The Boulder Stand» News

Water Supplies for Colorado Farms Sustained by Spring Snow

April Nowicki — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:11:19 +0000

Snowpack in the mountains has still not reached average levels this year. (Photo/April Nowicki)

Spring 2013 brought more than a foot of snow to Colorado, but the drought status persists, driving the cost of water up and affecting small farms’ bottom lines.

Demand for water swells with population growth, which is on a continual rise – almost half a million more people live in Colorado than did six years ago, for a total of almost 5.2 million, according to the 2012 U.S. Census. Meeting high water demand depends heavily on how much snow falls in the mountains in winter, and farmers know that less snow can dictate crop yields.

Statewide, snowpack has reached 86 percent of normal, thanks to spring snowfall. Seeing the majority of snowpack in March and April is a welcome last minute contribution to the reservoirs, and has potential to keep farms in sufficient supply of water throughout the growing season.

“That’s what saved us in the 2003 drought season,” said Eric Wilkinson, the general manager of Northern Water, a public water conservation district based in Berthoud, Colo.

Three major water resources benefit agriculture: mountain snowmelt runoff, storage reservoirs and rental water. Rental water often comes from municipalities that own local water rights.

“Farmers can lease water from cities, and that’s definitely where the cost has gone up,” said Anne Cure, owner of Cure Organic Farm. “That’s almost doubled what it used to be three or four years ago.”

Cure’s 12-acre farm, located near Valmont Reservoir east of Boulder, provides organic vegetables, herbs and flowers to local restaurants, an organization for Community Supported Agriculture and the city’s seasonal farmer’s market. Cure said that her farm owns water rights that are usually enough to irrigate the fields from the end of April through July. However, whether or not that water exists at sufficient levels depends heavily on snowfall throughout the winter. Low winter snowfall means water storage reservoirs might be too low to provide enough water for all her farm produce.

Irrigation is essential to most farming projects in Colorado. (Photo/April Nowicki)

Cure said that in past years, she received less than half the acre-feet she requested from the city. “It’s just because there’s not enough water to go around,” she said.

An acre-foot of water is enough to cover slightly more than one football field one foot deep in water. According to the Colorado Division of Water Resources, almost half of all the land in the state is used for agriculture. Production of vegetables, meat and milk contributes almost $16 billion to Colorado’s economy each year.

In low snowfall years, farms sometimes need to reassess which crops they can afford to grow. For example, winter wheat requires less water to grow than corn or sugar beets.

Transportation of water impacts cost as well. According to the Colorado Water Conservation Board, more than 80 percent of both human population and of productive farmland in Colorado are located east of the Continental Divide. But 80 percent of the water resources are west of the Continental Divide, and the system of pipelines transporting that water costs money to maintain. Pipelines encompass every type of water transport – from miles of federally maintained underground tunnels to small farms paying out-of-pocket to run water via irrigation ditches to their property.

Irrigation ditches like this one along the Goose Creek Path are a common feature in the Front Range. (Photo/April Nowicki)

Wilkinson said that Northern Water’s local storage reserves were low at the beginning of the snow season, including for the main Colorado-Big Thompson project, which consists of 12 reservoirs and more than 100 miles of canals and tunnels that transport water across the state for consumption. An acre-foot of water from the CBT project costs $12,500. This price promises reliable water delivery for as long as the project exists, but it is too expensive for many farmers – even Wilkinson, who owns an 80-acre farm east of Fort Collins.

“The price of water is going up daily,” Wilkinson said. “There’s much more demand in Colorado than there is supply, particularly on the East Slope.”

Minor Maintenance Completed at Boulder’s Wastewater Treatment Facility

Christi Turner — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:54:16 +0000

Plant operator Emanuel Watson gave a tour of the facility during Monday’s snowstorm. Watson frequently gives tours as part of the facility’s commitment to public education. (Photo/Christi Turner)

Despite the heavy bout of mid-April snowfall, repairs to the primary clarifiers at Boulder’s wastewater treatment facility were completed on schedule on Wednesday.

“The work on the primary clarifiers is actually fairly minor and only related to rehabilitation and replacement of old components,” said Chris Douville, wastewater treatment manager at the facility. “The work on the third and final clarifier was completed today, so other than site cleanup the contractor is done.”

