A massive and valuable energy resource is sleeping deep underneath the ground in many parts of Colorado: geothermal heat.
It often lives alongside oil and gas reserves, which gives Colorado, with its robust history of fossil fuel production, a running start on growing the industry. Tapping into geothermal produces affordable, reliable, carbon-free renewable energy, and yet geothermal development in Colorado remains in its early infancy.
”Colorado is set up really well for geothermal energy,” said Democratic Sen. Matt Ball of Denver. He’s the sponsor of Senate Bill 142, which seeks to unleash more geothermal development by reducing red tape, encouraging new projects and making geological data publicly available.
This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
Geothermal developers, engineers, municipalities, labor groups and utilities testified in support of the policy during the bill’s first hearing on Wednesday in the Senate Transportation and Energy Committee, where it passed on a 5-2 vote.
Backers of the bipartisan proposal say Colorado urgently needs to expand carbon-free energy sources as the clock ticks down to the state’s 100% renewable energy by 2040 goal.
“We think this is a really innovative and exciting place for Colorado to invest in to achieve all of our emissions goals in the next several years,” Ball said.
The proposal addresses multiple barriers now causing friction for the developing industry. It would clear away some of the red tape municipalities face when they try to build thermal energy networks. Those are relatively shallow systems of underground pipes that directly harvest stable underground temperatures via heat exchange to provide heating and cooling to multiple buildings.
Other provisions seek to encourage more geothermal electricity generation, a much more complex technology that involves drilling thousands of feet into the ground to tap into significantly hotter temperatures.
One section would use the state’s many abandoned fossil fuel sites to collect data on deep underground temperatures from more than 900 orphaned wells. Orphan wells are disused oil and gas wells with no identifiable owner that remain unplugged. They usually create a financial burden for the state, which has to assume responsibility for properly sealing and cleaning them up. Supporters of the bill say mining these wells for geothermal data would create a new trove of publicly available geothermal information.
“We can get some of that data out and then make that available to the industry to make more educated decisions on where they can bring future geothermal projects,” Ball said.
While some utilities, including Xcel Energy, support the bill, the electricity generation industry in Colorado has been slow to invest in geothermal, so far shying away from a technology with significant upfront costs that’s outside of their typical area of expertise. A third section of the bill would address that corporate hesitance head-on by requiring utilities to develop geothermal project proposals.
“We need investment and support in the terms of policy so that we can get utilities to take a risk,” said geothermal developer Jonathan Power of Game Creek Holdings.
The legislation isn’t facing outright opposition, but the fossil fuel industry and some environmental groups are seeking to amend it.
“This type of legislation is really key to what we believe is the future of electric generation in Colorado,” said Jeremy Ross, with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 111. “While we’ve spent a lot of the last several years focused on wind and solar, we have failed to address the baseload need of the future of Colorado, and we believe that geothermal … (is) going to play a big role in this.”
This story was produced by the Capitol News Alliance, a collaboration between KUNC News, Colorado Public Radio, Rocky Mountain PBS, and The Colorado Sun, with support from news outlets throughout the state. Startup funding for the Alliance was provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.