The Rio Grande Rift — a series of geological cracks some 21,000 feet below the surface stretching from Leadville to Chihuahua, Mexico — is releasing heat from the Earth’s core as the Colorado Plateau pulls away from the High Plains.
It is hot down there, in spots 2.5 miles deep more than 570 degrees Fahrenheit, but the rift has also ignited a different kind of heat and strife up on the surface in Chaffee County over a plan to tap into that geothermal energy to make electricity.
The rift began forming about 29 million years ago. The battle over a geothermal power plant south of Buena Vista hasn’t been going on that long, but it has been a saga, so far lasting nearly two decades.
In the latest episode, Mt. Princeton Geothermal LLC — the two-man company that has been trying to develop the project near Mount Princeton — lost its exploration lease on a parcel of state land called Maxwell Park.
In turn, Mt. Princeton Geothermal has sued the Colorado State Land Board and the company’s two potential partners who pulled out of the project, leading to the land board voting not to renew the lease.
The complaint, filed in Denver District Court, contends the partners — Western Geothermal and Reykjavik Geothermal — bailed at the last moment in a move to take over the project and that the land board’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious.”
“It definitely was a power play in which they would get complete control of the project,” said John “Hank” Held, one of the principals in Mt. Princeton Geothermal.
The lawsuit seeks to overturn the state land board’s decision, restore the lease and recoup damages.
“It was a five-year extension with performance obligations on our part and increased annual rental,” Held said. “We had all that negotiated. So, I just want to go back to that.”
Going back may be difficult as the times have changed since 2007 when Mt. Princeton Geothermal was the brainchild of then 71-year-old Fred Henderson.
The Rio Grande Rift creates heat and the most direct way of harnessing that energy is to tap into subterranean water it has boiled. The Chalk Creek Valley at the base of Mount Princeton looked ideal to Henderson.
The valley, in Nathrop, was peppered with hot springs, some used by locals to heat greenhouses, and then there was the Mount Princeton Hot Springs Resort with dozens of natural hot spring pools.
Held joined Henderson and they embarked on a search to find super-hot water. It is one thing to soak in a toasty mineral water pool and another to find the subterranean water under pressure or steam at the 300 degrees to 700 degrees Fahrenheit needed to turn a turbine.
From the get-go many in the community opposed the project. When the federal Bureau of Land Management was set to issue a geothermal lease in the valley in 2010 it received 240 protest letters and BLM officials faced 170 angry residents in a five-hour meeting.
The bureau eventually did let a lease. Young Life, a Christian youth organization that operates a summer camp in the area, was the successful bidder with the goal of protecting the land from development.
In 2013, in response to the community concerns the Chaffee County Commission first imposed a moratorium and then adopted guidelines for geothermal development in the county.
Over the years opposition cycled from one group to another to the current Save Our Arkansas Valley, of SOAV, which has demonstrated on the roads, gathered a petition with 1,300 signatures in opposition to the project and testified at the land board.
In the 2023, Buena Vista July 4th parade, along with a bowtie sporting mammoth skeleton, made of rebar and stucco, and Smokey the Bear, a group in hazmat suits pulled a float of Mount Princeton with a model of a smoking power plant in front of it. Posters on the float proclaimed “Buena Vista or Ugly Vista” and “Triggers Earthquakes.”
“There’s been a lot of emotion, a lot of passion,” said Blane Clark, a retired accountant and SOAV organizer, who lives about three-quarters of a mile from the Mt. Princeton Geothermal site in the Lost Creek Ranch subdivision, a hotbed of resistance.
“Our first year, you know, was like kindergarteners learning not to eat wheat paste … but our passion turned to more scientific, more commonsense arguments,” he said.
This summer, demonstrators lined the entrance to Lost Creek Ranch waving signs telling people driving by that “Deep water drilling is fracking,” and asking people to stop and sign a petition.
Through it all, Held and Henderson soldiered on.
“We need some young blood. And new money”
Mt. Princeton Geothermal got its first five-year exploration lease from the state land board for 3,692 acres in Maxwell Park in 2013. It got a second lease in 2020 and was seeking to renew it for another five years.
Over the last 12 years, however, there have been some big changes. Colorado embarked on a raft of initiatives to promote geothermal, including a new geothermal well program under the state Energy and Carbon Management Commission, or ECMC, and an investment tax credit for geothermal exploration.
The legislature also created a Geothermal Energy Grant program administered by the Colorado Energy Office, which has made $9.4 million in awards for a wide range of projects. About $13.8 million in tax credits have also been issued.
Gov. Jared Polis is a big booster, having launched the “Heat Beneath Our Feet” initiative in 2023 when he was chairman of the Western Governors’ Association. “Geothermal is the future,” he said in announcing the last round of $7.3 million in awards Oct. 16.
“We think that there’s a lot of potential for geothermal to play an important role, both in the heating and cooling space and the electricity space,” said Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office.
