondโs surface area increased the waterโs CO2 and methane emissions. These kinds of impacts โshould be considered not only for the waterbody in which [floating solar] is deployed but also in the broader context of trade-offs of shifting energy production from land to water,โ the studyโs authors wrote.
โAny energy technology has its tradeoffs,โ Joshi said, and in the case of floating solar, some of its benefitsโreduced evaporation and land useโmay not be easy to express in dollars and cents.
Silver Buckshot
There is perhaps no bigger champion for floating solar in the West than Scott Young. Before he retired in 2016, he spent much of his 18 years working for the Nevada Legislature researching the effects of proposed legislation, especially in the energy sector.
On an overcast, blustery May day in southwest Wyoming near his home, Young said that in the past two years he has promoted the technology to Colorado River negotiators, members of Congress, environmental groups and other water managers from the seven basin states, all of whom he has implored to consider the virtues of floating solar arrays on Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Young grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, about 40 miles, he estimated, from the pioneering floating solar panels in Napa. He stressed that he does not have any ties to industry; he is just a concerned Westerner who wants to diversify the regionโs energy mix and save as much water as possible.
But so far, when he has been able to get someoneโs attention, Young said his pitch has been met with tepid interest. โUsually the response is: โEh, thatโs kind of interesting,โโ said Young, dressed in a black jacket, a maroon button-down shirt and a matching ball cap that framed his round, open face. โBut thereโs no follow-up.โ
The Bureau of Reclamation โhas not received any formal proposals for floating solar on its reservoirs,โ said an agency spokesperson, who added that the bureau has been monitoring the technology.
In a 2021 paper published with NREL, Reclamation estimated that floating solar on its reservoirs could generate approximately 1.5 terawatts of electricity, enough to power about 100 million homes. But, in addition to potentially interfering with recreation, aquatic life and water safety, floating solarโs effect on evaporation proved difficult to model broadly.
So many environmental factors determine how water is lost or consumed in a reservoirโsolar intensity, wind, humidity, lake circulation, water depth and temperatureโthat the studyโs authors concluded Reclamation โshould be wary of contractorsโ claims of evaporation savingsโ without site-specific studies. Those same factors affect the panelsโ efficiency, and in turn, how much hydropower would need to be generated from the reservoir they cover.
The report also showed the Colorado River was ripe with floating solar potentialโmore than any other basin in the West. Thatโs particularly true in the Upper Basin, where Young has been heartened by Coloradoโs approach to the technology.
In 2023, the state passed a law requiring several agencies to study the use of floating solar. Last December, the Colorado Water Conservation Board published its findings, and estimated that the state could save up to 407,000 acre feet of water by deploying floating solar on certain reservoirs. An acre foot covers one acre with a foot of water, or 325,851 gallons, just about three yearโs worth of water for a family of four.
When Young saw the Colorado study quantifying savings from floating solar, he felt hopeful. โ407,000 acre feet from one state,โ he said. โI was hoping that would catch peopleโs attention.โ
Saving that much water would require using over 100,000 acres of surface water, said Cole Bedford, the Colorado Water Conservation Boardโs chief operating officer, in an email. โOn some of these reservoirs a [floating solar] system would diminish the recreational value such that it would not be appropriate,โ he said. โOn others, recreation, power generation, and water savings could be balanced.โ
Colorado is not planning to develop another project in the wake of this study, and Bedford said that the technology is not a silver bullet solution for Colorado River negotiations.
โWhile floating solar is one tool in the toolkit for water conservation, the only true solution to the challenges facing the Colorado River Basin is a shift to supply-driven, sustainable uses and operations,โ he said.
Denver Waterโs sustainability operations include generating energy from solar power panels installed on the roof of its Administration Building, parking garage and over its visitorโs parking lot at its Operations Complex near downtown. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Some of the Westโs largest and driest cities, like Phoenix and Denver, ferry Colorado River water to residents hundreds of miles away from the basin using a web of infrastructure that must reliably operate in unforgiving terrain. Like their counterparts at the state level, water managers in these cities have heard floatovoltaics floated before, but they say the technology is currently too immature and costly to be deployed in the U.S.
