There's a connection between water and energy that many water planners don't appreciate, said Melinda Kassen with Trout Unlimited. "It goes both ways. There's water needed to produce energy. But there's energy needed to develop and deliver water," said Kassen, who sits on a high-level water panel called the Interbasin Compact Committee. "If you talk about this, I think, you need to talk about both sides." Coal power plants need water to generate steam for their turbines and to cool off excess heat in their towers. Ethanol requires water for irrigation and to process corn into a useable fuel. Oil shale needs water to scour the underground rocks and refine the product into fuel for vehicles and jets. By 2030, U.S. power plants could be using as much water as all domestic users in the country were in 1995, according to a Department of Energy report called "Energy Demands on Water Resources." Closer to home, water planners are keeping their eyes on the large conditional water rights of Shell and Chevron, but the largest conditional water right in Colorado is for a future power plant. The Colorado River Water Conservation District owns the right to store more than 1 million acre-feet of water a year in Juniper Reservoir. Like the oil companies' reservoirs, Juniper does not exist yet.

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