The United States government, through the auspices of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), has initiated a leasing program in the Colorado River Basin of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming to encourage research into the development of oil shale as an energy resource. Under a Chevron/Tri-Lab Environmental Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA), PNNL and interdisciplinary collaborators are seeking to understand the undisturbed groundwater and surface water systems and in situ processes in northwest Colorado’s Piceance Basin. By gaining insight into how these systems and processes will react to impacts from of the oil shale upgrade and extraction process, these impacts can be mitigated. This document reports on the progress made in reviewing available data and developing an integrated conceptual model as the basis of numerical models developed to simulate groundwater flow processes within the subsurface environment of the basin. It recommends a path forward for local-scale characterization, monitoring, and modeling to support the development of a variety of remediation scenarios in advance of operations that might perturb the groundwater system.