A Flaming Gorge pipeline?

A Colorado businessman is promoting a project under which 165,000 acre-feet of water would be pumped yearly from Flaming Gorge Reservoir and piped to the Denver area.

The idea of Aaron Million, Fort Collins, has received largely favorable reactions from several federal and state officials.

Flaming Gorge Reservoir, operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, sprawls across the Utah-Wyoming border, backed up behind the dam near Dutch John, Daggett County. Flaming George National Recreation Area encompasses more than 207,000 acres, about equally divided between the two states.

Currently, the dam holds back more than 3 million acre-feet of water from the Green River system, according to the bureau.

News reports from Colorado peg the project's cost at $4 billion, much of it for a 400-mile pipeline. Exact locations of the project's features have not been announced, with discussions continuing about the details.

At one point, project supporters said they were interested in more than 400,000 acre-feet from the reservoir, but the number has dropped. One official said the latest estimate is for 165,000 acre-feet.

"There's a significant need for water on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs," said Don Ostler, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, based in Salt Lake City.

Proposals to use Colorado's water allotment from the area have been around for years, he said. "There were lots of problems with all of them, very substantial problems, whether they be political problems or environmental problems." Depleting the Colorado River in the western slope is among the difficulties of these plans.

"Mr. Million has begun planning for a project that would apparently avoid much of that," he said. He "has come up with a proposal to take water out of the Green River essentially, out of Flaming Gorge. This seems to avoid a lot of environmental issues," Ostler said.

"It has its own set of issues that people are just beginning to look at, in terms of how the Upper Basin shares the water, where they take it, and what that means."

Million has been working with the Bureau of Reclamation to obtain a contract to use water stored in the reservoir. "And of course the water would be charged to the state of Colorado," which has an allotment under interstate compact.