Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
On a hot day in August 2007, Bob Moran and I drove about 125 miles south, mostly on
rural roads, from his house in Golden, just west of Denver, to the town of Crestone, in
the San Luis Valley. The valley, which stretches for eight thousand square miles, from
central Colorado into northern New Mexico, is a wild and beautiful place that has long
attracted dramatic personalities.
In 1978, a Canadian billionaire named Maurice (pronounced “Morris”) Strong
bought Baca Ranch—two hundred thousand pristine acres in the middle of the San Luis
Valley—for a “ ire sale price , ” according to Forbes, from the oil refining consortium To-
sco. Strong and his Danish wife, Hanne, fell in love with Baca and made it their perman-
ent home. At first they planned to grow quinoa and to build a small brewery on their
property. But then they discovered the aquifer, which, they later maintained, they had
no idea was there when they bought the place. Given that the valley's water supply had
been studied for years by private and government hydrologists, as well as mineral and
energy companies, this assertion strains credulity.
The southern part of the valley drains into the Rio Grande, but much of the northern
part of the valley is a thirty-four-hundred-square-mile area called the Closed Basin.
Within the Closed Basin lies the Unconfined Aquifer, whose water is connected to
streams and lakes on the surface. Beneath that is a layer of impermeable clay, and then
bedrock. Six miles beneath the earth's surface is the Confined Aquifer, which is not con-
nected to the surface water. The Confined Aquifer is a magnificent water supply that
seems to make people go crazy. When USGS hydrologists surveyed the valley in 1971,
they calculated that at least 2 billion acre-feet of water was stored in its upper six thou-
sand feet of sediments. This is equivalent to fifty times the combined capacity of Lake
Powell and Lake Mead, the enormous reservoirs built on the Colorado River. Depend-
ing on snowmelt, Baca Ranch itself receives an additional twenty thousand to thirty-one
thousand acre-feet of surface water every year.
As a former oilman, Maurice Strong knew the resource business, and no one had to
point out to him the commercial potential of the water under his ranch. He has pre-
dicted that by the year 2031 freshwater will be so scarce that in arid parts of the world it
will be rationed by armed guards.
In the mid-1980s, the suburbs around Denver were one of the fastest-growing re-
gions of the country. But their growth was limited by water. Some towns were willing to
pay up to $7,000 per acre-foot for a reliable supply. At those prices, Strong was sitting
on top of something like $14 trillion in water.
In 1986 he formed American Water Development Inc. (AWDI), with backing from
the Vancouver billionaire Sam Belzberg and others. One of the first things AWDI did
Search WWH ::




Custom Search