A year ago, Denver City Council approved $83.5 million to start planning for a seventh runway. But airport officials say they still don't know where that runway will be.

A year ago, Denver City Council approved $83.5 million to start planning for a seventh runway. But airport officials say they still don't know where that runway will be.

Ask anybody involved in commercial development around Denver International Airport where it is that the airport will build its next runway, and they’ll tell you with no uncertainty.

“Yes, the seventh runway is east-west, south of Peña (Boulevard), where Peña turns, that’s the plan,” said Yuriy Gorlov, vice president of the Aurora Economic Development Council, when queried about it following a recent real estate gathering.

Development officials with Aurora, which has some 40 square miles of mostly empty land that adjoins the airport, are equally clear that a new runway would be south of Peña, within a mile of where Aurora is envisioning a new “Aerotropolis Parkway” to connect the airport to Interstate 70.

And brokers representing huge commercial projects near the site mention the impending runway as a sales point of their adjacent properties.

Not so fast, say airport officials.

“We’re moving forward with the study, but we’re not 100% committing to a seventh runway,” Mindy Crane, the airport's director of communications, told The Denver Gazette.

“We have to go through the study to determine if and when and where it would go,” Crane added.

When it opened in 1995, Denver International Airport had five runways, and in 2003 it added a sixth runway. The reported price of that last one, more than three miles long and the lengthiest at any commercial airport in the U.S., was $166 million.

Site drawings of the airport’s 52-square-mile expanse showed parcels for another six runways for future expansion, four of them running north-south at sites east and west of the airport’s terminal, and two more running east-west, one of them northeast of the airport, and one south of Peña Boulevard.

That Peña site is the closest to all of the new development arriving that underscores the airport’s potential as an economic driver. Those include big cargo terminals for FedEx and other cargo shippers, some mammoth-scaled office-warehouse buildings that straddle the airport’s border with Aurora and the 1,387-room Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center.

Meanwhile, the airport is ranked as the world’s third busiest airport, something few could have imagined when it was planned in the early 1990s. The airport served 69 million passengers in 2019, just before the pandemic curbed worldwide air travel, and is on track to top that number this year.

Last year, airport CEO Phil Washington committed to his Vision 100 plan, anticipating 100 million passengers a year expected to begin arriving sometime after 2030.

A year ago, Denver City Council approved $83.5 million to start planning for a seventh runway. At that time, media widely reported that it would be expected to cost $1.2 billion and would begin service in 2028 or 2029.

Twelve months later, the money is being spent, but airport officials say they still have no clear idea of whether and where that runway would be, or exactly when one might start landing passengers.

“We have not selected a preferred location at this point,” said Jim Starling, the airport's chief construction and infrastructure officer. Starling oversees the vast improvements already underway at the airport, including the $1.3 billion makeover of the terminal’s Great Hall, with 34 high-performance security lanes, 39 new gates to the concourses and a $500 million expansion of the baggage system.

“You have to go through the whole environmental process,” Starling said, noting that the process involves studies to look at where a runway would go, and working with the Federal Aviation Administration and other federal agencies in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act.

Is 2028 still a completion date? “From EIS (environmental impact statement) to landing the first plane is about 10 years,” Starling said.

“We want to make sure we're maximizing the runways we have,” Starling said, adding that the airport is also underway on some projects to make the existing six runways work more efficiently, including adding a new “Echo-Echo” taxiway on the airport’s east side to make departures run more smoothly.

A year after funds were allocated, Starling was unwilling to say which location would even be most likely for a Runway 7.

He admits that there is an expectation out there about the site near Peña Boulevard.

“I know in the past there has been discussion about that runway specifically, and some of the benefits that would come out of building that runway next, but we need to go through the process. We need to look at all the impacts and then take a look at all the benefits,” Starling continued.

“There are reasons to build a north-south runway as opposed to an east-west runway,” he said. Airlines will weigh in on their preferences, and the airport will at some point solicit wider public input on the location. Going through the initial process before final design, he added, could take four or five years.

“I look at it holistically,” Starling said, noting that meeting future demand is part of a big picture that involves the terminal and concourse improvements, the baggage system makeover, possibilities for enlarging the size of the airport’s passenger trains to six cars each and adding a possible D concourse. “Everything has to come up together.”

With prospect of having to serve a hundred million passengers fairly soon, will the airport’s original groundside infrastructure with a single main terminal and three passenger concourses be adequate to meet that demand?

“Yes, current modeling shows that with what we’re doing with the Great Hall, we can accommodate the hundred million passengers,” Starling said.

He added that the site south of Peña Boulevard is definitely still a possibility for that next runway.

“Eventually we’d like to be the biggest airport (in the nation) and have to use all 12 runways,” Starling said. “If that 7-25 runway (the Peña location) is not the seventh runway built, but the eighth, ninth, 10th or even the 12th, we want to make sure we preserve the ability to build that.”

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