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Meeting Front Range Water Demand Without Gunnison Water Basin There are many ways for the Front Range to meet future water demand with more reliability, less controversy, lower costs and less environmental impact than importing water from the Gunnison. Indeed, the Front Range can meet its future water needs through more efficient use of existing water supplies, through water conservation, and a wide range of Front Range supply-side efficiency measures. Taken together, improvements in water use efficiency"' can provide the Front Range with the water it needs for decades to come, leaving the waters of the Gunnison River to meet the Basin's present and future needs. A. Cost of Imported Gunnison Basin Water As the Front Range looks at a full range of water options, it needs to consider the potential cost of a trans-mountain project from the Gunnison. The cost of facili- ties to move large quantities of Gunnison water to the Front Range depends on many variables: • Would water be taken from Blue Mesa or above Blue Mesa? 143 • Would water be pumped over the Divide or transported through a tunnel? • Would additional storage be needed on one or both sides of the Divide? • What would be amount and cost of electricity to pump water up thousands of feet? (including the cost of new power stations and other infrastructure). One scenario would be to pump water from Blue Mesa Reservoir over the Continental Divide, across the Arkansas River Basin, to Antero Reservoir. But even this scenario, if compared to the cost of recent pipeline projects, would be extremely expensive. Based on the Green Mountain Project costs, adjusted for inflation, we estimate illustratively that the construction, mitigation and permitting costs of a pipeline from Blue Mesa Reservoir over the Continental Divide and to Antero Reservoir would be at least $1.2 billion for a pipeline capable of carrying 120,000 AFA. This figure does not include any cost of preparing Antero or any other Front Range reservoir to receive Gunnison water. Nor does it include any new storage reservoirs in the Gunnison Basin to hold water at a high elevation for delivery to the Front Range. Annual oper- ating costs for pumping energy and purchasing water from the United States may reach $50 million or more, depending on the cost of energy, including new transmis- sion facilities, and pumping equipment efficiencies. Using a discount rate in the range of 3%-4% to bring future annual operating costs back to the year in which proj- ect operations commence, this is water that might cost in the neighborhood of $20,000-23,000 per acre-foot, not counting any additional storage reservoir costs. Gunnison Basin Water • 33