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July
4, 2023
By Tracy
Ross
An entrepreneur is one big step closer
to
capturing methane leaking from Colorado coal mines
White River National Forest district ranger calls Coal
Basin mine project “precedent setting”
Delta Brick and Climate Company founder Christopher Caskey inspects a
methane capture power generation facility at the former site of the
Elk Creek coal mine outside Somerset in January 2021. (William Woody,
Special to The Colorado Sun)
An entrepreneur and environmental scientist has moved a step closer
toward being able to capture some of the estimated 1.3 million cubic
feet of methane gas leaking from coal mines in Pitkin County each
year, a key advance toward one day reducing carbon emissions from
mines and turning a harmful greenhouse gas into a fuel.
Chris Caskey received a “categorical exclusion” from the White
River National Forest on June 22 that will allow him to begin
inventorying and studying methane gas leaking from coal mine vents
across 5 square miles in Coal Basin near Redstone.
The decision authorizes Caskey’s Delta Brick & Climate Company
to use ground-based monitoring units and aircraft to gather data in
the White River National Forest that will relay the volume,
concentration and location of methane gas venting into the atmosphere
from mining adits and other surface features.
Jennifer Schuller, deputy district ranger for the national
forest, called the decision “precedent setting,” although it is just
the first step in a joint project between Caskey’s brick and climate
company, in Montrose, and the Aspen-based Community Office for
Resource Efficiency, a nonprofit dedicated to shepherding the Roaring
Fork Valley to a carbon-free, net-zero energy future.
In 2019, Caskey began harvesting sediment from
the silt-choked Paonia Reservoir, which feeds farms in the Gunnison
Valley, and repurposing it into bricks and the kind of colorful,
glazed interior home tiles you’d find in a high-end design magazine.
Through this process, he’s already freeing up water flow in Paonia
Reservoir and transforming its sticky bottom into something useful.
And he hopes to someday use captured methane to fire the kilns for his
bricks.
But his bigger focus now is on the mines in Pitkin County, where
methane, a greenhouse gas released from coal and surrounding rock
strata during mining activities.
If Caskey can map the leaks, he says he can destroy some of the
methane venting from the mines that have been closed for 30 years. All
this time later, that gas is still contributing to an estimated 14
deaths a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
“But that’s just the EPA’s best guess,” Caskey says. “We don’t know
how much gas is actually there. It could be more or less. My project
this summer will give us a better idea of where and how much methane
is leaking. But the current amount literally kills people both from
adverse heat impacts and then from smog and respiratory irritants,
which can cause premature deaths from asthma.”
Caskey wants people to think of the situation
as having “actual urgency. Like, what if more than one kid per month
was falling into an open mine shaft and dying?” he says. “We’d
probably want to do something about that. But because we don’t know
specifically which deaths the leaks are causing, and because they’re
happening more in pollution-burdened communities, we just don’t think
about it.”
Regardless of the death count, he says the problem needs to be dealt
with. Methane has at least 28 times more global warming potential than
carbon dioxide, and experts agree capturing mine methane would make
significant greenhouse gas reductions.
Methane emission estimates aggregated by the major oil and natural gas
segments in the United States are presented in the chart below.
(Provided by Environmental Protection Agency)
Options for destroying it include burning it and using it to generate
electricity. A few methane capture operations already exist in
Colorado, including the Larimer County Landfill Gas Project and the
Southern Ute Methane Capture project in La Plata County. But none
exist on public land — that’s part of what makes the Coal Basin
project so intriguing.
In addition to running his brick company, Caskey is managing director
of MethaneRX, formed in 2003 to work with mine operators, electric
utilities and coal communities on “economically viable projects that
destroy methane or utilize it for a clean and productive purpose,” the
company says.
Current MethaneRX projects include Elk Creek Mine in Gunnison, which
uses captured gas to power the operations of all four of Aspen Skiing
Company’s resorts, Cambria Mine 33, in Pennsylvania, which uses
oxidation to capture methane, and the Coal Basin project.
Dallas Blaney, CEO of the Aspen-based Community Office for Resource
Efficiency, says going to Coal Basin is a surreal experience. You hike
up a 40-foot-wide road cut through the otherwise pristine White River
National Forest. Birds sing. “There have to be bears,” he says. The
views of Capitol Peak are off the hook. “Then you’re hit with the
smell of the methane leaking through cracks or holes left by the coal
company for venting. It’s intense,” Blaney says. “The gas is potent.
You could ignite it.”
Coal Basin, in the White River National Forest, in the spring of 2023.