The repairs to the primary clarifiers, also called sedimentation tanks, included replacing the gates that let the wastewater in, as well as installing new trash racks to remove large debris that may still be in the water when it enters the clarifiers. Repairs also included an increase in the height of the tank walls to increase their total capacity. This will further reduce the risk that the clarifiers would let untreated sewage flow into Boulder Creek. While such a failure has not happened in over 50 years of operation, keeping the risk at a minimum is a primary concern of the treatment facility. This is especially true in light of population growth in the Boulder area, which translates to an increased output of wastewater. The city’s population has grown from just under 38,000 in 1960 to more than 103,000 in 2010. It is expected to grow to more than 119,000 by 2035.

Population growth, as well as the need to increase energy efficiency and reduce the use of chemicals, was also a factor in the construction of the new ultraviolet disinfectant system, according to Douville. The system was completed in December 2012 with the help of a $9.2 million revenue bond.

The complex wastewater treatment process begins with machines called step screens, which remove large debris such as plastic bags, diapers, and even clothing.

Aeration tanks like this one allow microorganisms to remove dangerous ammonia buildup from the wastewater as it is treated.
(Photo/Christi Turner)

“Sometimes there are uniforms from the Boulder County Jail,” said Emanuel Watson, an operator at the wastewater treatment facility. “I guess they’re trying to cause trouble up there or something, stuffing their uniforms down the drain.”

The wastewater then passes to the primary clarifiers, where solids that were small enough to pass through the step screens are removed. As the solids settle along the bottom, slow rotating metal arms push the materials toward the center of the clarifier. Now separated from the water, the solid waste collects in a large, tapered container before being pumped out through the bottom to the next step of the treatment process.

“After this, about 90 percent of the solids have been removed,” Watson said.

Those solids go on to be concentrated, thickened, digested, dewatered and eventually hauled off to area farmland and safely used as fertilizer. The digestion process also produces methane gas, which the treatment facility captures and uses to power its generators – another increase to both efficiency and risk-preparedness.

The new ultraviolet disinfectant system is safer and more energy-efficient than the old chemical-based process. (Photo/courtesy City of Boulder)

With solids removed and the physical stage of treatment complete, the wastewater then undergoes biological treatment, where microorganisms in aeration tanks help further break down organic solids and bacteria. After the biological phase, the wastewater then flows through the new ultraviolet system.

The UV rays provide a highly effective and efficient means of disinfecting the wastewater in its final stages of treatment, before it is safely released into Boulder Creek. The new UV system also replaces an old disinfection process that relied on the use of chlorine gas and sulfur dioxide gas. These hazardous chemicals required extensive safety procedures at the treatment facility, as even low-level exposure may cause permanent organ damage, or even death.

The facility treats an average of 12.5 million gallons of wastewater per day from the city of Boulder, although it is currently able to handle more than 25 million gallons per day.

Bill McKibben Discusses New Media’s Role in Climate Change Coverage

Caitlin Rockett — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:41:21 +0000

Journalist Bill McKibben speaking at the Journalism That Matters event “Long Live Journalism; Journalism is Dead” on April 3, 2013. (Photo/Caitlin Rockett)

The rapidly changing media landscape is often seen as a threat to journalism, but where climate change is concerned, new forms of media may give journalists the tools they need to mobilize society in revolutionary ways.

According to Bill McKibben, an environmental journalist and co-founder of the grassroots movement 350.org, “homemade” media such as tweets and blog posts have the power to educate and create significant social movements.

“It does a better job a lot of times than the real media – the one people get paid to produce,” he said on Wednesday night at the Journalism That Matters event, “Journalism is Dead; Long Live Journalism,” held at the University of Denver.

The acclaimed writer, whose 1988 book “The End of Nature” is considered the first popular book on climate change, discussed journalism in relation to climate change – a topic he says the media hasn’t managed to get right. He explained why climate change has proved to be a difficult subject for the press, and highlighted the ways in which new media affords journalists the opportunity for unbiased reports as well as climate activism.

