Integrated Water Resource Planning
Aurora Lower South Platte Master Plan
The Lower South Platte Master Plan was performed to give the City guidance on the future expansion of the North Campus system, and to provide recommendations on the future development of the Lower South Platte system. The LRE Water team, with significant input from Aurora Internal Stakeholders, identified five (5) Preferred Portfolios designed to maximize the City’s water supply yield, resilience, and reliability of current and future water rights and water infrastructure in the Lower South Platte basin.
The conclusions and recommendations presented in the Lower South Platte Master Plan were intended to assist Aurora in spending time and money wisely by identifying risks preemptively, and to further inform Aurora as to how potential supplies could tie into the existing system before purchase negotiations begin.
Aurora North Campus Master Plan
LRE Water provided master planning services to the City of Aurora for the development of the 2019 North Campus Master Plan, including long-range water resources planning, GAP analysis, and the development of a capital improvements plan for the progressive expansion of an additional 20 million gallons per day (MGD) from the Prairie Waters Project North Campus over the next 20 years.
Site Selection for Technology Client
LRE Water assisted a Confidential Technology Market Client in selecting the preferred property for development of a new facility. Prior to LRE Water’s involvement, the Client had selected five different project sites spread across three different Western US states. LRE Water was engaged to evaluate physical and legal availability of water, determine the process and costs associated with securing the water rights and developing the water supply, and select the preferred property for development based on the ability to satisfy water resource requirements.
Groundwater Development & Management
Sacramento Suburban Water District Aquifer Storage and Recovery Well Economic Assessment
Sacramento Suburban Water District is exploring the development of an aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) well system within its service area, and wanted to understand the associated costs, benefits, and risks. LRE Water created a decision support tool that evaluates the life-cycle costs of two ASR well development scenarios: retrofit existing inactive wells vs. install new ASR wells. The economic model calculates the capital and O&M costs of developing and operating an ASR well system compared to the revenue that could be generated from selling recovered water supplies over a range of volumes and unit prices.
Denver Water ASR Pilot Project
LRE Water has supported Denver Water in a multi-year, multi-phase project to assess the feasibility of using ASR wells as a water supply strategy and to select a site for a pilot facility. The most recent phase included the completion and geophysical logging of eight, 1,000+ foot deep exploratory boreholes in the Denver Basin to characterize the hydraulic and water quality of the aquifers. LRE Water also prepared an ASR pilot facility cost estimate and operations plan.
Groundwater Well for Data Center Cooling Towers
For a Data Center client, LRE Water evaluated the feasibility of installing a groundwater well for the purpose of supplying water to existing cooling towers and developing redundancy. Services included (i) a desktop groundwater hydrology review of the area, (ii) development of construction cost estimates for well construction and infrastructure to deliver water to the cooling towers; and (iii) regulatory guidance for the permitting and management of the groundwater supply.
Terry Ranch Aquifer Characterization and ASR Feasibility Study
The City of Greeley, Colorado’s City Council recently voted to move forward with the Terry Ranch Project. The Terry Ranch Project is a generational water supply enabled through an innovative private-party purchase structure that allows for phased, affordable project development. LRE Water supported the City’s extensive due diligence activities related to characterizing the aquifer’s yield and water quality, and assessing the feasibility of conducting ASR. LRE Water staff and its contractors collected over 7,000 water quality data points, and conducted aquifer testing, exploratory borehole drilling, geophysical logging, geochemical modeling, bench-scale testing, and ASR pilot testing. LRE Water constructed the Terry Ranch Aquifer Characterization Study GIS Story Map to communicate to the public the extensive data collected and complex findings of due diligence activities.
Boulder Community Hospital
The ongoing Boulder Community Hospital project involves coordinating the operation and maintenance of the perimeter drain system that surrounds the hospital. A slurry wall and sub-grade infiltration system was installed to maintain pre-construction groundwater levels below the wetlands areas in the adjacent open space area. The perimeter drain system maintains the dewatered condition for the hospital basement facilities and prevents groundwater from entering the basement level of the hospital buildings. LRE Water coordinated the maintenance activities and verified operations after maintenance was complete, taking the burden off the Facility Manager.
LRE Water’s services include weekly discharge monitoring and sampling, discharge monitoring reporting, groundwater monitoring network data collection and review, coordination of maintenance activities, seasonal operation of the groundwater infiltration system for the adjacent open space wetland area, and regulatory coordination activities.
Water Information and Technology
Denver Metro Water Quality Assessment Tool
Representing a partnership between the federal, state, and local governments, as well nonprofit organizations, the South Platte Urban Waters Partnership (UWP) possesses a tremendous amount of water quality data throughout the Denver Metro area. The UWP sought to create an interactive application that allowed both decision-makers and the general public to access the trove of water quality data and learn more about water quality in general. A series of interactive graphs, tables, and maps allow the user to explore the data while the interactive education storylines provide context to the data and why water quality matters.
