BIG PIVOTS: Geothermal Seeds, Sprinkled Across Colorado, Part One

Photo: The domes in Centennial Park, in Pagosa Springs, house the gardens maintained by the non-profit Geothermal Greenhouse Partnership.

This story by by Allen Best appeared on BigPivots.com on June 4, 2024. We are sharing it in two parts.

Colorado’s geothermal story has started to get very interesting. Just look at the diversity and depth of the 35 geothermal projects that are getting chunks of $7.7 million in state grants.

The seeds have been planted broadly across Colorado. In the Yampa Valley, the municipality of Hayden is to get $200,000 to investigate the idea of using geothermal to produce heat for the entire town, as Pagosa Springs already does for part of its business district. Instead of hot water, though, Hayden wonders if the heat in the ground can be mined.

Have you been to Pierce? It’s a town of about 1,100 people about 20 miles north of Greeley, where the irrigated farm country starts turning into grazing land. About 20 minutes more and you’re at the Wyoming border. Gradient Geothermal is to get $100,000 to study whether inactive oil wells can be repurposed to provide direct-use heat of up to 120 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit for a thermal energy network for the community.

Another project near Pierce, at the Longs Peak Diary, is to get $1 million for study of the potential to create generating capacity for.2 megawatts of electricity.

Crested Butte is to get $157,000 to use geothermal for new workforce housing. This was, you may recall, the first jurisdiction to put the kibosh on new natural gas in the town’s remaining unbuilt lots except as may be necessary for commercial cookeries.

Vail and Steamboat Springs both are trying to figure out how to use geothermal to melt snow on sidewalks. Unbeknown to most visitors, an incredible amount of natural gas gets burned to lessen the chance of somebody slipping and falling.

And also in Steamboat is an idea by Pure-Green Colorado, which is getting not quite $300,000 to evaluate how geothermal power can be paired with hydrogen production within an integrated system at the Steamboat Ski Resort.

After the studies and so forth, will all these projects come to fruition? Likely not. But new technology needs to be nurtured. Solar energy didn’t happen on its own. It took time and incentives. Solar became very big in Colorado last year, at times delivering the majority of electricity available to customers of Xcel Energy as has been documented by Boulder’s Ron Sinton.

Pagosa Springs has long heated a portion of its business district with geothermal.

Reading descriptions of these grants, I see lots of people and organizations thinking hard about how to make this work, how to mine “the heat beneath our feet,” as Gov. Jared Polis dubbed the technologies in his year-long initiative as chair of the Western Governors’ Association.

Some 12% of the grant money is going to single structures such as at Crested Butte or a house being built with geothermal in Boulder to replace what was lost in the Marshall Fire. Thermal energy networks such as is being planned at Carbondale will get 46% of grant money. The final 42% will go to efforts to produce electricity.

Those involved in assembling this program say they think Colorado is breaking ground nationally with its various incentives and initiatives. The work is being watched closely by other states but also the U.S. Department of Energy.

To be clear, the idea is not particularly new. I think I wrote my first story about geothermal in 2006. I had the “green beat” for a Vail-based real estate magazine. A guy with a ton of money had an outdoor lap pool at his house on a ridge down the valley toward Eagle, and he was heating it with geothermal.

We have also had conversations over the years about tapping the Earth’s heat at various places in Colorado, especially areas around Chaffee County’s hot springs, Mt. Princeton and Cottonwood. Nothing has happened so far, but Mt. Princeton Geothermal is to get a $500,000 grant to support drilling a well that may provide a better understanding of the subsurface hydrothermal resource.

The Colorado Capitol has had ground-source geothermal since 2013, the first state capitol in the nation to be so cooled — and heated. Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction has very elaborate geothermal heating-and-cooling.

Two technologies fall under the heading of geothermal. Both use residual temperatures in the ground. One type taps the year-round temperature of about 55 degrees close to the surface of the ground to provide heat in winter and coolness in summer. It is sometimes called low-temperature geothermal. This is the heat — and cooling — that gets tapped at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction. It’s also the heat (and cooling) used by Norbert Klebel at his housing project in Arvada called GEOS. And Delta-Montrose Electric Association had a program for many years led by Paul Bony (who is now with the Yampa Valley Sustainability Council).

The deeper you go underground, though, the hotter temperatures get. Go deep enough and you’ll be amid rocks hot enough that the heat can be used to generate electricity. This is called enhanced geothermal. It can also be called hot geothermal.

I had long understood that Colorado didn’t have the best geology for enhanced geothermal. Better by far than Iowa, but not nearly as good as Nevada. That may still be the case, but evidence has started to emerge that enhanced geothermal might play a role in electrical production for Colorado.

Auditions for still key roles in this energy transition remain open. We have figured out cost-effective technologies and systems to shift from coal, in particular, but also natural gas. That path to 75% to even 90% emissions-free energy has been well defined by wind, solar, existing storage technologies.

That last 10% to 15%, though, remains problematic. Every tool remains on the table, ostensibly even nuclear. The potential role of geothermal in solving this puzzle has been elevated in the last several years.

One grant of $250,000 will allow a company to try to identify hot sedimentary aquifers suitable for electrical production in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, site of much of Colorado’s extraction of oil and gas.

Colorado’s geothermal story essentially started in 2019. Polis had taken office after putting renewable energy at the center of his campaign. Legislators promptly passed greenhouse gas reduction goals that in many places of the country would have been seen, at best, as hopefully naïve. Some Colorado legislators, even those who were open to climate change as a risk, dismissed the goals of 50% economy-wide reduction by 2030 and 90% by 2040 as unrealistic. (The latter has been upgraded to 100% net)

Despite the skepticism in some quarters, legislators and the Polis administration have delivered dozens of bills that collectively push and pull Colorado’s economy into this big pivot. (Just had to use it). Some – most notably the Environmental Defense Fund –think the Polis administration and Democratic legislators are disingenuous by not playing hardball with the oil and gas industry. That’s a longer story.

As regards geothermal, legislators in 2022 appropriated $12 million for geothermal grants and staffing at the Colorado Energy Office to administer the program. That was HB22-1381, (You’re correct: more than $4 million for grants in another round in the coming year).

In 2023, two more bills followed. HB23-1252 adopted a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from Colorado’s four gas-distribution utilities 22% by 2030.

That same law also created a regulatory pathway for gas utilities to develop thermal energy networks, such as geo-exchange, and forgo natural gas.

That same session, legislators adopted HB23-1272, which provides support for geothermal electricity through an investment tax credit for exploration, drilling, and development of new wells; investments in geothermal electricity production; and production tax credits.
Read Part Two…