A Plainville businessman wants to quench demand for bottled water by tapping into a dwindling pool buried beneath western Kansas.

Ned Colburn, owner of Conquest International, is planning to pump 2.25 million gallons of water a year from the Ogallala Aquifer for the raw material of a new business: a High Plains Water Co. Inc. bottling plant to be built just west of Plainville in northwest Kansas.

The estimated $750,000 project is expected to pump 19 full-time jobs into the area and fill more than 8.5 million bottles of water a year.

Half the products would be sold under the label “Prairie Breeze” and marketed throughout northwest Kansas, Colburn said. The rest would be reserved for filling special orders nationwide, under custom labels designed to advertise, promote or advance a client’s needs — such as commemorating a wedding, celebrating a birthday or bolstering a business conference.

Colburn will have to secure a permit to drill his well, expected to bore at least 165 feet into a finger extension of the aquifer. But he doesn’t see concerns about dwindling water levels putting a crimp in his project.

“Compared to the millions of gallons pumped each day through the irrigation systems in western Kansas, it’s a drop in the bucket,” Colburn said.

Officials at the Kansas Department of Agriculture, which oversees the state’s Division of Water Resources, said Colburn’s plans didn’t sound like much of a problem. While the aquifer’s water supply beneath Plainville isn’t all that plentiful, area residents don’t soak up much of it, either.

The department continues to permit wells to tap into the aquifer in the area, provided the amount of water removed doesn’t outpace the aquifer’s rate of recharge, said Lisa Taylor, a department spokeswoman.

Colburn’s projected rate of removal, she said, “would not be considered an excessive amount.”

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Taylor’s only concern: Some of the area’s water suffers from contamination left by work involved in the oil and gas industry.

Colburn isn’t worried about that. His water would be screened for sediment before being poured into carbon filters, softened, purified through reverse osmosis and bombarded by ozone.

The five-step purification process will be designed to provide a “world-class, ultra-pure drinking water,” Colburn said.

“Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola have Aquafina and Dasani,” he said. “We’re going to go beyond the purification stages that they go through. As far as the quality of water is concerned, there will be no higher quality of water.”

He intends to open the plant this spring.