Link to Tool: http://exploremetrodenverwaterquality.org/
Arkansas Basin Water Operations Dashboard (ARKTOOLS)
LRE Water developed the Arkansa Basin Water Operations Dashboard to facilitate transparent and streamlined daily operations and water accounting for Arkansas Basin water users. Secure web forms provide a consistent process for water requests. They are auto-populated with user information and provide immediate email confirmation. Interactive reports provide water users with access to current and past requests. This system is built on an open-source platform with that leverages the Google Stack to provide interactive data visualizations.
DWSD Water Systems Operations Model
Dominion Water and Sanitation District (DWSD) is a retail water sanitation district established in 2015 in northwest Douglas County. The DWSD service area includes a major planned development named Sterling Ranch. By pairing water supply planning and modeling to evaluate water supply options, operations, costs, and characterize risk, LRE has developed effective and innovative planning solutions and a robust water supply portfolio that reduces risk and provides a reliable firm supply for the planned community under various economic and environmental conditions.
Dominion’s Water Operations Model (WOM) is a demand based water allocation model developed in Microsoft Excel. The model was designed with the flexibility to use monthly and annual projected water demands at various demand levels with and without outdoor water conservation. The model also includes the flexibility to vary monthly delivery and demand schedules and compare the results of multiple model runs side-by-side both tabularly and graphically. The insights gained from the allocation of water to meet demands characterizes system operations and infrastructure requirements. The WOM was constructed based upon Dominion’s primary renewable supply WISE and represents Wet/Average/Dry 10-year blocks of deliveries specified in the WISE Water Delivery Agreement. The understanding and characterization of WISE deliveries and the supporting agreements is crucial in the successful operation of a conjunctive use system.
The WOM has been used successfully to support Douglas County submittals, WISE management, understanding the timing of infrastructure and required funding, as well as integration with regional projects and partners.
Environmental Resource Management
Denver Water South Water System Watershed Planning
LRE Water worked with the Denver Water Watershed Steering Committee and staff to develop a watershed inventory, assessment and prioritization for their South Collection System, which includes source water from the upper south platte, upper blue river, chatfield and bear creek. The project is part of Denver Water’s adaptive watershed management, and involved several elements including:
- Aligning and articulating Denver Water’s organizational values on watershed health and raw water supply
- Developing a spatial inventory and associated geodatabase of watershed characteristics and risks ranging from agriculture to weather
- Defining Denver Water-specific water quality benchmarks to provide a relative comparison across the collection system
- Evaluating potential risk by compiling, processing and analyzing water quality data for over 250 monitoring locations and 40 constituents
The project culminated in the development and application of a Risk Decision Support Tool that integrates watershed values, risks and constituents to target action planning.
Mine Water and Mine Waste Services
Mine Water Management for Closure – Newmont Gold Corp., Boddington Mine, Australia
Operating practices at this mine had caused the inventory of impacted water to increase. Mine water management practices were evaluated in conjunction with closure planning using water balance modeling developed using GoldSim. The water balance model represents all major mine facilities including tailings storage facilities, waste rock storage facilities, water storage and treatment facilities and their changing status during the closure period. The model tracks waters of different qualities, creates input for PHREEQC modeling to estimate changes in water quality at the facilities over the closure period, and provides estimates of the quality of off site discharges under various alternative water management and treatment scenarios at closure.
Site-Wide Operational Mine Water Model - Freeport Mcmoran, Bagdad Mine, Water Balance, Arizona (2009 – Present)
Operational mine water management issues were evaluated for this copper mine by developing a stochastic dynamic systems model in GoldSim. The model has been updated and recalibrated frequently over the years to maintain its value as an operational tool. The model has been used to evaluate climate and water management-related water supply issues, evaluate facility development alternatives, and to identify water conservation opportunities. Mine staff were trained in the development and use of the model in order to perform quarterly on-site maintenance. The model includes dashboards which allow users to evaluate the effects of selected system modifications. Annual water supply, use and consumption reports are generated from the model for site and corporate evaluation.
Commercial Water
Felix Energy - Water Supply and Aquifer Sustainability
The project goal was to determine if the Felix Water, LLC (Felix) well field located in west Texas would be able to sustain constant groundwater production of approximately 3,150 gpm or a period of 5-10 years without over-mining the Pecos Valley Alluvial Aquifer (PVA) in the area of the well field.
Project highlights:
- Developed desktop review and field aquifer pumping test to collect hydrologic data
- Developed sub-regional groundwater flow model
- Drilled and tested 4 test wells to collect additional water quantity and quality information
- Constructed a new production well based upon the modeling and test wells
- Refined groundwater flow model based upon the new production well
The LRE Commercial Water Team was able to demonstrate on the basis of the work done that Felix could operate the existing well field for at least 5 years at the 75 barrel per minute flow rate without ‘drying up’ the aquifer if 2 or 3 new wells were installed in a thicker section of the aquifer as identified as a part of this work.