Fracking, drilling, and the natural gas bonanza

Posted on June 10, 2013 by allen.best

Why  the rush to drill here, drill now

when so much is yet to be proven?

by Allen Best

Josh Fox, the Pennsylvania filmmaker, was in Colorado recently to premier his second production, called “Gasland II.” If it’s anything like his first film, “Gasland,” where one lingering image was of Fox in a gasmask playing a banjo, this new film is a gonzo-giggle in its storyline. That first film was also casual in its fact-checking but ultimately truthful in its challenge to the prevailing narrative about natural gas.

A pump jack and a drilling rig along the Front Range of Colorado, north of Denver.

A pump jack and a drilling rig along the Front Range of Colorado, north of Denver.

Our national narrative goes something like this: We’re so smart! Through hydrofracturing and other techniques, we have now unlocked a vast store of natural gas and petroleum from microscopically tight shale and sandstone formations. We can now shelve dirty coal, have a newly invigorated plastics industry, and maybe even arrive in the holy land of energy independence that every president since Richard Nixon has talked about.

It’s a compelling storyline, but from the start there have been the impolite questions from the back rows about whether this is just too good to be true. The most common doubt is about the supposedly benign impact to public health.

Bernard D. Goldstein, a professor emeritus and dean of the University of Pittsburg Graduate School of Public Health, took the long view in his recent appearance at the Center of the American West FrackingSense series. A physician, Goldstein has worked in the realm of environmental health for 47 years.

“Are there public health risks effects?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t know.”

Goldstein was assistant director of the Environmental Protection Agency for two years during the Reagan administration. His responsibility, he said, was to “get the science right.”

The key challenge now is to get the science right on potential impacts of drilling.

The common response of the industry has been that hydrofracturing techniques have been used since 1947, so if there was anything bad, surely it would have turned up by now.

Not your grandparents’ fracking

But the fracking of our grandparents involved 50,000 gallons of water, sand and chemicals. Fracks now can push five million gallons down a hole. Pressures are much different. It is, he says, like the difference between a firecracker and a hand grenade.

Bernard Goldstein

Bernard Goldstein

The additives used in fracturing have also been controversial. Field service contractors have become more open about the chemicals used. On its website, Halliburton says that 96.3 percent of the fracking fluid used in wells in northeastern Colorado is water, and other 3.39 percent sand and similar proppants, to prop open the rock to allow the gas to flow. That leaves just 0.29 percent for fluids designed to expedite the flow of gas and oil from the rock.

Companies are willing to disclose the chemicals. Additives include chemicals such as ammonium chloride, an inorganic salt used in hand wash and shampoo. Some, such as trimethylbenzene, are hazardous. But companies refuse to divulge their secret, sauces. It is, they insist, proprietary.

Goldstein will have none of that argument. The concentrations of what’s in that 1 percent matter entirely, he says. What if benzene is everything of the 1 percent? The legal limit is 5 parts per million. This would be hundreds of thousands of times over the limit.

What also matters is the native context for the fracking. Temperatures deep underground where fracking occurs can hit 400 degrees. Chemicals can react differently when heated, he said at his presentation in Boulder. Too, these formations have their own deposits.

What goes down the hole in a frack may not be the same thing that emerges. The mixing of chemicals introduced and native could matter greatly.

“Mixture is always an issue in environmental health,” he said.

Given the many uncertainties about the safety of the new technologies, and the scale of deployment, we should wait, said Goldstein. Or, as he put it: stall. He argues that we need improved monitoring of water and air both before and after drilling. Only with these measurements can we understand change.

“Why is that we’re in such a rush to do this so quickly?” Oil and gas companies continue to improve their techniques, improving safety. A slower, more methodical rollout would allow drillers to continue to improve their operations and allow public governance to minimize impacts to water and air.

“Industry is hurting itself, we as a society are hurting ourselves, by not doing the sort of things that we know are the right thing to do in these sorts of situations,” he concluded.

Consequential converation

Earlier in the evening, Patty Limerick, the historian who heads the Center of the American West, had explained the intent of the FrackingSense series was to provide a “more robust and consequential conversation.”

Of the dozen or so presentations in the series, I attended three, and all lived up to Limerick’s goal of rich, analytical conversations blanched of sloganeering. The take-homes from all three tended to confirm my biases. Many questions remain to be adequately answered, and state governments, including that of Colorado, have been hesitant to be fully in charge. I bristle a bit at the not-in-my-backyard elitism that I find on the edges of this discussion. The shrill voices that were probably at the Josh Fox premiere that same night in Boulder also annoy me. But clip off these edges and there are still solid reasons to wonder about the mess we might be creating.

We’re still paying the cost of messes from our past. If you drive up I-70 from Denver, they’re left and right. Just one of them, the Eagle Mine superfund site in Minturn, cost upwards of $90 million to clean up and the cleanup is far from over. A plant to treat water coming from the mine is expected to operate into the distant future.

Are drillers evil people? Certainly not, but with the size and scale of drilling that is now getting underway, we’d better get this right. We need rigorous science, robust regulation, and a strong culture of safety in the operations. There’s just enough evidence to suggest worrisome gaps in all three.

Posted in Energy, Environmental, Natural gas, oil drilling | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Aiming for zero-waste at festivals

Posted on May 24, 2013 by allen.best

Bluegrass & green strategies at Telluride’s music and film festivals

(This was originally published in the Jan. 19 issue of Mountain Town News. Please inquire about subscriptions).

by Allen Best

Now in its 44th year, Telluride Bluegrass attracts 10,000 to 11,000 people. Inevitably, they leave mountains of trash. But thanks to an aggressive recycling program in Telluride, 50 to 60 percent of that trash is diverted from landfills.

Credit goes to the festival organizers, who have made it a goal, and execution by a local non-profit called EcoAction Partners.

EcoAction has been applying the same effort to the other festivals that inhabit Telluride’s summer schedule from Memorial Day into September.

The bundle of energy behind much of this is Kris Holstrom, a long-time resident of Telluride who began working 13 years ago with festival organizers.

EcoAction estimates that 80 percent of waste from the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival was diverted from the landfill by recycling and composting.Photo/Allen Best

EcoAction estimates that 80 percent of waste from the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival was diverted from the landfill by recycling and composting.
Photo/Allen Best

“I had already been doing composting behind the scenes at the Bluegrass Festival for a couple of years before our organization started,” says Holstrom, who is sustainability coordinator for EcoAction Partners, a group founded in 2007 and funded by four municipalities, two counties, and one foundation in the San Juan Mountains.

A major step was when festival organizers decided to use compostable materials and also began requiring the same of vendors.

Composting is not the easiest thing to do for a community. It helps when you have mass demand, such as at festivals. Holstrom and her team say communities just beginning to tackle waste-stream diversion from festivals should keep several things in mind:

Volunteers are essential to staff the waste stations, because people are unfamiliar with what can be composted. Even when told, they tend not to believe. “And at some point, they don’t care,” she says.

Education is a vital part of what volunteers do. They can help festival-goers understand why agriculture-based products are better than petrochemical products. They can also explain why this matters, both to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, landfill space and use of raw materials altogether.

“Most people, 99 percent, are very happy we are there, and they want to do the right thing, even though they’re in the festival setting,” says Holstrom. Her group marshals 40 volunteers for Bluegrass.

You need infrastructure to compost and recycle. For Telluride and Mountain Village, composting and recycling are done a few miles down-valley, at Illium. A $145,000 grant from the state government allowed EcoAction to purchase a bundler for recycling products.

Telluride is also among the few Colorado mountain towns with its own commercial blender, for composting of corn-based forks and knives, for example.

