Western State College of Colorado

It becomes a difficult time for a society when the solutions to its problems turn out to have problems in their own right - the solutions to which often complicate the first set of problems. Energy and water, throughout the nation but especially in the West, are now thoroughly bound up in that kind of a knot.

Growing cities, for example, are stressing both their water supplies and their energy resources. The obvious solution - the 20th-century solution - is to bring in more water and develop more energy resources. But most of the easy water resources (gravity flow to the cities) are already being used, so obtaining more water requires a substantial expenditure of energy to move it uphill.But the easy energy resources - petroleum and natural gas - are also going fast. And most of the more difficult energy resources that must replace them - coal, nuclear, non-conventional oil and gas, and the embryonic renewables - require substantial water either in their mining, or their energy production facilities, or both. And because of where those energy resources are in the West, getting water to where they are mined requires more energy, production of which requires more water - et cetera. And that analytical overview does not even touch on the extent to which a third necessity, food, makes major demands on both water and energy in the West. Nor does it incorporate the possibility - probability, according to a growing consensus of earth scientists - that climate changes caused by our major energy production systems might significantly reduce the amount of water available in the relatively near future.

What this basically means is that a 21st-century water conference is also an energy conference to some extent - preferably consciously so - and vice versa. And given the growing extent to which both urban and agricultural water resources are increasingly pumped from non-renewable groundwater accumulations (with growing energy expenditures as the levels drop), such a conference is also a mining conference, where water is concerned as well as energy. Welcome to "Mining, Energy and Water in the West," where we will try to confront some aspects of our increasingly interwoven reality.