GIS AND WEB BASED WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT FOR OIL SHALE DEVELOPMENT IN THE WESTERN UNITED STATES, STAGE I

Development of oil shale resources in the western United States will require significant quantities of water for surface or in-situ retorting, reclamation, and associated economic growth. The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates the use of 105 to 315 million gallons (2.5 to 7.5 million barrels) of water per day for an oil shale industry producing 2.5 million barrels of oil a day. It is estimated that an additional 58 million gallons (1.4 million barrels) of water per day will also be needed to support the population growth and industry infrastructure. This three year project funded by the DOE focuses on the development of the oil shale bearing Green River Formation in the Piceance Basin of western Colorado. A Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based regional water resource infrastructure, and web-based data warehouse for storing, managing, analyzing, visualizing, and disseminating Piceance Basin oil shale data are being developed to address both water quantity and quality issues. The first stage of this project presented here focuses on data acquisition and storage in the form of the ESRI ArcHydro surface and groundwater data models to support the state of art ArcGIS Server Enterprise application and analytical modeling of the hydrologic systems. The ArcHydro database schema provides the structure for the coupling of both surface water and groundwater observational data along with output from numerical modeling to support dynamic analytical models to address water availability. This robust spatial relational model combined with customized data and analytical toolsets accessed via the web will provide the DOE with a dynamic water resource assessment and management tool that can be applied to other oil shale basins.