“You need a very hot and well-tended pile, and generally speaking, for those products, you need to shred them or top them somehow,” says Holstrom. “Think of what a fork feels like. It takes a lot of heat to do that (cause it to decompose into organic material).”

Consider how to communicate your message. In their messaging, Holstrom and Walter Wright, the zero-waste coordinator at EcoAction, stress that waste reduction involves more than just reduce, reuse/repurpose and recycle. They also stress two more R’s: rethink and refuse. If much detested, Wal-Mart has used its buying power to get suppliers to rethink their packaging. The company had said it just won’t accept products that are excessively packaged.

You need a baseline of hard numbers by which to measure your progress or see where you’re lagging.

You also need volumes and weights of waste from the waste haulers. Telluride and Mountain Village require the two companies that service the towns to provide these data.

Telluride’s greatest success comes on Memorial Day weekend, at the Mountainfilm Festival. Three years ago, organizers decided to fully invest in waste reduction by using only compostable or recyclable items for food service. Festival-goers were advised in advance they needed to take their own coffee cups to the morning sessions.

Last May, 80 percent of waste generated at the four-day festival was diverted from the landfill.
Mouintainfilm banner

“It’s not that hard. People get it, especially with our crowd,” says Peter Kenworthy, executive director of Mountainfilm. “Our audience is already predisposed to that message. It’s a little bit of messaging. It’s a little bit of giving people a head’s up. The first year, we had to have things on hand.”

Mountainfilm’s rapid success can be partly attributed to its relatively small size, 3,500 people, and to the environmental theme of the sessions. Too, says Holstrom, eliminating single-use products is “very easy to do when you’re in control of everything.”

So far, composting and recycling are entirely voluntary at festivals. EcoAction, however, plans to appeal to the local town councils to make it a requirement of all festivals.

Wright says composting at festivals should be seen as an element in climate-action plans, because compostables, in theory, reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite these successes, recycling altogether remains a difficult proposition in even urban communities, and the isolation of Telluride makes some products even more difficult.

Glass, for example, is hauled to metropolitan Denver, where it can be ground up and made into containers for MolsonCoors products. But the cost of transportation is greater than the cost received for the bottles. To solve that problem, Holstrom and her team wonder if a grass-crusher would be in order. After all, glass ground up is nothing more than sand —which is imported into the Telluride community.

But even Telluride, which is probably a leader among Rocky Mountain states, has a ways to go. At the last inventory, for 2010, the community had a waste reduction of little more than 30 percent. Wright expects that diversion rate to be substantially higher when 2012 numbers are tallied early next year.

That said, Telluride probably lags most Canadian communities, and Canada lags Europe.

Posted in Environmental, Mountain towns, Sustainability, Telluride, Tourism | Leave a comment

God and nation as we head off to war

Posted on May 17, 2013 by allen.best

How murders in Sarajevo caused

my grandfather to sail for France

WWI,  Sand Creek Massacre & the messiness of history

by Allen  Best

World War I has always confused me. Assassination of the Archduke of Austria and his wife in Sarajevo triggered it, but the principles and interests at stake mystify me. Adding to the perplexity are stories about conviviality among the front-line soldiers. The men in the mud and trenches traded jokes and insults, customarily halting the shooting for breakfast. Warring soldiers in 1914 even celebrated Christmas together in scattered but widespread ceasefires along the Western front, emerging from their earthen slits to exchange gifts.

Yet, the war was altogether ghastly, elevating death to a new art form. The machine gun was first used broadly as a tool for mass murder. Mustard gas was deployed often. In his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” infantryman Wilfred Owen told about the consequences:

“As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;”

Owen chose the title ironically. A Latin phrase, it was used often at the start of the war and interpreted to mean: “It is sweet and right,” or that the war was honorable. Owen himself, after returning to England to be treated for shell shock, chose to return to the war. A week before the Armistice he was cut down by machine gun fire.

CENTRAL TO MY  puzzlement has been the part of my own grandfather, from whose hard work during his lifetime I still benefit and who set a standard for discipline and moral rectitude from which I have fallen far short.

My grandfather’s ancestors had fled Europe to avoid being drafted to fight on behalf of Prussia in the War of 1848. Born in a sod house on the Colorado prairie in 1890, he was ready to take up arms against the country of his forbearers. It was all about religion.

“It seemed to me that if Christianity was to survive, the German military had to be stopped,” he explained in his memoirs. With a Godless Germany and a Godless Russia, Christianity would have a set back maybe for centuries.”

And so, newly married to a woman, my grandmother, whose parents spoke only German, he left the farmlands of the South Platte River Valley of Colorado in 1918 for the killing fields of France, to do his part.

He was 28 then, and maybe it wasn’t all God and nation. Perhaps, he just itched to see some of the world. He had demonstrated a sense of adventure four years before, driving a motorcycle across roads as much rumor as reality to the World’s Fair in San Francisco. A half-century after WWI, he may have sanitized his motives. Maybe he didn’t fully understand them.

The New York Times, in a piece entitled “On the Brink,” published on May 12, 2013, reviewed two books. Those books, “The Sleepwalkers” and “July 1914,” reveal many motives and causes, none of them particularly noble. Or, as Harold Evans, the reviewer (a former Brit and partner of notable magazine editor Tina Brown) writes: “Not having a villain to boo is emotionally less satisfying, but Clark (one of the book authors) makes a cogent case for the war as a tragedy, not a crime: in his telling, there is a smoking pistol in the hands of every major character.”

That author, Clark, also offers what Evans describes as a “fascinating” new point: “Not simply were all the political players in the drama male, but they were men caught in a ‘crisis of masculinity.’”

I particularly like the way that Evans ends his review: “The participants were conditioned to keep walking along a precipitous escarpment, sure of their own moral compass, but unknowingly impelled by a complex interaction of deep-rooted cultures, patriotism and paranoia, sediments of history and folk memory, ambition and intrigue.”

I can’t help but wonder about how the oars of “patriotism and paranoia” have steered my own choices and attitude in life, and the “sediments of history and folk memory” that even now may anchor my thinking without my awareness.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, Patty Limerick’s Center of the American West gave the Wallace Stegner Award to Elliott West, a historian of the Great Plains. West, in his many books, has returned frequently to the contradictions of our frontier forbearers.

Speaking in Boulder, West pointed to the quintessential example of E.B. Sopris. A member of the Colorado militia, Sopris had participated in the massacre of Cheyenne and Arapahoe people at Sand Creek in 1864. In an interview some 61 years later, Sopris profanely bragged about killing Jack Smith, a half-breed. But in the same interview, Sopris proudly acknowledged his wife – a half-breed, whose parentages connected her to both Red Cloud, the Sioux chief, and the fur-trading St. Vrain fur-trading family. And in marrying her, he adopted her son, sending him to the University of Denver and then Columbia Law School.

“Life is messy,” said West.

Motives and actions in World War I were messy, too, and are hard to untangle even at the distance of a century. The only clear lesson I draw is that battle cries in the name of nation and God come easy, but the work of peace is difficult indeed.

 For a fuller description of the Sopris episode, see Elliott West’s “The Way West: Essays on the Central Plains.”

Posted in Colorado, Great Plains, Mountain towns | Tagged | 2 Comments

The odd couple of greenhouse gas reduction in Colorado

Posted on May 15, 2013 by allen.best
Patience was required of Tom Vessels to get his methane-capture project near Paonia into reality. It went on line last November.

Patience was required of Tom Vessels to get his methane-capture project near Paonia into reality. It went on line last November.

