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Green Valley's biggest water company is proposing to nearly double the size of a planned pipeline to import Central Arizona Project water into the growing area, as part of an agreement to bring in CAP water for the Rosemont mine.

The proposal released this week calls for a pipeline that would bring in more than quadruple the amount of water that the original pipeline would have brought — 30,000 acre-feet compared with 7,000.

That larger amount of water would eliminate or come close to eliminating the groundwater overdraft now plaguing the Green Valley area because of pumping for mines, farmers, homes and golf courses. The overdraft has been pegged at 30,000 to 40,000 acre-feet. The newly proposed pipeline, about nine miles long, would be 36 inches in diameter compared with 20 inches in the original proposal.

But the pipeline proposal faces a big unknown — making sure it stays full as population growth brings more water-users into Arizona over the next 20 years. That will put more pressure on CAP's Colorado River supply, which already is over-allocated. Still, the pipeline's backers hail this as a landmark opportunity to bring in a new water supply.

The Community Water Company of Green Valley hopes to get engineering and permitting work for the pipeline done this year, start construction next year and have the pipeline on line by 2010, said Arturo Gabaldon, the company's president. The pipeline would allow use of CAP water instead of groundwater pumping that is lowering the water table by about two feet per year, according to various studies. The CAP water would be recharged in the Green Valley area and also offset the effects of future Rosemont mine pumping.

Augusta Resource Corp. has agreed to pay the pipeline's $15 million to $18 million tab, said Jamie Sturgess, the company's vice president.

"With the water tables going down and water issues in our area, it seems very important that the sooner we can have water being recharged in our area, the better," Gabaldon said Thursday.

That shouldn't be much of a problem over the next few years, even though the Community Water Company is the only Green Valley-area user with a CAP allocation — 2,858 acre-feet.

Various municipalities, farmers, mining companies and others feeding off this pipeline would be mainly buying excess CAP water — water available from the 300-mile-long-canal but not being used. This year, nearly 900,000 of the project's 1.5 million acre-foot total is excess because cities, farms and Indian tribes that have rights to this water aren't using it. An acre-foot can supply up to three families with enough water for a year.

Although it's too late for Green Valley users to buy this water for 2008, that should be much easier next year because one current large buyer — the Arizona Water Banking Authority — is lower on the pecking order for the water than would be municipal and industrial users in Green Valley, said Bob Barrett, a spokesman for the Central Arizona Water Conservation District. The three-county agency operates the project.

But shortages caused by drought could start on the Colorado River by the next decade. Excess water such as the water bank's supply would be the first to go if CAP deliveries are reduced.

Shortages could raise questions about availability of water for people in the Green Valley area, Barrett said. In future years, growing Tucson and Phoenix would use more of their CAP supplies, squeezing the project further.

"It would depend on how severe the shortage was," Barrett said. "It's very hard to predict that far ahead. It's like trying to predict the weather."

Another option would be to buy or lease CAP water rights directly from various Indian tribes, such as the Tohono O'odham and Gila River Indian Community, that have legal rights to that water. That is likely to be at a much steeper price than buying water directly from the CAP's operators.

Gabaldon agreed that "the challenge will be to find water to keep this pipeline full for the long haul." Despite the uncertainty, he called the pipeline a very important facility that the area desperately needs.

"We are starting now with no water. If we can get any water down here, it is a good thing," he said.

But a local activist predicted that once CAP shortages appear, both the Green Valley-area water-users and the mining company will have to revert to pumping down the aquifer for water. Nancy Freeman of the non-profit Groundwater Awareness League predicted that at that time, there simply will be no excess CAP water to buy.

Augusta Resource's Sturgess declined to speculate on how long the pipeline could bring in reliable water supplies. But he said he is confident that the line will put at least as much water into the ground as the 100,000 acre-feet the mine would pump out over 20 years. That's largely because the company has already started buying and recharging CAP water into the ground in Marana. It will have artificially sunk 30,000 acre-feet there by the end of 2008.

"We have every confidence that in the near term that excess water will be in sufficient quantity to meet our goals," Sturgess said.

Rosemont's critics say its current recharge of water does the Green Valley area aquifer no good because the recharging lies well downstream of where Rosemont would be pumping out groundwater once it starts operating. The new pipeline would be aimed at solving that problem by allowing Rosemont to recharge the CAP water upstream of where it would pump.