Lake Pleasant, which holds some of the Central Arizona Projectโs Colorado River Water, is also a popular recreation space, complicating its floating solar potential. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News
In Arizona, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) delivers much of the Colorado River water used by Phoenix, Tucson, tribes and other southern Arizona communities with a 336-mile canal running through the desert, and Lake Pleasant, the companyโs 811,784-acre-foot reservoir.
Though CAP is following GRICโs deployment of solar over canals, it has no immediate plans to build solar over its canal, or Lake Pleasant, according to Darrin Francom, CAPโs assistant general manager for operations, power, engineering and maintenance, in part because the city of Peoria technically owns the surface water.
Covering the whole canal with solar to save the 4,000 acre feet that evaporates from it could be prohibitively expensive for CAP. โThe dollar cost per that acre foot [saved] is going to be in the tens of, you know, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars,โ Francom said, mainly due to working with novel equipment and construction methods. โUltimately,โ he continued, โthose costs are going to be borne by our ratepayers,โ which gives CAP reason to pursue other lower-cost ways to save water, like conservation programs, or to seek new sources.
An intake tower moves water into and out of the dam at Lake Pleasant. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News
The increased costs associated with building solar panels on water instead of on land has made such projects unpalatable to Denver Water, Coloradoโs largest water utility, which moves water out of the Colorado River Basin and through the Rocky Mountains to customers on the Front Range. โFloating solar doesnโt pencil out for us for many reasons,โ said Todd Hartman, a company spokesperson. โWere we to add more solar resourcesโwhich we are consideringโwe have abundant land-based options.โ
GRIC spent about $5.6 million, financed with Inflation Reduction Act grants, to construct 3,000 feet of solar over a canal, according to David DeJong, project director for the communityโs irrigation district.
Young is aware there is no single solution to the problems plaguing the Colorado River Basin, and he knows floating solar is not a perfect technology. Instead, he thinks of it as a โsilver buckshot,โ he said, borrowing a term from John Entsminger, general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authorityโa technology that can be deployed alongside a constellation of behavioral changes to help keep the Colorado River alive.
Given the duration and intensity of the drought in the West and the growing demand for water and clean energy, Young believes the U.S. needs to act now to embed this technology into the fabric of Western water management going forward.
As drought in the West intensifies, โI think more lawmakers are going to look at this,โ he said. โIf you can save water in two waysโwhy not?โ
If all goes according to plan, GRICโs West Side Reservoir will be finished and ready to store Colorado River water by the end of July. The community wants to cover just under 60 percent of the lakeโs surface area with floating solar.
โDo we know for a fact that this is going to be 100 percent effective and foolproof? No,โ said DeJong, GRICโs project director for its irrigation district. โBut weโre not going to know until we try.โ
The Gila River Indian Community spent about $5.6 million, with the help of Inflation Reduction Act grants, to cover a canal with solar. Credit Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News
GRICโs panels will have a few things going for them that projects on lakes Mead or Powell probably wouldnโt. West Side Reservoir will not be open to recreation, limiting the panelsโ impacts on people. And the community already has the fundsโInflation Reduction Act grants and some of its own moneyโto pay for the project.
But GRICโs solar ambitions may be threatened by the hostile posture toward solar and wind energy from the White House and congressional Republicans, and the project is vulnerable to an increasingly volatile economy. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump, aided by billionaire Elon Musk, has made deep cuts inrenewableenergy grants at the Environmental Protection Agency. It is unclear whether or to what extent the Bureau of Reclamation has slashed its grant programs.
โUnder President Donald J. Trumpโs leadership, the Department is working to cut bureaucratic waste and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently,โ said a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees Reclamation. โThis includes ensuring Bureau of Reclamation projects that use funds from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act align with administration priorities. Projects are being individually assessed by period of performance, criticality, and other criteria. Projects have been approved for obligation under this process so that critical work can continue.โ
And Trumpโs tariffs could cause costs to balloon beyond the communityโs budget, which could either reduce the size of the array or cause delays in soliciting proposals, DeJong said.
While the community will study the panels over canals to understand the waterโs effects on solar panel efficiency, it wonโt do similar research on the panels on West Side Reservoir, though DeJong said they have been in touch with NREL about studying them. The enterprise will be part of the system that may one day offset all the electrical demand and carbon footprint of GRICโs irrigation system.
