Local alternative energy project provides power to Aspen Ski Co.

Generating as much as 3 megawatts

A project several years in development is finally changing the face of energy production in the North Fork Valley. Denver-based Vessels Coal Gas (VCG) has signed a contract with Holy Cross Energy and Aspen Ski Company to produce power from methane, or natural gas, captured as it seeps from the Elk Creek coal mine, on the other side of Kebler Pass.

The highly explosive methane gas is vented away from coal mines and until recently went unused into the atmosphere, making the Elk Creek Mine responsible for more than 1 percent of the entire state’s carbon footprint. Methane is said to have 22 to 23 times the heat-trapping capacity of carbon dioxide.
Meanwhile, gas wells around the mine were sending something similar off to market.
In February, Vessels Coal Gas subsidiary North Fork Energy applied for, and got, a Gunnison County permit to drill a shallow well where they could collect some of the methane seeping to the surface above the mine.
“It’s more of a surface casing well than anything else,” VCG chief financial officer Paul Jordan explained. “We’ll use the waste gas to generate electricity and then put that into the market.”
The generators North Fork Energy is using to turn the methane into power aren’t exactly high tech and the company isn’t introducing any new technologies to the world, Jordan said. Much of what is being done has been successful in Pennsylvania, where both power and methane from similar operations are being sent to market.
“Mines and wells are like snowflakes. The quality and concentration differs in each area and concentration differs over time. So we do improve [equipment] to work on lower and lower concentrations of methane. But it isn’t as if we’ve invented a new technology,” Jordan said.
But the technology hasn’t been used on this scale before in Colorado. Then the Aspen Ski Company put in with North Fork Energy, pledging to invest $6 million to bring the plan to fruition and Holy Cross Energy, which provides power to about 55,000 people on the Western Slope, agreed to take the North Fork Energy’s electricity to market.
Aspen Ski Co. president and CEO Mike Kaplan reportedly told a gathering at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES), “It’s going to offset 100 percent of our energy consumption.”


At the same time, the project could pull as much as 80,000 tons of carbon-equivalent emissions from the atmosphere and pump 3 megawatts of electricity into the grid at full generation, enough to power more than 1,500 homes.
“It’s such a niche,” Jordan says of the budding business at North Fork Energy. “It’s not gas development or coal mining per se and it’s not power generation. It crosses all those lines and that’s one reason it’s not been done on a wider scale. Our people have all that experience.”