To reduce environmental impact during their research phase, Delta Brick and CORE used pack animals to carry methane measuring equipment into the hills of Coal Basin. Photo courtesy of Impact Media Lab

The coal mining chapter of Redstone’s history has been closed for the past few decades, and although that sounds like good news for the fight against climate change, the abandoned Coal Basin mines are far from benign. Even though new rock isn’t being broken, these mines are still releasing copious quantities of methane into the atmosphere. Aspen-based nonprofit Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE) has been hard at work with Delta Brick & Climate Company investigating just how much methane is being released, and now the results are in.
In a community outreach series, Chris Caskey of Delta Brick put their conclusions succinctly: “Everything we’re seeing up in Coal Basin is pointing us toward action.”
Methane gas, which is contained within underground coal seams, has over 80 times the global warming power of carbon dioxide for its first 20 years in the atmosphere. As coal seams are fractured for extraction, the flammable gas is released into the atmosphere — and the Coal Basin mines were known to be especially gassy. On April 15, 1981, it was a buildup of that same methane gas that caused an explosion in the Coal Basin’s Dutch Creek Number One mine that took the lives of 15 miners. The same gas can hang around mines long after they’ve been decommissioned, posing both a significant risk to human life and to the atmosphere.
While methane emissions do initially decline as mines are abandoned, the gas slowly stabilizes into a steady release. In 2021, the EPA estimated that abandoned coal mines produced an estimated 330,000 metric tons of methane — approximately 12.5% of coal mining’s total methane emissions.
Luckily, if methane is adequately captured, it can burn very efficiently. Burning one molecule of methane releases heat, water and one molecule of CO2. When one considers that methane has 84 times the warming power of CO2, that’s a dramatic reduction, even if the reaction still releases carbon into the atmosphere. If release of methane gas from the mines can’t be halted altogether, then the next best strategy is destruction.
That’s why CORE has been collaborating with Montrose-based sustainable building material producer Delta Brick & Climate Company to measure emissions at Coal Basin and plan new mitigation strategies to reduce the amount of methane in our atmosphere.
In 2021, CORE was awarded a $1.2 million grant from the Department of Energy to fund research at Coal Basin. In the summer and early fall of 2023, CORE and Delta Brick’s project team conducted thorough research in the hills of the White River National Forest, utilizing drones, pack animals and a wide array of sensors to capture readings of methane levels in the area. While the research is being analyzed, the team has moved into a community outreach phase.
On March 26, Basalt Regional Library hosted a community outreach event, followed by a similar event at Redstone Church on April 4. During these events, project representatives presented their research and potential strategies, aiming to inform and gather feedback from local stakeholders.
The team estimates that there are 1,950 metric tons of methane being released from Coal Basin every year. In terms of warming power, that’s equivalent to about one third of all the greenhouse gasses released in Pitkin County combined.
One of the most easily executable strategies for mitigating between 185 and 400 tons of that yearly release would be with what’s called a regenerative thermal oxidizer (RTO). Often used in manufacturing processes, RTOs move pollutants (in this case methane) through a combustion chamber, destroying them and releasing the resulting, cleaner exhaust into the atmosphere. An RTO could theoretically be used at the Dutch Creek Number One and Two mines. At the L.S. Wood mine, the team would use an experimental technology known as bioremediation.
“In the soils of Coal Basin, there have evolved bacteria that eat methane,” said Caskey. Like combustion, these bacteria digest methane into CO2. The theory is, the more bacteria-rich soil the gas must travel through, the less gas makes it into the atmosphere.
Now, CORE is using both its research and feedback from these outreach programs to draft a proposal mitigation strategy to the U.S. Forest Service, which will conduct a review and hopefully push the process forward.