โThe community, they love these types of innovative projects. I love these innovative projects,โ said GRIC Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, standing in front of the canals in April. Lewis had his dark hair pulled back in a long ponytail and wore a blue button down that matched the color of the sky.
โI know for a fact this is inspiring a whole new generation of water protectorsโthose that want to come back and they want to go into this cutting-edge technology,โ he said. โI couldnโt be more proud of our team for getting this done.โ
DeJong feels plenty of other water managers across the West could learn from what is happening at GRIC. In fact, the West Side Reservoir was intentionally constructed near Interstate 10 so that people driving by on the highway could one day see the floating solar the community intends to build there, DeJong said.
โIt could be a paradigm shift in the Western United States,โ he said. โWe recognize all of the projects weโre doing are pilot projects. None of them are large scale. But itโs the beginning.โ
Grasses growing in the shade of a solar array were only a little less productive than those growing nearby in open grassland during years of average and above-average rainfall โ but in a dry year, the shaded plants grew much better than those growing in full sun. Thatโs the result of a four-year study we conducted in a semi-arid grassland of northern Colorado.
When choosing a location for generating solar power, consistent sunlight and interconnection to the electric grid are key criteria. In Colorado the combination of new electrical transmission infrastructure, abundant sunlight and short vegetation that is easy to maintain have made grasslands a prime target for solar development.
Grasslands, like those that dominate the eastern plains of Colorado, provide important habitat for wildlife and serve as a critical food source for livestock. Although these grasslands have long been productive despite their normally arid environment, a warmer climate has increased the potential for more frequent and severe drought. For instance, a recent global study found that previous research likely underestimated the threat of extreme drought in grasslands.
Semi-arid grassland near Cheyenne, Wyo., with close-ups of flowers of some of the plants that grow there. Matthew Sturchio, CC BY-ND
At Colorado State University, biology professor Alan Knapp and I started the ecovoltaics research group to study the effects of solar development in grasslands. Our primary goal is to ensure an ecologically informed solar energy future.
Solar panels create microclimates
Strings of solar panels redirect rain to the edge of panels. Because of this, small rain events can provide biologically relevant amounts of water instead of evaporating quickly.
Simultaneously, solar panels shade plants growing beneath them. Some arrays, including the ones used in our study, move the panels to follow the path of the Sun across the sky.
This results in a combination of sun and shade that is very different from the uninterrupted sunlight beating down on plants in a grassland without solar panels. In turn, patterns of plant stress and water loss also differ in grasses under solar arrays. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Up4HoJYVbR4?wmode=transparent&start=0 A time-lapse video shows how a single-axis tracking solar array at Jackโs Solar Garden modifies patterns of sunlight availability.
How grasses respond to a solar panel canopy
To get a handle on how these different conditions affect grasses, we measured plant physiological response during the early stages of our study. More specifically, we tracked leaf carbon and water exchange throughout daylight hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., over 16 weeks in summer 2022 at Jackโs Solar Garden, a solar array over grassland in Longmont, Colorado.
In general, plants that are adapted to full sun conditions, including most grasses, might not be expected to grow as well in partial shade. But we suspected that growth benefits from reduced water stress could outweigh potential reductions in growth from shading. We call this the โaridity mitigation potentialโ hypothesis.
Sure enough, we found evidence of aridity mitigation across multiple years, with the most pronounced effect during the driest year.
When water is scarce, increases in grassland productivity are more valuable because there isnโt as much around. Therefore, increasing grassland production in dry years could provide more available food for grazing animals and help offset some of the economic harm of drought in rangelands.
Informing sustainable solar development in grasslands
So far, our research has been limited to a grassland dominated by a cool season grass: smooth brome. Although it is a perennial commonly planted for hay, fields dominated by smooth brome lack the diversity of life found in native grasslands.
Future work in native shortgrass prairies would provide new information about how solar panels affect plant water use, soils and grazing management in an ecosystem with 30% less precipitation than Jackโs Solar Garden. Weโre beginning that work now at the shortgrass ecovoltaic research facility near Nunn, Colorado. This facility, which will be fully operational later in 2025, was constructed with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, through the wider SCAPES project.
Testing the effects of solar panels over grasslands in a native ecosystem with even greater aridity will help us develop a clearer picture of ways solar energy can be developed in concert with grassland health.
