BOARD02203

• Board Meeting Date: 3/20/1975
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Resolution
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

Colorado.

Water is necessary to the extraction of minerals from the earth and,
particularly, water in large amounts is essential to the extraction of
oil from shale under most of the retort processes under advanced study.
The ASPGREN process, TOSCO II, and the Union, with perhaps no water
required in the Parahoe, the Superior, and some in-situ techniques.

However, in any process except an in-situ technique, the disposal of
processed shale, refining of crude product, and associated municipal
and domestic uses require significant quantities of water. To be
specific, an oil shale industry in Colorado of as much as one million
barrels of oil per day would probably require 200,000 acre-feet per year
of consumptive use.

I

A policy in the State of Colorado, should one be adopted, of supporting
only federal irrigation projects, or only the irrigation features of
federally sponsored reclamation projects, will not repeal Colorado water
law. Such a policy, if it were adopted, would radically change the
present planning for the Yellow Jacket, the Lower Yampa, or Juniper,
and the West Divide Projects, each of which has substantial provision
for water for mineral development in Northwest Colorado.

In our age of mineral deficiencies and energy shortage - Persian Gulf
crude costing 15 cents per barrel, being priced at $10.50 per barrel -
the mineral deposits in Northwest Colorado will be developed and the
coal, oil, gas, and oil shale extracted along with the aluminum, soda
ash and other associated minerals.

Water rights in the Yellow Jacket Project and water rights in the Range1y
Project are the vested property of Yellow Jacket Water Conservancy
District and the Colorado River Water Conservation District, respectively,
and these rights are protected by the constitution of Colorado and the
United States.

Gulf Oil Company and Standard Oil Company of Indiana as lessees of the
federal prototype oil shale lease in the Piceance Basin of Colorado on
Tract C-a, for which their successful bid was over $210 million, propose
to build, jointly with the Yellow Jacket Water Conservancy District, a
reservoir in Yellow Creek in the oil shale area of more than 400,000
acre-feet - about 1.7 times the si~e of the Dillon Reservoir. There
are a number of other vested water rights - property rights in Colorado -
for oil shale development. Substantially in order of priority - or in
relation to this order - large water diversions in Northwest Colorado
will be built. With unified Colorado support - unified support - the I
diversions will be under the Bureau of Reclamation sponsorship. Without
such support, the projects will be almost completely, if not entirely,
industrial.

My second point. Attention should be given to the question which has
been raised today and earlier of whether industrial use of water in
Colorado will take land out of irrigation. It need not. Industrial
development need not take water out of irrigation. 200,000 acre-feet of

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