The matchmaker who paired Bill Koch’s mine and Aspen Skiing in pursuit of  profit 

This article originally was published in the October 2012  issue of Colorado Biz Magazine. S.B. 252, which is now awaiting a signature by Gov. John Hickenlooper,  would expand renewable portfolio standards in Colorado for electrical cooperatives from the current 10 percent to 20 percent. The bill would allow coal-mine methane-capture projects such as this to be counted against that requirement.

by Allen Best

Give Tom Vessels his due. He’s a matchmaker and dealmaker who brought together what just may be the oddest couple of Colorado business. Who could imagine two enterprises in Colorado as unlikely to be paired as the Aspen Skiing Co. and Oxbow Mining?

They’re the yin and yang of business, Aspen Skiing being perhaps the state’s best-known brand in the international arena, its primary product snow, sparkling and virginal and white, always white. Oxbow, just 80 miles away, grubs coal from deep underground, its black product, high in energy and low in sulfur, railroaded to power plants in Kentucky and Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Global warming is at the crux of the business deal, but the views of the key executives couldn’t be more different. Aspen is an evangelist for climate-change action, chief executive Mike Kaplan even traveling to Washington D.C. several years ago to testify in favor of cap-and-trade legislation. Jim Cooper, the president of Oxbow Mining, says flatly that he doesn’t believe in it. “I don’t believe in man-made climate change,” he says.

Yet there they were this summer, the Oscar and Felix of Colorado commerce, shaking hands on a deal structured by Vessels that will yield three megawatts of electricity produced from the methane vented from the mine. Credit Vessels with gumption and persistence.

“I was never gifted with a high level of athletic coordination, so I tended toward endurance sports like running,” says Vessels, who works from 17th Street in Denver. “This was definitely an endurance story.”

Looking for holes

Vessels is a third-generation oil-and-gas man in Colorado. After he took control of the family business in 1984, his company drilled 250 wells, mostly seeking natural gas in the Wattenberg field northeast of Denver, the Piceance Basin west of Glenwood Springs and the Washakie Formation north of Craig. His company also built compressor stations and laid more than 100 miles of gas-gathering pipeline. Trying to capture escaping natural gas was “always a pesky problem,” Vessel says. “You are always looking for holes. The last thing we wanted was a loud ka-boom.”

After selling the company in 1998, Vessels went to Great Britain and then Germany, both times to study how methane escaping from coal mines could be put to good use. He calls it a “wasting resource.” He found the Europeans – and others around the world – already had it figured out.

Methane from landfills is increasingly harnessed to produce electricity, both in Colorado and elsewhere, as is manure from dairies. But almost nothing has been done in the United States to harness methane from coal mines.

Coal mines have long been cursed by methane. The primary constituent of natural gas, it is explosive at concentrations of 5 percent to 15 percent in air. To detect the gas, miners took canaries with them underground. In 1981, explosion of methane in the now-abandoned Mid-Continental Coal Mine, southwest of Carbondale, killed 15 men.

To reduce the danger, operators must vent the methane. Spewed into the atmosphere, methane constitutes what most climate scientists say is a significant threat because of its ability to trap heat in the atmosphere. It is much less common that carbon dioxide and dissipates more readily. But measured over a century’s time, methane is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Forming Vessels Coal Gas Co., Vessels began shopping his idea of tapping the methane already being vented by coal mines to electrical suppliers in 2005. He got interest, but no commitments. Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electrical provider, retreated when cap-and-trade legislation faded in Washington. Vessels estimates he talked with 10 to 15 utilities.

The crux of Vessels’ problem was that electricity from methane costs more than electricity produced by burning coal or natural gas. It might be cheaper than solar, and perhaps than wind, or even methane from landfills or feedlots. But it is not included in the mandated renewable energy portfolio applied to utilities in Colorado.

“One of my pet peeves is that agriculture methane is ‘good,’ but coal mine methane is ‘bad,’” says Vessels. “Because we ‘hate’ coal.”

Beyond everyday economics

Finally, Vessels talked with Holy Cross Energy. “That was my turning point in spades, plain and simple. It was the very, very first time I met people who were as positive as they were about doing something (with the methane),” he says of his first meeting with Del Worley, the manager of the Glenwood Springs-based electrical cooperative, and energy adviser Randy Udall.

Holy Cross is heavily invested in coal. It owns 8 percent of the new Comanche 3 coal-fired power plant in Pueblo. But it also has customers, especially in the Aspen and Vail areas, who want a reduced carbon footprint and are willing to pay slightly higher prices. The cooperative has already surpassed the state mandate for cooperatives of 10 percent for renewables and is pursuing an internal goal of 20 percent. Directors several years ago decided to expand the tent of renewables to include electricity produced by coal mine methane.

Holy Cross will not divulge how much it will pay for the methane electricity, but a tariff sheet released in July specified a rate of 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour for this year, escalating in coming years.

“If you want to be serious about reducing methane emissions, you need to provide incentives to make it happen beyond everyday economics,” Vessels says.

Sealing the deal with Oxbow took a little longer. Vessels describes a “turning curve” as opposed to a turning point. Crucial was making it clear that the methane-capture project would be subordinate to the mining at Elk Creek, which currently has a payroll of 351 people. Coal, not methane, provides the payday at the mine, located near the hamlet of Somerset, a few miles from Paonia.

Mining in the North Fork of the Gunnison River Valley began in 1896. Three underground mines are operating. West Elk began operations in 2002. Oxbow, a subsidiary of Oxbow Carbon, founded by Bill Koch, of the famous family of Kansas-reared billionaires, expects the mine to continue producing 4 to 5 million tons annually through 2018. Methane released from the mining will actually increase after the mine has closed, says the company’s Cooper.

Cooper says Oxbow was drawn to the deal, in part, because Vessels was trying to turn a resource with no value into a public good. That’s what coal miners see themselves doing. In this case, as with coal, there will be financial benefits extending beyond the direct parties involved, says Cooper. Some money from sale of mineral rights trickle to the state’s schools. But the key to all this getting done, says Cooper, was the persistence of Vessels.

One of the mining operations at Somerset in western Colorado, where coal has been mined since 1896.Photo/Allen Best

One of the mining operations at Somerset in western Colorado, where coal has been mined since 1896.
Photo/Allen Best

Aspen Skiing is the final key party in the deal. The company is fronting $5.4 million for the trio of the methane-converting engines that will be placed at the mine vents. That’s 90 percent of the front-end cost. In return, Aspen makes good on its carbon-busting vows and can tell the world about it. But Chief Financial Officer Matt Jones also reports a low-risk, high-margin profit. Other companies, he says, should follow Aspen’s example.

For about a decade, the Aspen Skiing Co. tried desperately to deliver actions matching its rhetoric about the urgent need to curb climate-altering greenhouse gases. It redeployed its snowmaking system at Snowmass, the largest of the company’s four ski areas, to produce a dribble of electricity during spring runoff. It installed high-efficiency boilers for the forced-air heating at its flagship hotel, the Little Nell, and retrofitted its headquarters building to use less energy.

It installed solar panels. The largest array was erected by a public-private partnership at a school in Carbondale. The company paid $1 million and reduced its carbon footprint by 1 percent.

Aspen, which has 3,700 employees at peak season, investigated the feasibility of installing wind turbines atop the Snowmass ski area, the largest of its four ski areas. It reviewed the potential for installing hydroelectric turbines in the Colorado River at Palisade. Both had troubling, deal-killing aspects.

Face shoots were free this year on Aspen Mountain. Photo/Jeremy Swanson

Face shoots were free this year on Aspen Mountain. Photo/Jeremy Swanson

Then Vessels came courting last year. The great risk is if the coal mine produces fewer methane emissions than projected. Analysis of past emissions and future mining plans shows that risk is minimal. “There might be enough methane to continue 20 years or more, but we think 15 years is the worst-case scenario,” Jones says.

