Though the coal mines in Redstone have sat unused for several decades, their impact on carbon emissions is far from over. Methane continues to steadily leak from the mines, and for the past four years, Aspen-based nonprofit Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE) and Delta Brick & Climate Company have been preparing the solution. 

The research is complete, the technology has been tested and since the partnership’s last round of community outreach, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has been reviewing an application to finally set up methane capture devices in Coal Basin and cut down on a major source of emissions in Pitkin County.

Methane is ordinarily trapped within the seams of rock that get broken in the process of coal extraction. While plenty of the gas is released during the actual mining process, more continues to leak out even after mining operations cease. 

Back in 2021, CORE was awarded a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to research methane release at Coal Basin. CORE partnered with Montrose-based climate action and sustainable building material company Delta Brick to aid in that research and explore possible solutions for how to best address the issue. The project is currently funded by a combination of state, federal and county sources, as well as a donation from Atlantic Aviation, the company that operates the Aspen/Pitkin County Airport.

After extensive study in the fall of 2023, the partnership released their findings at a pair of community outreach meetings in the spring of 2024. According to the findings, they estimate that 1,950 metric tons are being released from the Coal Basin mines per year — equivalent to the emissions from 36,456 gas-powered cars and 30% of all other greenhouse gas emissions released in Pitkin County.

Since the outreach in 2024, the partnership prepared and applied to the USFS for permission to place methane capture devices around Coal Basin’s most emissive sites. During the review process, the partnership will continue supplying the USFS with research and information as requested. Though the application was submitted in September of last year, there is no current estimate for when the review process will be completed.

In the meantime, the partnership has continued with community outreach and held another informational meeting in Carbondale on Thursday, June 12, to refresh the public on what’s been going on at Coal Basin and what’s being done to fix it. At the same time, Delta Brick has been continuing work on methane capture elsewhere in Colorado and testing out some of the same technologies which, if the application is approved, will be hauled up to Coal Basin.

One of the best ways to get rid of methane is the simplest — combustion. However, a burner is only effective with high concentrations of methane, and the team has found that the mix of gases being released from the Coal Basin mines require an alternate, more complicated device called a regenerative thermal oxidizer.

An RTO, however, is a large machine roughly the size of a shipping container and will require the reopening of a service road for installation, plus maintenance and an electrical line up to the Dutch Creek #1 mine, which means substantial noise and construction in the area if the application is approved — a primary concern among some local residents.

However, there are many more sites at Coal Basin which can only be reached by horseback, and so the partnership has been exploring a third technology known as bioremediation, which uses methane-digesting bacteria to capture and process the gas.

Chris Caskey, founder of Delta Brick, has been testing out this technology at the decommissioned Bowie mine in Delta County. First, the team collects samples of local soil bacteria from leak sites and sends them to CH4 Microbial Solutions, which identifies and cultures the best, most methane-digesting bacteria in that sample, and sends it back to the site. Methane gas is blown through 55-gallon drums containing the bacteria which digests the gas and produces carbon dioxide. This tech can be transported via horseback to the harder-to-reach leak sites at Coal Basin.

Until then, it’s back-and-forth between the USFS and the project team. According to Caskey, nationwide budget cuts and understaffing in the USFS mean that it may be a long while until the process is complete and construction begins.