Flowing uphill: Aurora's Prairie Waters project reflects the new era of fighting gravity to pump water to homes and businesses.

• Author: Best, Allen
• Position: ENERGY [for water]

If you ever tried to walk up a trail with 1,000 feet of vertical gain, then you have an idea of what Aurora's new water supply must do. To defy gravity, the Prairie Waters system requires energy--lots of it.

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Pumping begins at the 17 wells scattered along the South Platte River between Brighton and Fort Lupton. Lined by cottonwood trees, the river there loops back and forth. Among these loops are the wells, 300 feet from the river and about 50 feet deep. The collected water is then pushed uphill at three pumping stations along its 34-mile journey to Aurora.

In Aurora, the water undergoes a four-step purification process. One of them, advanced ultraviolet oxidation, requires particularly large stores of energy. Finally, the water is mixed with Aurora's more bounteous mountain sources for delivery to consumers.

This incessant need for energy by the $655 million Prairie Waters project reflects a growing theme for communities along Colorado's Front Range. The era of gravity-flow water delivery systems from nearby mountain rivers has been giving way to the era of pumping. In a figurative sense, it has long been said that water flows uphill to money. Now, that's becoming literally true.

Colorado Springs also has uphill plans. Located at an elevation of 6,000 feet or more, with not much above it other than Pikes Peak, it has no river to draw on save spindly Fountain Creek. It exhausted that resource decades ago, turning first to water imported from near Breckenridge and then, in 1967, from the Vail-Leadville area.

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Now, it will soon break ground on its long-discussed $880 million Southern Delivery System. Water will be drawn 62 miles in a pipeline from Pueblo Reservoir to the city, gaining up to 2,300 feet when distributed to the loftiest neighborhood, North-gate. Additional expansions remain possible.

John Fredell, Southern Delivery System project manager, says annual pumping costs could eventually reach $7.4 million with additional phases. Yet a rigorous review of alternatives by utility officials concluded that even so, it was the most cost-efficient way to deliver new water to the city of 414,000 people.

Other projects, still conceptual, also call for long pipelines with uphill trajectories to the population-rich, water-poor Front Range. One idea envisions a pipeline from Blue Mesa Reservoir near Gunnison, and another from west of Craig. Yet two more see water being imported nearly 400 miles from the Green River in Wyoming or Utah. And, although it isn't clear that Colorado still has the water, the idea of a giant pipeline from near Grand junction isn't completely dead.

No matter how you cut it, costs of water--surely one of Colorado's great bargains in the last century--will be rising.

"Generally, we agree that the days of cheap water are over," says Stacy Telling-huisen, of Western Resource Advocates, an environmental organization. "Cities looking to develop new water supplies are having to look further afield, either to rivers or reservoirs, or to groundwater aquifers that are deep, or by treating water to...