“I long ago concluded when I wrote ‘The End of Nature’ that I was no longer an objective journalist,” McKibben said. “That doesn’t mean I’m not a journalist anymore. With the rise of citizen journalism and new forms of media, it’s becoming possible and respectable to say … ‘I actually care about the outcome of this.’”

However, according to McKibben, journalists are still grappling with how to address climate change, and failing to express its significance. While journalists regularly write about complex topics such as economic models, many shy away from scientific topics and climate models.

“The level of imprecision in an economic model is ten times greater than the uncertainty that now surrounds climate models,” he said. “To build a computer model you may need a PhD, but to understand it you don’t.”

McKibben says that around-the-clock news cycles also contribute to the lack of quality climate change coverage. In geological terms, climate change is moving extraordinarily fast. A recent study in Science revealed that the planet is warming 50 times faster than at any other time during the current geological epoch.

“So in scientific terms we’re moving at unprecedented speed, but it doesn’t change that much between the news at noon and at six,” McKibben said.

Yet the biggest impediment to climate change coverage is money.

“Exxon (Mobil Corp.) has more money than anyone in the history of money,” said McKibben. “The CEO of Exxon spent the last 20 years funding people to spread disinformation about climate change.”

Still, McKibben says none of this justifies the media’s failure to convey that Earth is heating at an alarming rate. But where journalists failed, Mother Nature succeeded – years of wildfires, floods, drought and snowless ski seasons made it easy for people to simply “look out the door and see what’s going on,” said McKibben. A survey from Yale concluded that Americans’ belief in climate change rose from 57 percent in January 2010 to 70 percent in September 2012.

It was perhaps this shifting paradigm that whetted society’s appetite for serious journalistic exploration of climate change.

In the summer of 2012, Rolling Stone published an article by McKibben titled, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.” The 6,000-word piece was read by 3 million people and received more than 125,000 “likes” on Facebook. In an interview with thinkprogress.org, McKibben called the article “wickedly viral.”

McKibben says that the synergy between old and new media is where the best journalism occurs today – the ability to write for an established print publication such as Rolling Stone can now circulate online to millions of people.

But McKibben has gone outside the bounds of traditional media sources to give environmental topics the exposure they deserve. In 2011, McKibben organized what became the largest civil disobedience action in the last 30 years of America’s history in protest to the Keystone Pipeline in Canada. 1,253 people, including McKibben, were jailed for the protest. Prior to their arrest, participants tweeted and blogged about the demonstration, turning the 1,700-mile pipeline project into a national issue.

“Finding ways without much money to stand up to large amounts of money is in a certain sense what the best journalism has been about almost from the beginning,” McKibben said.

Bill McKibben is led away from the White House in handcuffs on Feburary 13, 2013 after participating in an ongoing protest asking the Obama administration to reject the Keystone XL pipeline project. (via www.flickr.com)

McKibben and 47 others were arrested again on February 13 in front of the White House as part of an ongoing protest calling on the Obama administration to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

“I’m more comfortable (now) with journalism and movements being intertwined,” said McKibben. “It’s the natural desire of good journalists to make people care and go do something, especially when the stakes are as clear cut and obvious as they are here.”

When asked whether he’s optimistic or pessimistic about the future, McKibben says that he gave up on being either one long ago.

“I don’t really know how it’s going to turn out, and I don’t even think about it that much. You get up every day and do as much as you can about it. I think I was right 25 years ago that this is the story of our times. It will keep journalists busy for the rest of their careers.”

Water Use for Fracking Not Necessarily a Net Loss

Christi Turner — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:16:22 +0000

Reagan Waskom currently serves as the Director of the Colorado Water Institute and as Director of the Colorado State University Water Center. (Photo/Courtesy of Colorado State University)

While the fracking boom in Colorado raises public concerns of a water bust, a balance may be possible.

“It’s all reusable,” said Reagan Waskom, director of the Colorado Water Institute and the Colorado State University Water Center. “It’s just a question of what it costs to do it.”

In the third lecture in the “FrackingSENSE” lecture series on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder on Tuesday, Waskom put the water debate in context for fracking, telling the standing-room-only audience that finding ways to conserve water throughout the fracking process is key to sustainability, and a balance between community needs and energy needs. He also reminded the audience that in Colorado, agriculture uses a much higher percentage of water than fracking. Hydraulic fracturing, or the injection of water mixed with trace chemicals into shale in order to extract natural gas deposits, is indeed a water-intensive procedure; but Waskom argued that perhaps a different perspective was needed on just how much water is “a lot.”