Matthew Sturchio, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Natural Resources and the Environment, Cornell University; Faculty Afffiliate in Ecology, Colorado State University
The Blue River flows through Silverthorne on May 22 on its way to the Colorado River. Photo/Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
May 29, 2025
Even-steven. That was the intent of delegates from the seven basin states in 1922 when they met near Santa Fe to forge a compact governing the Colorado River.
But what exactly did they agree upon? That has become a sticking point in 2025 as states have squared off about rules governing the river in the drought-afflicted and climate-changed 21st century. The negotiations between the states, according to many accounts, have been fraught with tensions. Becky Mitchell, Coloradoโs lead negotiator, delivered a peek into that dispute at a forum on May 22 in Silverthorne along the headwaters of the river.
The Colorado River Compact was a quid pro quo. California, in particular, but also Arizona, was ready to see the highs and lows of the rivers smoothed out. They, as well as Nevada, wanted a giant reservoir in Boulder Canyon near the small town of Las Vegas, which then had a population of 2,300. Those Southwestern states couldnโt do it alone, though. They needed the federal government to build the dam later called Hoover. For that, they needed the support of Colorado and the three other upper-basin states.
Colorado, represented by Delph Carpenter, and the three other headwaters states realized that they had best reach a compromise, as they would more slowly develop the rivers. If the doctrine of prior appropriation that they had all adopted within their own states prevailed on the Colorado River, the water would be gone by the time they found need for it.
This was the foundation for Article III of the Colorado River Compact. It apportions 7.5 million acre-feet in perpetuity for the exclusive beneficial consumption by each of the two basins. On top of this 15 million acre-feet, they knew there would be water lost to evaporation, now calculated at 1.5 million acre-feet annually, plus some sort of delivery obligation to Mexico, which later turned out to be 1.5 million acre-feet.
In Santa Fe, delegates had assumed bounteous flows in the river, as had occurred in the years prior to their meeting. And so, embracing that short-term view of history, they believed the river would deliver 20 million acre-feet.
Source: Colorado River Water Conservation Board.
It has not done so routinely. Even when there was lots of water, during the 1990s and even before, as Eric Kuhn and John Fleck explained in their 2019 book, โScience be Dammed,โ troubles ahead could be discerned. And by 1993, when the Central Arizona Project began hoisting water to Phoenix and Tucson, the river ceased absolutely to reach the ocean.
Then came the 21st century drought. Those framing the compact understood drought as a temporary affliction, not the multi-decade phenomenon now perplexing the states in the Colorado River Basin.
Nor did they contemplate a warming, drying climate called aridification. Similar to drought in effects, it is rooted in accumulating atmospheric gases. Unlike drought, it has little to no chance of breaking.
Now, faced with creating new rules governing the sharing of this river, delegates from the seven states are at odds in various ways, but perhaps none so much as in their interpretation of compactโs Article D. It says that the upper-division states โwill not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.โ
The lower division states have so far received 75 million acre-feet over every revolving 10-year period. The upper-basin states have not fully developed their apportionment, although Colorado has come close. In the last 25 years, the upper-basin states have been using 3.5 million to 4.5 million acre-feet. The lower-basin states that a decade ago were still using 10 million acre-feet have cut back their use to 7.5 million acre-feet.
In May 2022, water levels at Glen Canyon Dam were dropping so rapidly as to make relevant discussions about potential loss of hydroelectricity. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Lake Powell serves as a water bank for the upper basin states. The storage in 2022 had declined to 22%, although a good snow winter in 2022-23 restored levels somewhat. Today, the two reservoirs are at a combined 34% of full.
โThat means 66% empty,โ said Mitchell at the forum along the Blue River in Silverthorne at a โstate of the riverโ forum organized by the Colorado River Water Conservation District.
Mitchell, an engineer by training, has a large on-stage presence. Sheโs spunky, not one to mince words, sometimes straying into the colloquial. This outspokenness is more evident when she speaks exclusively to a home-town crowd. Silverthorne certainly counted as one.
Shared risk is at the heart of the dispute. Colorado and other upper-basin states want the lower-basin states to accept that the river will not always satisfy all needs.
โHow do we handle drought? We know how to do that in the upper basin, and most of the people in this room know that you get less,โ said Mitchell, Coloradoโs representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission. โThat hasnโt been the case in the lower basin.โ
The two basins differ in three fundamental ways. One is the pace of development. The lower basin developed quickly. The upper basin still has not used its full allocation. From the upper-basin perspective, that does not mean that the lower-basins states should expect something beyond a 50-50 split.
