BOARD00647

• Board Meeting Date: 8/15/1973
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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Parachute and the native areas are intensively under development and
mining and processing and when the coal gasification project which
is now being carried on by Continental Oil Company in the Meeker
area gets into operation that the water will be available here will
not adequately supply all the needs.

You didn't say how much water you plan in your
the court records don't seem to divulge this. How
think will actually go to the Piceance basin dut
of the White River directly to the Piceance basin?

Mr. Berthelson:
present plans and
much water do you
of the headwaters

Mr. Brannan: I think all of it will go. All of it that is available
and that is somewhere in the neighborhood of between 60,000 acre-feet
and to use a round number, lOO,OOO acre-feet, if there is an excep-
tionally good year, will go into the Piceance basin. And I also
know of my own knowledge that there will be water from the upper
reaches of Elk and Rifle Creeks which will go into the Piceance basin.
Part of it is through a canal which has already been engineered and
surveyed and laid out by Elk-Rifle Water Company. I do not know by
my own knowledge of the details, but Socony Mobil will take the
balance of the water up into that area for their development. So I
think what we are talking about is a demand for oil shale and the
other industrial developments which are at least equal to all of the
water which we will actually be able to carry.

Now I assume that when we are all talking here about the diversion
of the water to the oil shale areas that we are at no time ignoring
the responsibility (and we already have put this into a potential
u~derstanding with the Forest Service, although it will have to be
very much updated and revised). Now there is a commitment to let
enough water always corne down the White River to make it a viable
fishing, recreational stream. And if we didn't intend to do it,
there are at least four federal laws and water state laws that would
force us to do it, would force the Colorado River District to do it,
and would force anybody else to do it. There was some testimony,
not before this board, to the effect that if this project were to
develop the river below the darn would be as dryas the river above
the Belmont plant.

Well, gentlemen, if you believe in laws and all the statutes which
. .
are in the book which have been put there in the last ten years by
the environmentalists, that couldn't possible have happened and
nobody intends to do it. At least, we never intended to do it, and
we never had the slightest idea that it could be done in the face of
all the legislation.

Mr. Berthelson: Mr. Brannan, are not your plans, your past plans,

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