Keeping on pitching

Aspen expects to make 12 percent in annualized returns. But while making a handsome buck, Aspen can soon boldly proclaim that it has offset 100 percent of energy use – electricity, natural gas, diesel and gasoline – at its ski areas, hotels and other operations. And it did so in triplicate, testimony to the powerful heat-trapping properties of methane.

“To achieve the same amount of carbon reduction, we would have had to put a half-billion dollars into solar,” Jones says. “The bang for the buck here is enormous. There’s no comparison.”

Randy Udall credits Vessels as the crucial link in making the deal happen. Holy Cross was ready to go forward, but Oxbow Mining was reluctant at first. “You can’t force the mines into the marriage. They have to want to come on their own volition,” he says.

“Tom was able, through persistence, to convince Elk Mine to play ball. He’s one of those guys who doesn’t get discouraged easily and was able to meet with them repeatedly,” Udall says.

Vessels says his background as a landman helped. “I was accustomed to the need to have relationships be more important than paper contracts. I personally do not believe in the lawyer-intensive contracts process. That is an American approach. I think at the end of the day you need to stay in touch with your business associates and know their businesses.”

Both Vessels and Aspen hope that this is the foundation for more methane capture operations in Colorado and the Rocky Mountains. Beginning with this three-megawatt operation, Vessels sees 50 megawatts of what he describes as low-hanging fruit from the Elk Creek and other mines, and conceivably another 100 megawatts in Colorado. Cooper says the most likely mines are those in the North Fork Valley, near Durango, and in the Trinidad-Walsenburg area.

This isn’t much electricity when you consider that the trio of Comanche power plants at Pueblo collectively generate 1,426 megawatts. But it is a huge amount of greenhouse gas reduction, as Aspen Skiing Co.’s numbers suggest. Further deployment may depend upon whether the renewable energy mandates are expanded to include methane from coal mines. Democrats in the Colorado Legislature rejected a proposal to do so, though it may be included in a broader initiative being studied by environmental groups to raise the renewable portfolio standard.

The technology for this is by no means glamorous. There’s nothing visually arresting like the sheen of solar panels or the graceful swoosh of wind turbines. The piston engines converting the methane to power will be loaded off a flat-bed truck and placed onto a leveled gravel platform amid the oak brush of the West Elk Mountains, then hooked up to power lines. They can be easily moved.

Economics you’ve got to like

Private companies usually keep their profitability statistics close to their vests. Aspen, though, has eagerly shared its financial details. Jones says his company may try to do more and hopes other companies also chase the profits of methane capture.

“It is a boring, kind of technical and unremarkable project that knocks the ball out of the park from an environmental perspective,” Jones says. “And it is something you would invest in even if it didn’t.”

Posted in Aspen, Climate change, Coal-mine methane, Colorado, Colorado General Assembly, Economic Development, Electrical co-operatives, Energy, Environmental, Renewable energy portfolio | 1 Comment

Aspen in the firing range of the War on Drugs

Posted on May 12, 2013 by allen.best
War veterans from War II to Afghanistan marched in Aspen's fourth of July parade last year. It was middle America. But in its attitude toward drugs, Aspen may not be middle America.Photo/Allen Best 2012

War veterans from War II to Afghanistan marched in Aspen’s fourth of July parade last year. It was middle America. But in its attitude toward drugs, Aspen may not be middle America.
Photo/Allen Best 2012

Montgomery Chitty and the broader story of drugs, money & Aspen

by Allen Best

Long-time Aspen resident Montgomery Chitty, who is 61, was pals with the late writer Hunter Thompson and did research for the late Ed Bradley, a correspondent for the television show “60 Minutes.” Thompson lived near Aspen and Bradley was a frequent visitor.

Chitty was also involved in high-level politics, according to the Aspen Daily News. He served as a consultant to the Democratic National Committee and pitched in on the campaigns to get Gary Hart elected to the U.S. Senate and then to the presidency.

But  Chitty has been behind bars since early 2012, and he may remain there for the rest of his life. In February, a jury in U.S. District Court in Denver convicted Chitty of peddling cocaine in Aspen. Witnesses told jurors that Chitty bought and sold well more than 200 kilos of cocaine from 2002 to 2012, with at least hundreds of thousands of dollars getting passed.

This and related cases have provided a fascinating peek into the lingering drug culture of Aspen. Five people from the Aspen area arrested in 2011 were all in their 60s. Chitty was arrested in early 2012. One of their cocaine suppliers in Los Angeles is in his 70s.

THE DRUG BUSTS  also focused attention on whether local law enforcement, specifically the sheriff’s department, turned a blind eye toward drug use and was  chummy with some of the drug dealers. That was one of the suggestions implicit in the decision by federal drug agents in 2011 not to notify the local sheriff of impending busts.

One of the defendants had had ties with the last three sheriffs of Pitkin County. The former sheriff for the last 30 to 35 years and the current sheriff both admitted they attended a birthday party for Wayne Reid, the ringleader of the coke-peddling business. Both sheriffs denied close ties.

But Reid, 66, was sentenced to 53 months in prison, while Chitty, who is younger,was  given what one lawyer in Aspen says is commonly called the “pine-box life.” He was sentenced to to a minimum 20 years in prison, in part because of a previous conviction for peddling marijuana.

Why the difference? Rick Carroll, managing editor of The Aspen Times, says you may tell your kids not to be a tattletale. But federal drug laws give defendants strong incentive to snitch—and Chitty refused.

“By all accounts, Chitty refused to cooperate with prosecutors by giving names and outing dealers,” he said in a column published earlier this spring.

OTHER DEFENDANTS in the ring revealed names and are getting comparatively light sentences, at most 11.5 years among the five, said Carroll.

“Chitty was the sacrificial lamb because he kept his mouth shut – and also because he was friends with the past three Pitkin County sheriffs, all of whom the feds have lusted over for years but haven’t mustered an inkling of evidence to charge or prosecute – just enough innuendo to keep the rumor mill turning.”

In this, Carroll says he has only so much sympathy for Chitty. “This was the business Chitty chose,” he wrote. “But so did the other ones, all in their 60s and 70s, who sold out Chitty in exchange for sweetheart deals or immunity. Justice got turned upside down in this case, one tainted by coke-peddling snitches, dealers who stayed in the game too long, confidential informants, backroom deals and a DEA hell-bent on making Aspen its prize catch, albeit 20 years late with a small fish like Chitty.”

In Aspen, Chitty has been seen a colorful character, sot of a second-shelf Hunter Thompson. “He was a bad boy, but not an evil boy,” says Su Lum, a resident of Aspen since 1964. She says she did not know him personally.

The Denver Post more recently studied the situation, more cautiously coming to this same conclusion as The Aspen Times: “In a town that prides itself on having no cops devoted to busting drug dealers and that views drunken driving as a bigger threat to public safety than cocaine, Chitty has become emblematic of a long-standing quandary,” says the newspapers in a May 5 story titled “Bust of ‘over-the-hill’ Aspen drug gang pits local cops against feds.”

Seen in the courtroom

As a correspondent for The Aspen Times, I covered the first day of Chitty’s trial in Denver during February. It was primarily a process of jury selection, and I was struck by how few among the jury pool were likely to have much sympathy for a drug dealer in Aspen.

More vivid was the scene after the opening arguments and after the jurors had been let out. At that point, Chitty—who is my age—was required to submit his hands to be cuffed, and the was then led, his hands behind his hips, out of the courtroom, briefly acknowledging a young man who later identified himself to me as Chitty’s son. The son’s companion, a blonde-haired female, cried as Chitty left the room.

Judge says economics no justification for selling cocaine in Telluride

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Cocaine has also been in the news in Telluride. There, Prudencio Lopez-Montoya was sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence for his involvement in a Telluride cocaine distribution ring that police say he led.