โThe main thing that we got from the compact was the principle of equity and the ability to develop at our own pace,โ said Mitchell. โWe shouldnโt be punished because we didnโt develop to a certain number. The conversation now, she added, is โwhat does equity look like right now?โ
Another difference is that the upper basin has thousands of individual users. Sure, there are a few big ones, like Denver Water and the other Front Range transmountain water diverters who collectively draw 400,000 to 450,000 acre-feet annually across the Continental Divide. The lower basin has just a handful of diverters, and the diversions are massive.
Also different โ as alluded to by Mitchell โ is that the lower basin has the big reservoirs lying upstream. The largest is Mead, with a capacity of almost 29 million acre-feet, followed closely by Powell at a little more than 25 million acre-feet. Mead was created expressly to meet needs of irrigators and cities in the desert southwest.
Source: Colorado River Water Conservation Board.
Powell was created essentially to ensure that the upper-basin states could meet their delivery obligations. Mitchell shared a telling statistic: More water has been released from Powell in 8 of the last 10 years than has arrived into it.
Upper-basin states must live within that hydrologic reality, said Mitchell. If itโs a particularly bad snow year in the upper basin, the farms and ranches with junior water rights and even the cities can get shorted. The lower basin states? Not a problem. They always get their water โ at least so far. But the two big reservoirs have together lost 50 million acre-feet of stored water.
โWeโre negotiating how to move forward in a way different place than we were negotiating 20 years ago,โ said Mitchell.
Upper-basin states have managed to deliver the 75 million acre-feet across 10 years that the compact specifies, but what exactly is the obligation? That has long been a gray area.
At a forum two days before Mitchell spoke in Colorado, her counterpart in Arizona, Tom Buschatzke, reiterated at a conference in Tucson that they see the compact spelling out a clear obligation of upper-basin states to deliver 75 million acre-feet plus one-half of the water obligated to Mexico.
What if the water isnโt there? Thatโs the crux of this dispute as the upper and lower basin states negotiate in advance of a September deadline set by the Bureau of Reclamation.
Denver Water sends diversions from the Ffaser River and other headwater tributaries through the Moffat Tunnel at Winter Park.ย Photo/Allen Best
In theory, if the situation were dire enough, Colorado could stop all its post-1922 diversions to allow the water to flow downstream. But is that what those gathered in Santa Fe in the shortening days of November 1922 had in mind?
Will lawsuits toss this into the court system for resolution? That process might take decades and, if it ended up at the Supreme Court, it might not yield a nuanced outcome. Mitchell didnโt address that directly, although she did say everybody on the river wants to avoid litigation.
The situation described by Mitchell and other upper-basin proponents is perhaps analogous to a divorce settlement. The settlement may call for a 50-50 split of all earnings between the partners, but what if one becomes destitute and has no money to pool?
Upper-basin states do have reservoirs to help buffer them from short-term droughts. Altogether, however, they donโt come close to matching the capacity of Powell.
Again, from the perspective of upper-basin states, California and Nevada have a sense of entitlement. Not that the upper basin states are angelic, said Mitchell. Itโs because they have no choice.
โI say we use three to four million acre-feet less than our apportionment. It varies. You know why? Because hydrology varies. And so we respond to hydrology. Itโs all based on snowpack and itโs all gravity. Most of it is gravity dependent. We donโt have those two big reservoirs above us like the lower basin does. We donโt have those reservoirs to equal out the flows or allow us to overuse. We have to live with variable hydrology, and we take cuts every single year.โ
Upper-basin states want a willingness in this settlement for agreement that focuses on the water supply, not the demand. โCommon sense would tell you, maybe Mother Nature should drive how we operate the system.โ That, she said, is the bedrock principle of the proposal from the upper division.
With plentiful snowfall, greater releases from Powell might be possible, said Mitchell, and in times of extreme duress, water from Flaming Gore and perhaps the Blue Mesa and Navajo too. She said there might be room for greater conservation measures in the upper basin states.
But there must be โreal work happening down in the lower basin,โ she said.
