With five years of drought prompting massive campaigns to educate Utahns on the virtues of water conservation, there is a common perception that Utah is running out of water.

Make that a misperception. Utah is a state swimming in water.

In fact, there's water, water everywhere and plenty of it to drink, today, tomorrow and 50 years from now. Utah has enough water to meet the needs of a population several times its current 2.3 million people.

But there's a catch: It's going to get very, very expensive in the years ahead.

"We're not running short of water. We're just running short of cheap water," said Gregory Williams, senior engineer for the Utah Division of Water Resources.

Water officials across the state have launched campaigns to "slow the flow" (the goal is a 25 percent statewide reduction in per capita use by 2050) and to explain the need for new water development (billions of dollars will be needed to build the delivery systems for the next generation of Utahns).

And no one disputes that Utahns will have to change certain habits in the years ahead to make sure clean water is flowing through new high-efficiency taps.

Utahns currently use 321 gallons per person per day, or more water per person than any other state in the nation except Nevada.

The goal — and the state's long-term water strategy hinges on it happening — is that water conservation will drop the daily water use to 240 gallons per person per day, or roughly the average of all states in the Rocky Mountain region. But it would mean instead of new water development totaling 1 million acre-feet per year, it could be scaled back to 646,000 acre-feet (an acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover one acre to a depth of one foot, or the equivalent to what a family uses in any given year).

If it all sounds confusing, it is, even to seasoned water experts, all of whom use different sets of numbers and different models to come up with their projections. There isn't even agreement on how much water Utahns use (the 321 gallons is a number settled upon by the Utah Division of Water Resources).

The bottom line is Utah has to figure out how it will deliver 646,000 acre-feet more, or about two-thirds more water than the amount being used by Utah households today.

But the key word is "delivery." Water experts say it is the cost of building those delivery systems that is the limiting factor to growth, not a shortage of water.

Beneficial use

From the time Brigham Young first entered the Salt Lake Valley more than 150 years ago, Utah decisionmakers decided that water would be owned for the "beneficial use" of all.