“Forty-eight percent of the water that is withdrawn in the United States is tied to energy production,” Waskom said. Most of the water drawn for energy production is used for cooling, such as is necessary in the coal- and nuclear-powered electricity plants.

“But when you switch to the arid west, our numbers look really different,” he continued. “In Colorado, 86 percent of our withdrawals are for irrigation.”

In parts of the state, such as the San Luis Valley in the south of Colorado, irrigation withdrawals are even higher – 90 percent or higher, Waskom said.

Waskom also suggested that a better way to gauge water use in fracking is to look at water intensity – a measure of how many gallons per unit output of energy – instead of just total output. He said it takes an average of 300,000 gallons of water for vertical drilling and fracking, depending on depth. For horizontal wells – emblematic of the fracking revolution, in which technology allows longer wells to be drilled horizontally at unprecedented lengths – the usage is between two and five million gallons. But there is a difference in output.

“The productivity of these wells is really fantastic,” Waskom said. “A typical horizontal well will produce about ten times what a typical vertical well will do.”

A horizontal hydraulic fracturing operation. (Photo/arimoore via Compfight cc)

A typical horizontal well produces an average of about 3 million gallons of water, or about 9 acre feet. One acre foot is enough for three average households per year.

Polemics aside, unconventional gas (or natural gas trapped inside tight rocks, shale, or sand miles below the Earth’s surface) is abundant in Colorado. The Rocky Mountain Oil and Gas Fields in Colorado have 4,765 oil and gas fields. Of the nearly 50,000 active oil and gas wells in Colorado, around 20,000 of those are concentrated in Weld County in the northeastern part of the state.

“Fracking is the single biggest time when water is needed,” Waskom said, referring to the specific part of the process when shale is actually “fractured” by injecting water into it in order to release natural gas.

But water is consumed throughout the process – during drilling, during fracking, and throughout the rest of the shale gas production cycle. It is crucial to remember this, Waskom said, when considering how to be more water efficient in the future.

Waskom says that in typical hydraulic fracturing and shale gas extraction, nearly 50 percent of all “flowback” water that comes back up from wells after it is injected is captured, reformulated, diluted and ultimately recycled.

As for the “produced” water that flows up to the surface as a result of fracking, most of that water is being reinjected, Waskom said. But there is vast potential to recapture, reuse and reconceptualize this water so as not to seem as a net loss.

The key, he said, is to “close the loop” on water that is “produced” through fracking, and figure out ways to generate less, store more efficiently, make safe to reuse, and innovate smarter uses for it.

Another major challenge is the simple fact that Colorado’s population is projected to double by 2050, putting more demands on limited resources in an arid state.

“People want to move to Colorado,” Waskom said. “And they don’t call ahead to see if there’s enough water.”

But already Colorado is living on just one-third of the approximately 15 million acre feet of water that it produces every year, sending about 9 million acre feet of that to states downstream.

Changing this situation would involve a total overhaul of the system of prior appropriations on which water rights are based in Colorado. Barring this or other dramatic change in the way that water is consumed and developed, Waskom estimates that the state will need about another 10 percent of water than it has now to support the growing population.

But this does not represent a net loss of water, he emphasized.

“A lot of this water is coming out of agriculture,” Waskom said. “I don’t want to leave you with the impression that that 20 thousand acre feet of water being used in fracking represents a new depletion. It represents a substitution. Basically it’s 20 thousand acre feet of water that’s not being used to grow alfalfa or hay or something else.”

While Waskom posits that all water is treatable, “It is energy-intensive to treat that water,” he said, and new technology is necessary to make total water recycling possible.

Yet he believes we are not far.

“It could become an acceptable cost of business to treat that water,” he said, implicating the fracking industry.

“The question is really about sustainability,” Waskom said.