The audience in Silverthorne was comprised of many โrookiesโ to the water world. Some who might have attended, those more knowledgeable about the negotiations, would have wanted more: What are the deal breakers; what are the red lines, what are the issues they intend to kick down the road?
As the session in Silverthorne neared its end, time remained for one last question, and I asked it:
โI have to wonder about who we have in the White House right now, and how the President might alter the negotiations on the Colorado River. Any thoughts you might be willing to share?
โNo!โ she barked back without hesitation. โAllen, you know better than that.โ
I laughed heartily, and so did many others.
Given what weโve seen since January, though, I must continue to wonder.
Postscript: Before her remarks in Silverthorne, Becky Mitchell offered the opportunity for an in-depth interview with Big Pivots sometime later in June. I intend to take up that offer.
Delph Carpenter’s original map showing a reservoir at Glen Canyon and one at Black Canyon via Greg Hobbs
Lorelei Cloud, Vice-chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, and Southwest Colorado’s representative of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which addresses most water issues in Colorado. Photo via Sibley’s Rivers
The Colorado Water Conservation Board, Coloradoโs top water policy agency, has a new leader: Southern Ute tribal member Lorelei Cloud.
The 15-member board sets water policy within the state, funds water projects statewide and works on issues related to watershed protection, stream restoration, flood mitigation and drought planning. On May 21, board members elected Cloud to serve a one-year term as chair, making her the first Indigenous person to hold the position since the board was formed in 1937.
Cloud said her new role gives Indigenous people a long-sought seat at the table where water decisions are made.
โThis is history,โ Cloud said during the meeting. โWhat a moment. What a great moment for the state of Colorado.โ
In 2023, Gov. Jared Polis appointed Cloud for a three-year term, making her the first known tribal member to hold a seat on the board. Cloud also served as the boardโs vice chair for a year starting in May 2024.
Part of the Colorado Water Conservation Boardโs purpose is to protect Coloradoโs water interests in dealings with other states, like the water sharing agreements among seven states in the Colorado River Basin.
She represents the San Miguel-Dolores-San Juan basin in southwestern Colorado, which is part of the larger Colorado River Basin, a key water source for about 40 million people across the West.
The Colorado River Basinโs water supply has been strained by over two decades of prolonged drought, rising temperatures and an unyielding demand for water.
The rules that govern how water is stored and released from the basinโs reservoirs are set to expire in 2026, leaving officials with the difficult task of negotiating a new set of management rules that will last for years to come.
The seven basin states have been at odds over how water should be managed in the basinโs driest possible conditions. Tribal officials have been working to ensure their priorities are considered in the high-stakes negotiations.
โThis moment isnโt just about me or about the Indigenous people โ itโs about all of the people in this room,โ Cloud said, adding that the board is โmaking decisions that arenโt just about today. Itโs about our future.โ
Decision-makers in the Colorado River Basin have a history of excluding tribal nations that dates back to the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
The compact laid the foundation for how water is shared between the Upper Basin โ Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah โ and the Lower Basin โ Arizona, California and Nevada. The agreement includes one line about tribal water, and tribal nations were not involved in the negotiations.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
Tribal water is a key issue in the basin: The 30 basin tribes have recognized rights to over 25% of the Colorado Riverโs average flow.
Cloud said her new role is โpart of the reconciliation that weโve all been waiting for as Indigenous people.โ
โHaving an Indigenous person in a position that makes water management decisions โ itโs a seat at the table that weโve been wanting for such a long time, and itโs finally here,โ Cloud said. โItโs a joyous moment.โ
Cloud has twice served as vice chairman of the Southern Ute Tribal Council. She has also held leadership positions in The Nature Conservancy Colorado, the Indigenous Womenโs Leadership Network, the Ten Tribes Partnership, and the Water and Tribes Initiative.
As board chair, Cloud will run the meetings, ensure fair voting and represent the board as spokesperson when needed. She will continue to represent the southwestern basin, which reaches 10 counties and includes cities like Cortez, Durango and Telluride.
The Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe โ the two federally recognized tribes with reservation land in Colorado โ are also located in the southwestern basin.
โIโve been lucky to witness Chair Cloudโs rise as a leader in the Colorado water community,โ said Dan Gibbs, Department of Natural Resources executive director. โNo one is more deserving or better positioned to chair the CWCB in this critical moment.โ