At first, it looked as if there was wind behind Mt. Princeton Geothermal’s sails. Two new potential partners, including Reykjavik Geothermal which has developed projects in Iceland, the Canary Islands and Africa, signed on in 2024.
Mt. Princeton Geothermal received a $500,000 award from the Colorado Energy Office and applied for a $5 million state tax credit as well, Held said.
And then things came undone. The lease renewal was up for consideration at the land board’s June meeting. The day before Western Geothermal and Reykjavik Geothermal informed the board they were pulling out.
The board staff recommendation went from approving the lease renewal to rejecting it. Held said he found out about the move by Western Geothermal and Reykjavik Geothermal from the land board staff — the companies never informed him.
“That withdrawal, moreover, occurred just days before the lease was set to expire, leaving MPG without time to secure new partners ahead of the termination date,” the Mt. Princeton Geothermal lawsuit said.
The company filed for reconsideration of the land board’s decision and made an impassioned 48-minute presentation in August. “The question should be how do we help you and not throw you out with the bathwater?” asked Michael Albretch, who is a new partner and the project’s manager.
With Held now 78 and Henderson 89, Held said “we need to get some young blood. And some new money.” He said the company was on the verge of lining up “some very significant and serious partners.”
Princeton Geothermal submitted a letter of support from Reno, Nevada-based Ormat Technologies, which has developed geothermal plants around the world, saying they might be interested in participating in development in some form.
“The first critical component of a project is to secure the clear and valid legal right to explore and evaluate the potential geothermal resource,” the Ormat letter said.
The company presented letters expressing interest in the project from geothermal startup Polpis Systems and Boulder-based Berrendo Energy, a renewable energy developer.
Still, the exploration phase — two test wells and confirmation — will cost about $7.8 million and no one has come forward with that financing.
“If it is so attractive to all these other companies, why aren’t they throwing money at you?” one of the land board commissioners asked at the August meeting.
“I have other individual investors that are ready to go,” Held said in an interview. “All they need is assurance they have five years in order to be able to implement the program.”
The land board commissioners, however, were not convinced and voted again to not renew the lease. Loss of the lease also resulted in the Colorado Energy Office rescinding its $500,000 grant.
At the same meeting the land board also rejected a bid for the lease from the Princeton Hot Springs Resort, which in shades of Young Life 15 years earlier, was looking to take the parcel out of play.
“There are huge potential impacts not only on the temperature of our water but the production of our wells,” Thomas Warren, general manager of Mount Princeton Hot Springs Resort, told the August board meeting.
The land board was seeking a reset.
“I believe this vote reflects the state land board’s awareness of and intent to look more fully and expansively at the opportunities for this type of development,” Deborah Froeb, the board’s president, said after the vote.
Water hot enough to turn a turbine is near the surface
In September, the land board issued a statewide solicitation, or request for information, for geothermal projects on all state land.
“This RFI is about fairness, transparency and casting the net as wide as possible,” Nicole Rosmarino, the land board’s director, said in announcing the solicitation.
Held doesn’t see anything fair about it. “We’ve invested $2 million in this project … money we aren’t going to get back” he said. And so, the hopes of Held and Henderson rest on the lawsuit.
Held said that they had 35 days to serve Western Geothermal and Reykjavik Geothermal and had not yet done that. The two companies did not respond to requests for comment from The Sun.
To date, the only geothermal test wells in the state are two drilled by Occidental Petroleum as part of its “Geothermal Limitless Approach to Drilling Efficiencies” or GLADE project, backed with a $9 million federal award.
The two wells in the Denver-Julesburg Basin in northeastern Colorado were drilled to a depth of 20,000 feet.
“For a power plant (the depth of a well) is going to vary maybe 12,000 to 25,000 feet. … That is probably the target,” said Mike Rigby, who oversees the ECM’s geothermal program. The deeper the well the more of a drilling challenge and the more expensive the geothermal project.
There are a number of hot spots around the state, especially in oil producing basins. “The DJ Basin, the Raton and the Piceance are all very hot,” Rigby said, and a number of other deep geothermal projects are in the works.
What the Chalk Creek Valley has, however, is the hottest hot spring in the state, the Hortense Hot Spring, with surface water of 181 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Colorado Geological Survey.
The water temperatures are perhaps double that just 4,500 feet to 6,000 feet down, based on analysis done for Mt. Princeton Geothermal by the Dewhurst Group, an energy engineering firm.
However, the promise of turbine-spinning hot water so close to the surface isn’t enough.
“Nobody wants to even talk, in serious terms, until we have pinned down an exploration lease with sufficient tenure long enough to complete the exploration program,” Held said.
Will that be coming?
“We have to spend some serious time figuring out how we move forward, because this is not the end of this,” the land board’s Froeb said in August, saying that the decision not to renew the Maxwell Park lease at this time wasn’t a rebuke of Mt. Princeton Geothermal.
“This decision reflects more of an organizational intent to make sure we are acting in our fiduciary capacity to understand the range of options that we may have in front of us for assets we probably didn’t realize we had had a few months ago,” Froeb said