Of that, 8 years is mandatory, reports the Telluride Daily Planet. He and five others were arrested in a raid last August. All of those arrested are Mexican nationals and face deportation after their sentences are served.

Through an interpreter, Lopez-Montoya said he was dealing cocaine to raise money for his family in Mexico, where he has two children and other family members.

The prosecuting attorney asked for a maximum penalty, citing a “public safety issue.” But the public defender asked for a lighter sentence, as there was no evidence that he was inflicting violence. “It was purely economic,” said Nicolas Campbell. “There is clearly a demand here [for cocaine].”

The judge, Mary Deganhart, sternly warned that no circumstances justify selling illegal drugs, and that punishments are intended to be a deterrent.

 

Posted in Aspen, Mountain towns, Telluride, War on Drugs | Leave a comment

Guns laws in the rural West

Posted on May 12, 2013 by allen.best

Proposal to require

gun in every house

NUCLA, Colo. – In Southwestern Colorado, where white-capped mountains descend into red-rock canyons, the town trustees in Nucla were recently scheduled to take up a proposal to require every household to own a gun.

“I think we ought to do like that town in Georgia and do an ordinance that requires everybody in the town have a gun,” said Richard Craig, a town trustee, according to a Facebook posting in March.

“I think so too,” said the mayor, Dawna Morris.

Nucla is an hour west and 3,000 feet lower than Telluride. Philosophically and economically, they inhabit different planets.

Where Telluride can afford a private school and supports two newspapers, Nucla and nearby communities have been strapped since the uranium boom ended about a half-century ago. Even the prospect of a few jobs was front-page news in the recent issue of the local San Miguel Basin Forum.

The towns also differ in their thoughts about guns.  Telluride Mayor Stu Fraser testified before a Colorado legislative committee this winter about the need for stiffer limits on firearms. The Nucla mayor wants to require them.

Nucla has been in the news before. Along with Naturita, the adjacent town, Nucla once attracted national attention for a prairie dog shooting festival, which drew the ire of animal rights activists. Townspeople were belligerently defiant, some even speculating about a “shoot a yuppie” festival, according to a New York Times story in 1990.

A more nuanced view of Nucla was presented in a New Yorker story by Peter Hessler. His story “Dr. Don,” profiled the local pharmacist, but it really was much more broadly about what it takes to make a small town work. David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, cited it as among the best magazine stories of 2011.

One memorable quote in that story, from a Nucla resident, is this: “I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simpler game, but it’s played to a higher level.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/09/26/110926fa_fact_hessler

But as regards gun control, ironies can be found in both Nucla and Telluride. Telluride recently hashed out the need for stronger gun controls. But there’s no place in town that sells guns and, for that matter, little evidence of guns altogether.

As why require guns of residents in Nucla when households already seems to have one?

“The criminals know that we have guns,” explained Craig, the town trustee, in the Forum, an eight-page newspaper. “We have them anyway, but that’s beside the point. This makes it official that we have guns.”

Posted in Colorado, Gun laws, Mountain towns, Telluride | Leave a comment

Jobs, rural Colorado, and the transition from coal

Posted on May 7, 2013 by allen.best
Colorado Green and other projects harness the wind between Lamar and Springfield, in the state's southeast corner, but locals say there's plenty of wind left. What's lacking is transmission.Photo/October 2012 by Allen Best

Colorado Green and other projects harness the wind between Lamar and Springfield, in the state’s southeast corner, but locals say there’s plenty of wind left. What’s lacking is transmission.
Photo/October 2012 by Allen Best

Pounding the nail of CO2 reduction

with renewable portfolio standards

 by Allen Best

Located 200 miles and two mountain passes northwest of Denver, the town of Craig was rocking and rolling in the late 1970s as two coal-fired power plants were being completed and a third was launched. Then, after the construction crews left, not so much.

But it could get worse. “We’re at wit’s end,” said Frank Moe, testifying against Senate Bill 252 recently before a legislative committee. The bill, which was adopted last week by the legislature, mandates that the 22 electrical cooperatives in Colorado get 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020. The existing mandate is 10 percent. The administration of Gov. John Hickenlooper testified in support.

Moe and his wife, Kerry, own and operate a Best Western in Craig. They estimate that 60 percent of their business comes from the energy sector, almost exclusively fossil fuels. “If (electrical) prices increase, I’m going to have to let somebody go,” said Kerry, tears welling in her eyes.

Whether electricity costs in Craig will rise because of this legislation, as the Moes fear, is doubtful. Yampa Valley Electric, the local cooperative, and Grand Valley Power, serving the Grand Junction area, both get their power from Xcel, which is briskly moving to meet its 30 percent mandate. Holy Cross Energy, a cooperative based in Glenwood Springs, expects to meet its internal goal of 20 percent greenhouse gas reduction by 2020.

The legislation targets the 18 cooperatives supplied by Westminster-based Tri-State Generation and Transmission, and another cooperative, Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA). Tri-State is the majority owner of the three coal-fired power plants in Craig, as well as a smaller plant at Nucla, west of Telluride. IREA serves territory from Fairplay to Castle Rock to Bennett.

Serving rural America

I have a soft spot for cooperatives. The result of New Deal legislation in the 1930s, they used federal financing to deliver electricity to areas where the private sector, such as Xcel’s precursor, would not go, to the scattered farms and ranches. My grandparents were charter members of their co-ops in the South Platte Valley, in 1942 and 1948. My aunt, on her 80th birthday, was asked about the greatest change in her lifetime. Electricity, she said. Not TV, not computers, but what enabled both.

Tri-State arrived in the 1950s, created by member co-ops to facilitate transmission of electricity from the giant dams of the West then being built. In keeping with the times, Tri-State then focused on centralized power production, mostly coal plants.

At the six-hour hearing I attended, proponents portrayed SB 252 as a job creator for rural Colorado and a strong hedge against rising costs of coal-fired power. A little more costly up front, renewables will deliver significant cost savings over the long term, predicted Jeff Berman, an elected director of Durango-based La Plata Electric.

“Too much, too fast, too costly,” opponents said repeatedly. SB 252 would be a job killer, they predicted.

Republican legislators on the committee kept asking why, if renewable energy was such a good idea, the private sector wasn’t already doing it. Too bad they weren’t around in the 1930s to ask the same question. One even tried to link the mandate to Solyndra, the California solar manufacturer that flopped and reneged on $500 million in government loans.

To meet this mandate, said Ken Anderson, chief executive of Tri-State, his organization would most likely go to Wyoming and Nebraska, where wind resources are better and hence cheaper. Absent from this hearing was mention of the problem: carbon dioxide. Instead, arguments were waged in proxies about jobs gained, jobs lost.

Unseen, but not inconsequential

This unseen gas produced by burning fossil fuels probably represents a grave, long-term risk to stability of modern civilizations. “We risk the chance of being the first generation to leave a problem for which there is no solution,” Hickenlooper used to say when he was mayor.

But Frank Moe — and I suspect many opponents of the mandate — see the world very differently. He observed that before leaving Craig that morning, the sky had been crystal clear. Denver, upon his arrival, not so much. If you think that carbon dioxide isn’t a problem, these renewable energy mandates must surely seem strange, even sinister.

A painful split was also apparent between rural and urban Colorado. “This is an insult to rural Colorado,” said one speaker. Tri-State and its supporters say they were not consulted about the bill in its formation — and indeed, didn’t know about it until it was introduced. Lee Boughey, Tri-State spokesman, calls it a “rushed, exclusionary legislative process. We would like to have had a more engaged discussion,” he says.

