Industry News
Southwest of Aspen, near the town of Paonia, Colorado, an abandoned coal mine is slowly belching methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and has contributed as much as 30% of the current warming of the planet. In the atmosphere, methane eventually oxidizes to form carbon dioxide, over the course of a decade or two. Both active and abandoned coal mines can be intense sources of methane emissions. Abandoned mines are rarely monitored, and methane emissions can go unaccounted for and are rarely mitigated, since mine owners are no longer responsible. The Bowie No. 1 Mine was abandoned and sealed in 2004, but has been steadily leaking methane ever since.
Switchback Restoration, founded by two former employees of Aspen One, and a faculty member from the Colorado School of Mines, is hoping to do something about the Bowie Mine and other mines in Colorado. The group purchased the Bowie Mine in 2023 and drilled new holes to pipe the methane into a combustion tube where it is burned. Switchback accounts for the amount of methane that gets released and destroyed from the mine, and credits for the emissions reduction are registered with the American Carbon Registry, for use in cap-and-trade programs. The Aspen Times reported the land cost about $400,000, and Switchback has invested another $1 million in drilling and equipment.
Burning methane, which is a fossil fuel, may seem like an unexpected way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, since the process itself releases carbon dioxide. But, the fact that methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide means that overall, eliminating methane emissions will slow warming from the greenhouse effect, even though more carbon dioxide will be emitted. If mines like the Bowie Mine sit there untouched, the methane released from them will have a decade or two of intense warming in the atmosphere before it is eventually broken down into carbon dioxide anyways.
In 2012, Aspen One launched an ambitious plan to use methane leaking from the Elk Creek Mine to generate electricity. The project required an investment of over $5 million, but Aspen One paid off 86% of its investment over ten years thanks to more than $100,000 in revenue generated each month from electricity generation. In 2022, methane levels dropped below the thresholds required to maintain electricity generation, and the project switched to burning the methane. Switchback Restoration has said it is not pursuing electric generation at the Bowie Mine, or at any future project sites, because of the much higher capital investment.
Switchback Restoration represents an important philosophy in the response to global climate change, that imperfect solutions should not prevent action. To be sure, generating electricity captures energy that is otherwise lost when methane is burned, but setting up simple combustion tubes is far easier than setting up an entire methane power plant. At the end of the day, there are more than a dozen other mines in the North Fork Valley emitting methane, and simpler projects that reduce methane emissions from these sites faster may be a better alternative to scraping together the capital required to develop electricity generation at each site. Switchback Restoration plans to expand its operations to other sites in the future.