In the Highly Polarized Fracking Debate, Tierney Takes the “Sensible Middle”

Christi Turner — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:09:23 +0000

A hydraulic fracturing well is drilled near Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. (Photo/Leia Larsen)

The supporters and opponents of hydraulic fracturing tend to stand at opposite ends of a fractured debate, but meeting in the middle may be the key to finding the best way forward.

In a lecture titled “The Context for Thinking About Unconventional Natural Gas” at the University of Colorado campus in Boulder on Tuesday, Susan Tierney proposed what she called a “sensible middle” approach to the “fracking” issue and to the U.S. energy debate as a whole. The fracking debate, she said, is characterized by a wide gap in perceptions, a deep information deficit, undeniable environmental concerns and complications from varying state-based regulations on natural resource extraction. But in the final analysis, according to Tierney, accepting natural gas may be the only way to keep the nation from turning to more and more coal for its energy needs.

Former Secretary for Environmental Affairs for the state of Massachusetts, former Assistant Secretary for Policy at the U.S. Department of Energy, and an expert in energy economics, regulation and policy, Tierney’s perspective is founded on over 30 years’ experience and a hefty dose of realism.

“When you hear the industry say there are no cases of contamination from hydraulic fracturing, remember what they’re talking about,” Tierney said, referring to the industry’s insistence that fracking only happens when pressurized water penetrates shale at 8,000 feet below the Earth’s surface.

“For the opponents, fracturing is the whole damn thing,” she said.

Tierney said that the lack of transparent baseline data and information on both sides hampers the debate and compromises the credibility of both sides. She said that more study is needed across the entire life cycle of hydraulic fracturing in order to present more complete information to the public.

“The biggest source of volatility is public trust issues,” Tierney said. “When people treat this as the greatest thing

Susan Tierney is an expert on energy policy and economics, specializing in the electric and gas industries. (Photo/ courtesy of AnalysisGroup.com)

since sliced bread, they ignore that public trust issue.”

While the details of the environmental impacts of fracking are still unknown, Tierney said that there is a consensus

among experts of a palpable “environmental urgency” to the debate. From her perspective, a host of genuine environmental issues still need to be addressed more thoroughly – methane emissions, air contaminants, water pollution, wastewater disposal and the cumulative impacts of industrial development – in order to create a more informed and less polarized public discourse.

Tierney also highlighted vast differences in natural resource extraction laws from one state to another. Policy discrepancies are found in wastewater tracking, pit liner requirements (Texas requires no liners for its fracking wastewater pits), well testing and the ratio of wells per inspector. In Colorado, she said, inspectors oversee between 500 and 1,500 fracking wells, one of the highest ratios in the U.S.

“There’s great chauvinism of states that they’re doing it the right way,” Tierney said.

States also regulate the issue of disclosure, and there are tremendous discrepancies in information that is made public. In a 2009 paper published by the Shale Gas Subcommittee of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, key policy recommendations included “public disclosure of all chemicals in fracturing fluids, with an exception for genuinely proprietary information.” Tierney goes a step further on the disclosure issue.

“Most people focus on disclosure of what’s going in, but really, I’m interested in what’s coming out,” Tierney said, like “fugitive emissions” of methane during the extraction process and the degree to which these contribute to climate change.

A member of the coalition Frack Free Colorado holds up an anti-fracking sign at a rally in Denver. (Photo/Steve Harbula via flickr)

Tierney also pointed out that the increased production of natural gas is putting pressure on the coal industry.

“Gas prices are causing many of these coal plants to operate so low, it’s not worth keeping them open,” she said.

But the bottom line, Tierney said, is that maximizing the benefits of shale gas from fracking requires identifying and minimizing the environmental impacts – whatever those impacts turn out to be.

She did not, however, predict a clean energy revolution in the near future. Rather, Tierney seemed to propose natural gas as the best available fossil fuel option.

“I don’t think we’re going to conserve ourselves out of energy,” Tierney said. “Eventually, to live in an acceptable climate, we have to decarbonize our energy system, we have to be as efficient as we can. But if we don’t accept natural gas, we’re going to end up with coal for a very long time.”

The next FrackingSENSE lecture will feature Reagan Waskom, discussing the issue of water use for energy production. The lecture will be held next Tuesday March 12 at 6:30 p.m., in the Hale Building on the CU Boulder campus.