Five abandoned coal mines here emit an estimated 1.3 million cubic
feet of methane gas into the atmosphere each year, and entrepreneur
Christopher Caskey and the Aspen-based Community Office for Resource
Efficiency are trying to mitigate it. (Provided by Dallas Blaney,
CORE)
The sensory experience is “profound,” he adds.
And unsettling. “It is such a beautiful place but there’s a dichotomy
of having a former industrialized site for coal mining layered on top
with this amazing scenery. It creates a kind of tension.”
In 2017, Caskey approached CORE, telling them the EPA and Colorado
Energy Office expected big methane leaks to be present in Coal Basin.
CORE gave him a small grant — a few thousand dollars — to start a
stakeholder dialogue and get some initial measurements. They have
since re-upped the grant a couple of times and have put over $175,000
of CORE funds into his efforts so far.
CORE has also received $1.2 million in congressionally-designated
spending via the Department of Energy, $500,000 from Atlantic Aviation
(in unrestricted funds to CORE with some of it being spent in Coal
Basin), and $200,000 from Pitkin County to be spent by CORE on
environmental permitting activities.
En route to the Forest Service’s June decision, CORE and Caskey
“weathered bumps” that come with this type of innovation, Blaney says.
The challenges were nothing specific, “it’s just that no one has ever
done what we’re doing on public land before or at an abandoned mine
site,” he adds. “Those two wrinkles created challenges that were
difficult to anticipate, but I think we’ve settled into a good place
with the Forest Service, because all we’re proposing is a scientific
study. We’re not planning to impact or modify the landscape in any
way, shape or form.”
Blaney says he isn’t surprised the Forest Service gave Caskey the
categorical exclusion, and he thinks it bodes well that the agency “is
open to exploring this experimental approach.”
Entrepreneur Chris Caskey points out holes in
the ice on Paonia Reservoir. He wants to mine clay-like silt from the
impoundment and use it to to make bricks and tiles at a factory
powered by coal-bed methane. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado
Sun)
Methane may one day power the kilns Caskey
uses to make bricks from the mud in Paonia Reservoir, but the power
will come from methane captured at the Elk Creek Mine. “Coal Basin,”
he says, “is purely for the climate change impact.”
Greg Poschman, a Pitkin County commissioner, said, “What we learn will
inform efforts to mitigate fugitive coal mine methane from closed
mines everywhere. This pilot project has challenges which are unique
to closed mines. While they present tough problems nationally and
globally, they cannot be ignored any longer. We have the privilege of
doing R & D!”
“And then, this is the fun part,” Caskey adds. “Burning methane
generates water. You know, it’s not millions of acre-feet per year;
you’re not going to solve the Colorado River crisis. But you are going
to help small diversified farms. Or people using residential wells,
which are low priority in terms of water rights. So if the river
district ever made a call on that stem of the river, methane burning
could generate that little bit of bonus water that would let people
keep their wells.”
Delta Brick and Climate Company founder Christopher Caskey points to
various bricks heated at different temperatures at the company’s brick
factory in Montrose, Colo, Monday January 25, 2021. (William Woody,
Special to The Colorado Sun)
The categorical exclusion, classified under the
National Environmental Policy Act, now paves the way for Caskey to at
least test the mines in Coal Basin to see how much and where methane
is venting.
In a few weeks, he will partner with Boulder-based Scientific
Aviation, which will do fly-overs of the site to find the gassiest
vents. Then he’ll hike-in continuous monitoring systems, set up on
tripods and powered by solar panels, that will quantify the methane
output. After several months of data collection, he’ll write a
proposal for what he sees as the best ways to dispose of the gas. And
then he’ll take it back to the Coal Basin Methane Advisory Board for
more review — before petitioning the Forest Service for more
precedent-setting access.
Meanwhile, recreationists can still access the 221-acre Coal Basin
site, which the philanthropist grandsons of Walmart-founder Sam Walton
bought in 2015 and turned into a bike park threaded through with
singletrack.
Aspen leaves flutter in the breeze, just as they did before the advent
of mining. Singing creeks and moon-reflecting ponds complement
bluebird days and constellation-filled nights. The combination of
past-present, toxic-pristine is kind of like Chernobyl after the
explosion. Like Blaney says, it vibrates with tension. The gas pouring
into the atmosphere there isn’t good for anyone. But the Forest
Service’s recent OK of a major step in Caskey’s project could bring
Coal Basin, and the atmosphere, closer to pure again.
Correction: On Tuesday, July 4, at 7:45 a.m., this story was updated
to clarify a bike park in Coal Basin is not on Pitkin County Open
Space land.
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