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Lemonade Stands are Good for the Local Economy: Produced waters are an additional water supply for the West! Pat O'Toole, Rancher Savery, Wyoming For the last few years the Family Farm Alliance, which represents farmers in 13 western states, has been trying to analyze options for coping with drought and water shortages. The need for water storage My family's ranch is on the Colorado /Wyoming border on the Western Slope. If you've been a farmer or rancher and lived through drought, you know it is a grinding experience; you wake up in the morning and go to bed at night thinking about drought. I talked to a fellow in New Mexico who said the snowpack in parts of his state is 0 percent. When we hear about the possi- bility of 653 million barrels (42 gallons/barrel) of water being produced, I thought, "Wouldn't it be something if some of that water would help the Elephant Butte Irrigation District alleviate cutbacks this year ?" The New Mexico delegation is looking at some way to hold their farmers together through this drought period so their livelihood doesn't disappear. In this New West, facing drought- induced reality is the mission of the Family Farm Alliance. The popular perspective of water storage in the past few years has been that storage is a bad thing and we need to tear down dams. The drought has shown us that this perspective is not realistic, and in fact, if we want to move forward, we need storage. Analysis currently underway in Colorado indicates that, over the next 20 years, 2.7 million people are expected to move into the Eastern Slope of Colorado and the Eastern Slope doesn't have the water for this type of expansion. Instead, that water is going to come from agriculture. The pro- jections are 150,000 to 450,000 acres of agricultural production in Colorado will disappear in that period of time in order to fulfill the needs of the population growth. Wyoming as an example In our valley at the Colorado /Wyoming border, we're anticipat- ing a major coalbed methane development. The initial work has already started. When we started project- ing how many mcf of gas is related to how many bbls of water; and quickly came up with numbers that boggle the mind. We started asking questions of the companies and of the state of Wyoming: what is it going to mean to us? What are we going to do with this water? What we do know is that if we do not understand how much water and how much gas are going to be there, we can't plan. Right now there's an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process going on in the Atlantic Rim, a geologic feature that runs north- south, north of the Colorado border. It's high -des- ert country, and it's very beautiful country. It has incredible livestock capability. It has incredible wildlife capability. It has the best sage grouse habitat anywhere. In our part of the country, we value those attributes. What we're trying to figure out is: how does this massive influx of gas development, which resulted in the Powder River experience, going to affect us? The current EIS process indicates all that water is going to be reinjected. I'm telling you right now, that isn't going to happen. Not geologically, not economically; it's not going to happen. It's going to happen other ways. New needs, new technologies Nineteen percent of California's total energy consumption is used to transport clean water. The relative value of water has increased from about $5 - $7 an acre -foot — the worth to a farmer producing hay or alfalfa — to about $1,100 - $1,200 an acre -foot, the cost that California's coastal communities find affordable compared to the cost of transporting that water from