Claims on both sides were exaggerated. While opponents talked of 20 percent rate increases, SB 225 specifies a very strong backstop: a maximum 2 percent increase. Coal power, however, enjoys no such limits. But will this create jobs for rural Colorado? On the margins of this bill, but intriguing in its potential, is a carve-out for something called distributed generation, producing power close to where it is consumed, whether from methane produced at dairy farms or other, small sources.

More likely, big wind will provide the biggest answer. Wind industry representatives say abundant wind remains in Colorado to be developed. Transmission is lacking. Tri-State says it takes 7 to 10 years to develop transmission lines, and sometimes longer. But transmission has happened more rapidly. A 70-mile transmission line in northeastern Colorado was permitted and built within 12 months. And that was done without use of eminent domain, says Brent Orr of Cornerstone Energy Development. Utilities, he says, must acknowledge impacts to farmers and ranchers and compensate accordingly.

Windy places, not just windy oratory

Southeastern Colorado was site of the state’s first big wind farm, Colorado Green, and there’s more where that wind comes from. “If it’s not blowing, people fall over,” he says. More remains, says Jay D. Suhler, a banker in Springfield and formerly the town’s mayor for 23 years. Turbines owned by the Arkansas River Power Authority ran at 44 percent capacity last year. He contends that state government needs to provide more leadership to ensure construction of transmission lines.

Tri-State continues to invest in coal. Since 2005, it has put $71.9 million into a proposed coal plant in Holcomb, Kan., and more into land and water for a potential coal, nuclear or some other kind of power generation near Lamar. In 2011, Tri-State’s Ken Anderson made the case for continuing to ride coal — although he didn’t say what is needed. Anderson has invested a relatively small amount of money into researching carbon sequestration at his company’s Craig plants.

The three units of coal-fired generation at Craig were completed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.2009 photo/Allen Best

The three units of coal-fired generation at Craig were completed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
2009 photo/Allen Best

Tri-State and its co-ops seem more focused on resisting change that nurturing innovation. You have to wonder why. In Craig, Nucla, and other towns, coal plants provide middle-class incomes where good jobs are scarce. But clearly, these coal plants cannot be allowed to continue polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.

But renewable portfolio standards are annoying, too, in that they anoint technological correctness. SB 252 gives Tri-State no credit for the 15 percent of its electricity that comes from a renewable, non-carbon polluting source, hydroelectric dams. Del Worley, general manger of Holy Cross Electric, which has no dog in this fight, questions whether this is fair. I agree. President Barack Obama had it right two years ago in calling for a clean energy standard. Carbon dioxide, not fossil fuels, should be off the table.

A new book, “The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong — and How to Fix It, ” by Oxford economist Dieter Helm, argues for a carbon tax, both domestically and on imported goods, to create a level global playing field and drive innovation in energy production and consumption.

But we’re not having that more sophisticated conversation at the national level, so we end up with proxy arguments about job gains and losses in statehouse meeting rooms. SB 225 has good intentions, although it strikes me as a bit like using rocks to pound nails.

A slightly shorter version of this originally appeared in the May 5, 2013, issue of The Denver Post. 

 

Posted in Climate change, Colorado General Assembly, Economic Development, Electrical co-operatives, Energy, Environmental, Mountain towns, Renewable Energy, Renewable energy portfolio, Telluride | Leave a comment

Artificial insemination of clouds

Posted on May 2, 2013 by allen.best

Why Los Angeles messes with

storms in the Rocky Mountains

by Allen Best

But does it work? That’s always been the question about cloud seeding, the technology pioneered in 1946—coincidentally with the brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut as a principal figure – and now widely deployed across the West.

In Colorado alone, nearly $1 million was spent by cities, water districts and ski areas to seed clouds between Winter Park and Telluride. Most see the operations as a low-risk bet on augmenting snowfall in the so-so years. In drought years, typically there are few clouds to seed. In snowy years, it’s not needed.

If even modestly successful, the cost is low – just $1 per acre-foot, according to an operator who seeds clouds near Crested Butte, Colo.

A new study issued in December by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation more cautiously estimates costs ranging from $30 to $60 per acre-feet. At that rate, says the study, cloud-seeding could be one of the least expensive ways to narrow the gap between supplies of water in the Colorado River Basin and growing demands. Dramatically more expensive would be desalting brackish groundwater in Arizona, which the study estimated at $650 per acre-foot, or ocean water near Los Angeles, at $2,100 per acre-foot.

A ground-based cloud-seeding generator near Eagle, Colo., seeks to disperse silver iodide into clouds blowing toward Beaver Creek and Vail.Photo/Allen Best

A ground-based cloud-seeding generator near Eagle, Colo., seeks to disperse silver iodide into clouds blowing toward Beaver Creek and Vail.
Photo/Allen Best

But even the federal government’s estimate for cloud seeding has almost no empirical basis, says a scientist involved with cloud-seeding research. “It’s pretty back of the envelope, more qualitative (than quantitative),” says Dan Breed, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Not enough pure research has been completed yet to assign a hard figure to the effects of cloud-seeding, says Breed.

Breed also remains skeptical that cloud-seeding could produce 300,000 acre-feet per year, on average, as the Bureau of Reclamation’s study estimates. That’s about as much water as is diverted from the Western Slope of Colorado to the Front Range in a poor year.

Eureka in Schenectady

The hallelujah moment for cloud-seeding occurred at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. There, Bernard Vonnegut, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that silver iodide could serve as the nuclei, or seeds, around which water droplets condense.

Silver iodide remains the most common agent used to seed clouds. The chemical is put in a solution of acetone and combusted. The heat lifts the aerosol into upslope winds, which carry it toward targeted areas. Airplanes allow more effective seeding, but at much greater expense.

The longest-running program in the West occurs in the upper San Joaquin River Basin of California. There, Southern California Edison seeds clouds in a program that began in 1950. Long-standing programs have also existed in Nevada and Utah.

Colorado’s longest steadiest program began during the drought winter of 1976-77, with Vail Mountain as the intended recipient. The program has continued with just temporary lapses ever since.

Other programs in Colorado began after the dire drought of 2002. The efforts coalesced in the winter of 2011-2012 in a partnership of cities, ski areas and water districts pooling money to seed clouds to augment watersheds from Aspen to Grand Lake at elevations above 8,500 feet. Ski areas pay for efforts only through January, although other efforts continue through February and sometimes into March. Total cost of the program is $293,000.

Sites of cloud-seeding generators in Colorado during the 2012-2013 winter.

Sites of cloud-seeding generators in Colorado during the 2012-2013 winter.

A parallel program uses two remotely operated generators to cloud-seed the Winter Park ski area from November through March.

But does it work?

The National Academy of Sciences, in a 2003 report, threw water on weather modification efforts altogether, although conceding “strong suggestions of positive seeding effects” from winter snowstorms, unlike summer storms.

Cloud-seeding advocates were indignant. Atmospheric modeling is extremely difficult, they pointed out, and the scientific establishment had not demanded the same high bar or proof for global warming theory.

Arlen W. Huggins, of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., points to work in Utah’s Wasatch Plateau as providing “some of the best physical evidence of seeding-induced precipitation increases.” He also credits research conducted in recent decades on Colorado’s Grand Mesa and in California’s Sierra Nevada.

But for randomized experiments, some of the best work —and only work – was done in the 1960s, in the area between Vail and Breckenridge. That work was supervised by Lew Grant, an atmospheric scientist who grew up in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. He followed that project with additional work at the research lab atop the Steamboat ski area in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

After seeding clouds with silver iodide there, Grant quit his work in weather modification and applied his energy full time to growing vegetables on a farm north of Fort Collins, Colo., without aid of chemicals. Later, the term “organic” came into vogue to describe that type of farming.

As for weather modification experiments, the federal government by then had gotten out of the game.

