Federal agency awards $75.5 million for Navajo-Gallup pipeline work

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation awarded Flatland Energy Services LLC a $75.5 million contract to push another stretch of the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project forward. The new work covers the Block 2-3 Pipeline Horizontal Directional Drilling components, a roughly 10,000-foot segment that starts at Frank Chee Willetto Reservoir, about 17 miles east of Shiprock, and ends at the San Juan Lateral Water Treatment Plant in the Hogback Chapter area of San Juan County.

The project will eventually move water through about 300 miles of pipeline, 19 pumping plants and two water treatment plants. It is designed to serve about 250,000 people over a 40-year planning horizon and to deliver 37,764 acre-feet of water each year from the San Juan Basin to the eastern Navajo Nation, the southwestern Jicarilla Apache Nation and Gallup. Inadequate water supply has affected the ability of Jicarilla Apache people to live and work outside Dulce.

The newest contract is not routine trench work. Bart Deming, the Reclamation manager overseeing construction, said the segment includes some of the most complex horizontal directional drilling on the project so far, including crossings beneath the San Juan River and the Chaco River. One of the hardest pieces is the San Juan River crossing and a bore at Nenahnezad Hill that involves a 250-foot elevation change. Reclamation also awarded nearly $62 million for the San Juan Lateral Pumping Plant No. 1.

Even with that progress, the timeline remains measured in years, not months. The San Juan Lateral is more than 70% complete, with initial water deliveries expected in late 2028 and full project completion by the end of 2029. Construction on the broader project began in 2012, after Congress authorized the effort in the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009. Feasibility studies were first authorized in 1971.