The infrastructure of a populated area, including roads,
airports, water and energy transmission and distribution
facilities, and sewage treatment plants, is critical to the
vitality and sustainability of the area. Construction of new
and ongoing maintenance of existing infrastructure both
require large volumes of natural resources such as energy
(oil, natural gas, and coal), construction aggregate (stone,
sand, and gravel), and water. However, sufficient natural
resources may not always be available for ready use due to
(1) scarcity of local sources, (2) inaccessibility (for example,
gravel cannot be mined from under a housing subdivision),
(3) unsuitability of the resource (for example, polluted ground
water may be unfit for domestic use), or (4) land use or legal
restrictions limiting access to local sources. Should local
sources of these natural resources either be unavailable or not
used, then costs incurred to construct and maintain an area’s
infrastructure through use of more distant supplies will be
greater than they would be if local sources were used. Thus,
the ability to explore for and develop local accumulations
of natural resources for use in infrastructure construction
and maintenance, in large part a function of accessibility to
the resources, is of particular interest and benefit to areas of
significant population growth or where growth is expected.
The challenge for communities is to adequately factor
maintenance and growth of the area’s infrastructure into
comprehensive land-use planning efforts and to consider how
changes in land-use designation can influence the availability
of these vital natural resources.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Front Range Infrastructure
Resources Project (FRIRP) was designed, with direct input
from stakeholders, to advance our
understanding of the location and characteristics of accumulations
of energy, construction aggregate, and water—herein
termed infrastructure resources—in the plains immediately
east of the northern part of the Front Range in Colorado. The FRIRP study area
was selected for two primary reasons. First, this area has undergone
substantial population
growth over the last 30 years, with the attendant need
for infrastructure resources. The population is expected to
increase by as much as 1 million people within the next 25
years (Denver Regional Council of Governments, 1999).
Not surprisingly, the need for infrastructure resources will
correspondingly grow as the existing infrastructure requires
maintenance and new construction is undertaken. Second, the
northern part of the Front Range of Colorado was chosen for
this study because urban and commercial development has
encroached upon some areas that are supplying or have historically
supplied infrastructure resources. Furthermore, urban
growth is projected for areas that currently produce infrastructure
resources or have the potential to do so. Thus, the project
study area was a natural laboratory to consider the interplay
between population growth and its effects on the availability
of infrastructure resources.
Version 1.0
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| Posted July 2005 |
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