Randomly in Wyoming

Enter Wyoming’s State Legislature, which in 2006 appropriated money to begin what Huggins calls the “first fully randomized wintertime cloud seeding experiment to be conducted in the U. S. in more than 30 years.”

The experiments in Wyoming, as those in Colorado in the 1960s, are independent of any practical seeding efforts. The goal, says Barry Lawrence, of the Wyoming Water Development Commission, is to determine what role cloud-seeding may have in the state’s long-term water strategy.

Huggins says the Wyoming study stands on the shoulders of previous experiments, which defined the periods of storms that are seedable. “This greatly reduces the variability in precipitation among the randomized cases,” he explains. “From a scientific perspective, the study directly addresses the National Academy’s recommendation that further research was necessary to prove the efficacy of cloud seeding.”

The National Center for Atmospheric Research was chosen to design and oversee the study, and Breed was given responsibility as project manager and scientist.

Central to the experiment are two parallel mountain ranges, the Sierra Madre and Medicine Bow, set 40 to 50 miles apart, located southwest of Laramie, near the Colorado border. When storms carrying the appropriate level of precipitation approach, cloud-seeding generators are set off randomly, spewing silver iodide as high as 3,000 feet for as long as four hours.wyoming-satellite-image-m_wx_mod_3_13

Only one range is seeded per storm. The other mountain range serves as a control, with snowfall measured in both ranges after the storm.

“The randomization is needed because you’re looking for a small signal in a fairly large natural variability,” says Breed.

To gauge the effectiveness of seeding, however, weather conditions in the two mountain ranges must be similar. Only then can the apples be compared fairly.

Each mountain range has eight ground-based generators. Another 10 generators are located in the Wind River Range, between Pinedale and Lander, although the study there lacks the same randomized design.

One problem in the Wyoming research has been lack of clouds to seed. “We’ve had several drought winters, and last winter was just terrible,” says Breed. The winter had 15 storms suitable for seeding, far short of his hope for 30 to 40 per winter.

Conversely, the snowpack grew so rapidly two years ago that seeding operations had to be suspended.

For effective seeding, clouds must be cold, at least 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and wet. Even by late February, temperatures often rise too high for effective seeding, says Breed.

Therein lies a fundamental problem with cloud-seeding as a grand strategy for filling Lake Powell and other reservoirs in the arid Southwest. In drought years, the technique has little effect, and in wet years it can’t be done. Between the two extremes during the narrow band of mid-winter lies potential, but is it enough to make that much difference?

Can cloud-seeding help fill reservoirs of the Southwest, including Dillon? Evidence suggests it's a tool, but with only limited value. Photo/Allen Best

Can cloud-seeding help fill reservoirs of the Southwest, including Dillon (shown here in 2002)? Evidence suggests it’s a tool, but with only limited value. Photo/Allen Best

That is what the research in Wyoming intends to find out, but the answer has remained elusive. To have enough storms to achieve statistical significance, the program had to be extended longer than was originally planned, with a corresponding ballooning of the cost, now at $13.5 million. That extension produced some editorial harrumphing by the state’s leading newspaper, the Casper Star-Tribune, but legislators agreed to work through the 2013-2014 winter. A final report is expected in 2015.

So far, says Breed, results give “strong indications of positive effects” of seeding clouds, “but it’s still too early to say that with statistical confidence.”

Much is at stake, says Huggins. “It has the potential of putting the whole cloud seeding package together; i.e. confirming cloud seeding can increase wintertime precipitation and that this increase can be translated as a benefit to water resources.”

In other words, cloud-seeding would become more bankable.

Where LA puts its money

Cloud-seeding already has been proven effective enough to the satisfaction of 66 programs already in place in the West.

A major funder for several of these programs in the Metropolitan Water District, which delivers water to 18 million people in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The agency has spent $28,500 per year for the last eight winters for cloud-seeding efforts in the lower-basin states. But lower-basin water agencies spend $425,000 annually in the Colorado River headwaters.

“Traditional water projects cost $400 to $500 per acre-foot. We are looking at $10 to $20 per acre-foot (for water produced by seeding clouds),” explains Metropolitan Water’s Tom Ryan. “We wouldn’t be spending that sort of money if we didn’t think it was effective and valuable.”

Colorado’s Gunnison River Basin gets some of that money. Los Angeles and other water providers in lower-basins states foot roughly half the bill on a program that is capped at $95,000, less if there are insufficient clouds to seed.

The most substantial local commitment comes from the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservation District, this year at $26,500. “The cost is relatively modest for the return on investment,” says the district’s general manager, Frank Kugel. “Even if the program produces only 10 percent of the amount projected, it would result in very inexpensive water.”

Mt. Crested Butte, a municipality, also chips in $3,000, and Gunnison County $10,000.

Cloud-seeders emphasize that you can’t make snow from nothing. You need clouds.

“If you’re going to have 50 percent of snowfall naturally, and you get a 10 percent increase from cloud seeding, that would still result in a snowpack 55 percent of average,” explained Don Griffith, president of North American Weather Consultants, the firm that has seeded the clouds near Crested Butte for the last decade.

“There’s still a drought. It’s just going to be a little less dry than it would be naturally,” he told the Crested Butte News earlier this winter.

An elevated cloud-seeding generator in the Sierra Nevada of California.Photo courtesy of Desert Research Institute.

An elevated cloud-seeding generator in the Sierra Nevada of California.
Photo courtesy of Desert Research Institute.

Ski towns like more certainty of snow for obvious reasons. So would Las Vegas. With just four inches of natural precipitation per year, the gambling mecca is largely at the mercy of water flowing from upstream. The Southern Nevada Water Authority has already been actively engaged in discussions about funding desalination and many other techniques, mostly very expensive, for augmenting existing water supplies in the Colorado River Basin. Las Vegas is interested in any and every strategy to produce more water.

Cloud-seeding can probably be one of those strategies, says Breed, the NCAR scientist supervising the Wyoming experiment.

Breed cautions against expecting too much from cloud-seeding in Wyoming. “Every little bit helps. It’s not going to be huge (increase), but it will be a little bit.” And, he adds, cloud-seeding operations can be ramped up relatively quickly in years ahead, unlike some other efforts, such as desalination or, less clearly, imports of water into the basin from other sources, such as the Mississippi River.

Second fiddle to conservation

Indeed, that’s the bottom line of the Colorado River Basin Supply and Demand Study, which was issued in December. The Colorado River water has not reached the Pacific Ocean since the late 1990s, and only intermittently since the 1960s. The report examines a whole host of supply augmentation strategies – including, importing water to existing users from other sources, including a pipeline from the Mississippi River at Memphis to the Front Range of Colorado.

But even if pipelines to deliver water into Colorado or Utah from other, more water-plentiful basins could be done profitably, said Eric Kuhn, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, they’re still unlikely. At a water conference in Gunnison last summer, he was skeptical about any grand, silver-bullet solutions.

Breed also warned against expecting too much. “It is one small tool,” said Breed. “Conservation will be much more important. Cloud-seeding is important, but it is very small compared to all the other tools. It (produced water) is not a huge amount.”

But does it work? Yes, he thinks so.

This story was amended on May 7 to correct the money spent by the Metropolitan Water District for  lower-basin cloud-seeding efforts. The correct figure, according to a district spokesman, is $28,500 per year for the last eight years. 

This originally was published in the March issue of Mountain Town News, a newsmagazine distributed to subscribers. To inquire about rates and advertising opportunities, please contact me at allen.best@comcast.net

 

Posted in Climate change, Colorado River, Environmental, Mountain towns, Science, Steamboat Springs, Vail, Water | Leave a comment

Space travel from two miles high

Posted on March 31, 2013 by allen.best
At 10,200 feet, Leadville has a third less atmosphere to pierce on the way to outer space than Cape Kennedy.

At 10,200 feet, Leadville has a third less atmosphere to pierce on the way to outer space than Cape Kennedy.

Vail Resorts & final frontier of tourism

Company plans high-elevation Leadville spaceport

LEADVILLE, Colo. – Vail Resorts Inc. plans to construct a spaceport at nearly 10,000 feet in elevation near the mountain town of Leadville, located south of Vail, according to an announcement on Sunday.

For $300,000, space tourists will be able to take a trip of a lifetime to more than 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, the international boundary line for outer space. Only those with an Epic Pass will be eligible to buy trips on the spaceman journeys from the spaceport, to be called Galaxville.

For Leadville, the announcement of the spaceport is akin to a dream come true.  Since the Climax Molybdenum Mine shut down in 1981, the town has been looking for economic development. Occasionally, it has succeeded, with such ventures as snowshoe manufacturing lasting for a time, but never anything to fill the void left by the demise of mining.

Leadville Mayor Spud Elliot welcomed the news. “This may be even bigger than the reopening of the molybdenum mine,” he said. “We should be able to fill some motel rooms now.”

Will boom times return to Leadville's Harrison Avenue with a high-elevation spaceport just outside town?

Will boom times return to Leadville’s Harrison Avenue with a high-elevation spaceport just outside town?

Six other spaceports have been licensed in the United States by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of the Associate Administrator for Commercial Space

Transportation (AST). Most are at sea level, but Sir Richard Bronson, the British entrepreneur who started Virgin Records and then Virgin Airlines, took a different tack with his space tourism venture, called Virgin Gallactica. With New Mexico authorities,

he chose to build a spaceport at Upham, N.M., about 45 miles from Truth or Consequences. Upham was chosen because its low population density, uncongested airspace, and high elevation—all of which hold true at Leadville.

More recently, a company announced that it planned to launch aircraft into space from the Front Range Airport, located east of Denver, about 6 miles from Denver International Airport. The Denver Post reported that the spaceport license is likely in 2013. But the New Mexico site is only 4,560 feet, and the Denver-area airport just 5,400 feet. Galaxville will be at 10,000 feet.

Obviously, the lake County Airport will need an upgrade to become a world-class spaceport.

Obviously, the lake County Airport will need an upgrade to become a world-class spaceport.

“At Leadville, we’re twice as far to outer space already,” purred Bob Katz, chief executives of Vial Resorts. And it won’t be far from Breckenridge, Vial, or Beaver Creek – or, for that matter, from Aspen and Snowmass, Cats added slyly.

The runway for the new aircraft headed into space will be along the valley floor at the base of Mt. Elbert and Mt. Massive. The valley tilts up at a slight angle, and the space jets should be able to easily clear Tennessee Pass, one of the lowest spots on the Continental Divide. Vale Resorts sees strong synergy between its existing ski tourism and real estate development revenues streams and this new venture in space travel.

In 2012, the company bought two ski areas in California, and chief executive Cats has let it be known he’s interested in buying more— and has been kicking the tires of resorts in China and perhaps elsewhere. With this investment, he thinks his company can realize further profits as it broadens its brand across the globe.

“Thomas Friedman had it right: The world’s flat,” he said. “But we think whether it’s Russian oligarchs or the new 1 percenters in China, we can persuade a fair number of them to come to Colorado to join the world’s 0.01 percent in this extraordinary out-of-the-world adventure.”

But for Vial Resorts and Deadville, there’s just one problem. Galaxville will be permitted to operate just a brief time each year: within one or two days of April Fool’s Day. – Reported by Allen Better.

 

 

Posted in Economic Development, Mountain towns, Tourism, Vail | 1 Comment

Putting chips on the shoulder of I-70

Posted on March 28, 2013 by allen.best
Traffic shoulders would be widened by three to five feet, accommodating a toll lane for I-70 on Sunday afternoons and other peak traffic. 2009 photo in Idaho Springs/Allen Best

Traffic shoulders would be widened by three to five feet, accommodating a toll lane for I-70 on Sunday afternoons and other peak traffic.
2009 photo in Idaho Springs/Allen Best

Hardening the main artery for

mountain resorts of Colorado

by Allen Best

Limited tolling is being talked about as a way to improve the flow of east-bound traffic on from the mountains to Denver on Colorado’s Interstate 70 on Sunday afternoons and other times of high-volume traffic.

The concept, called managed lanes, has been implemented in Minneapolis, Indianapolis and other metropolitan areas. The Colorado Department of Transportation thinks managed lanes can also be used in Colorado for:

• I-25 north from Denver,

• U.S. 36 between Denver and Boulder, and

• C-470 in the south metro area.

The new – and temporary – lane on I-70 would stretch from Empire Junction, where traffic on Highway 40 merges with the I-70 traffic but without added lane capacity. It would continue to Floyd Hill, where the existing two lanes expand to three lanes on into Denver. The total distance is 12 miles.

Part of this bottleneck will be eliminated this year by creating a third bore at the Twin Tunnels, just east of Idaho Springs, for east-bound traffic. C-DOT found $100 million in its budget to widen the tunnel, accommodating three lanes. That is expected to be done by December, maybe earlier.

C-DOT has started work on boring a third lane for east-bound traffic of I-70 near Idaho Springs. The new lane is expected to reduce but not end congestion.

C-DOT has started work on boring a third lane for east-bound traffic of I-70 near Idaho Springs. The new lane is expected to reduce but not end congestion.

Prices for use of the I-70 express lane would be set with the goal of encouraging use of traffic flowing at about 45 mph. Variable tolling, the concept in question, is knotty. If the fee is too low, it just becomes another congested lane. Too high and nobody will use it. But there is some certainty from week to week and month to month. The same concept is already used on the high-occupancy vehicle lanes in Denver.

A different system, called dynamic tolling, adjusts rates in accordance with real-time conditions, such as hour to hour. In Minneapolis, tolls have ranged from 25 cents to $8 during one epic snowstorm.

Tolls would be assessed by transponders or by photos of license plates, similar to the way traffic is charged on Colorado’s existing toll road, E-470. There will be no pitching of quarters into roadside baskets, said Bemelen.

While no pen has been put to paper yet, says Bemelen, C-DOT roughly estimates infrastructure costs of the express lanes at $30 million. Work would take 18 to 20 months to completion. Thanks to the existence of fiber optics, extensive installation of monitoring cameras would be a relatively minor component.

The idea has been shared with elected officials in Idaho Springs and Clear Creek County, who were flown to Minneapolis to see operations there. “They all had concerns, but all were duly impressed by what they saw in Minneapolis,” observes Bemelen.

I-70 on a Sunday afternoon in March.

I-70 on a Sunday afternoon in March.

Tim Mauck, chairman of the Clear Creek County commissioners, was among those who went to Minneapolis. “It’s an interesting concept,” he says. “It deserves further research, modeling and discussion in regards to its effectiveness in the I-70 mountain corridor.”

 One concern was whether emergency responders could reach traffic accidents, as they commonly now use the shoulders when traffic is congested. But, if 45 mph speeds are guaranteed in the express lane, that works for them.

Mauck  doubts that managed lanes can be a long-term solution. “My fear is that 10 years down the road we will have three lanes of congested traffic sitting in Clear Creek County, and the quality of life, not only of other Coloradans who travel that corridor, but also our residents, will be adversely affected.”

While C-DOT representatives originally said they hoped to see the I-70 upgrade under construction in 2014, Mauck believes 2015 should be the earliest. He will oppose rushing, as he believes Clear Creek County is being adversely effected by the hurry to create a third east-bound lane at the Twin Tunnels. The express lane, if it is to happen, must be “fully thought through.”

Posted in Denver, Interstate 70, Mountain towns | 2 Comments