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A geothermal power plant in Stillwater, about 60 miles from Reno, Nevada.

A geothermal power plant in Stillwater, about 60 miles from Reno, Nevada.

The energy transition that started more than a decade ago continues to accelerate as low- and zero-carbon fuels get cheaper and more reliable. 

But that doesn’t mean fossil fuels and emission-free energy are mutually exclusive. They are not enemies, as some of the loudest voices in the environmental debate want you to think.

In truth, the science, technology and know-how of the fossil fuel industry is laying the groundwork for an economy that runs on reduced emissions energy. That was true more than a decade ago, when flexible natural gas turbines started opening up the power grid to much larger volumes of electricity from wind farms and solar arrays. And it’s true today.

One of the best examples is happening right here in Colorado. An innovative startup called Transitional Energy is using oil and gas infrastructure and advanced heat-exchange technology to produce geothermal electricity.

The Denver-based company has already completed a successful pilot project in Nevada and will demonstrate the technology on a larger scale in the Silver State in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. The federal agency’s involvement follows an earlier grant from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.

Meanwhile, United Power — a Brighton-based electric cooperative that serves more than 300,000 people in northern Colorado — will work with Transitional Energy to convert geothermal heat from oil and gas wells in the Denver-Julesburg Basin into a new local source of renewable electricity.

However, unlike wind and solar, Transitional Energy’s geothermal technology is expected to produce “dispatchable baseload electric power” that’s available around the clock, according to United Power. 

This breakthrough could dramatically expand the availability of geothermal electricity, which is currently available in only a handful of states.

Traditional geothermal power plants use very hot sources of underground water to produce steam, which drives a turbine and generates electricity. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, these plants require underground water sources with temperatures of at least 360 degrees Fahrenheit.

With current technologies, there are relatively few places where geothermal wells can be economically drilled to reach these superheated underground water sources. But Transitional Energy has found a way around this problem.

First: Instead of drilling new wells, Transitional Energy is harnessing geothermal heat from existing oil and gas wells, which produce hot, briny water as a byproduct. In Colorado, temperatures inside these wells can reach above 200 degrees. But this promising source of geothermal heat has gone entirely unused. With tens of thousands of producing oil and gas wells in Colorado, this is a potentially huge energy resource.

And second: Transitional Energy’s technology uses a specially designed turbine that doesn’t require superheated water and steam to generate electricity. Instead, the turbine uses liquid refrigerant with a much lower boiling point than water.

“We run the hot water from the oil and gas well through a heat exchanger, which flash boils the liquid refrigerant into a vapor,” Salina Derichsweiler, CEO and co-founder of Transitional Energy, said in an interview with The Western Way. “That moving vapor turns the turbine, which generates electricity, just like steam would in a regular turbine, but at a lower temperature.”

According to United Power, this technology will be piloted on producing and non-producing oil and gas wells. This is significant, because it may show that oil and gas wells that are no longer economical can be converted into wells that exclusively generate geothermal electricity.

“Utilizing clean, economical geothermal energy to provide local power that can be dispatched when needed is a critical component of our growing energy portfolio,” Dean Hubbuck, United Power’s Chief Energy Resources Officer, said when the partnership with Transitional Energy was first announced. “Geothermal energy represents a huge untapped renewable resource that can reduce our reliance on power from other traditional sources.”

Tied up in red tape

But to tap geothermal’s full potential, we need innovative policies to match these breakthrough technologies. Historically, geothermal has been caught up in the kind of red tape that wind and solar — and even oil and gas — don’t have to worry about.

For example, in a recent report to Congress, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management said permitting for new geothermal projects on federal land was limited because federal law requires geothermal applications to be handled differently.

“Unlike its ability to charge cost-recovery funding of project proponents for wind and solar proposals under … the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the BLM’s geothermal program has no legal authority to charge cost-recovery funding of project proponents to cover the costs associated with environmental review and permitting work for geothermal energy proposals,” the report found.

“As such, the BLM currently relies entirely on appropriations to fund dedicated staff for geothermal leasing, permitting, and long-term compliance monitoring.”

In other words, while wind and solar developers can be asked to cover the costs of the staff time needed to process their permits — which saves taxpayer dollars — geothermal developers don’t have that option. Geothermal permits can only be funded with taxpayer funds, which effectively puts those projects on a slower and more unpredictable track.

No wonder, then, that geothermal projects made up 100 megawatts of the 2,890 megawatts — or less than 4% — of renewable energy projects approved on federal lands during 2021, according to BLM data. This is a bad deal for taxpayers and for geothermal developers and needs to be rectified.

But that’s not all. Republican lawmakers, led by Idaho U.S. Rep. Russ Fulcher and Idaho U.S. Sen. Jim Risch, have found further disparities in the federal permitting process that add more red tape to geothermal permitting applications on federal land than even exist for oil and gas.

The extra layer of environmental review means geothermal developers must wait an additional 10 months on average before they even know if they have a viable project. Just imagine how much harder that makes planning and estimating the cost of the equipment and skilled labor necessary to make these projects a reality.

As a result, these lawmakers are pushing a legislative fix that would create “parity” between geothermal permitting and oil and gas permitting at the BLM. “Federal regulations should not discourage geothermal exploration,” Congressman Fulcher said when the legislative fix was first proposed last year. The current permitting process is “long and burdensome” and is standing in the way of “new opportunities to harness this clean energy.”

So much for those political stereotypes of conservative lawmakers only supporting fossil fuels.

Likewise, this year in in Colorado, Republican State Sen. Rob Woodward from Larimer County led a bipartisan effort to pass a bill that treats geothermal energy the same as solar energy in the planning and permitting process. 

When I talked to Woodward about the bill, he said his rationale was clear and simple: Wherever state law provides a benefit to solar energy, “let’s add the word geothermal next to it, to make sure that geothermal gets every benefit that solar energy does.”

Among other changes, the bill limits the fees that local and state governments can charge for approving the installation of a geothermal system — a common-sense guardrail that has certainly helped rooftop solar take off in Colorado.

Woodward’s bill also directs the Colorado Energy Office to develop a consumer education program for geothermal so that homeowners, businesses and school districts know they have other options for on-site renewables in addition to solar panels.

To be clear, the geothermal technology used to heat and cool buildings is different than the geothermal technology being developed to generate electricity. Perhaps the biggest difference is the depth of the well.

Compared to a depth of thousands of feet for the oil and gas wells being tapped by Transitional Energy, geothermal wells for heating and cooling buildings only go “100 feet down, sometimes just 50 feet down,” Woodward said.

By harnessing the “fairly constant” temperature below the ground, geothermal wells can be connected to a heat pump that will “heat your home in the winter and cool your home in the summer,” he told me. “We need to let people know that you can literally put this in your house today.”

And the good news is, Woodward’s bill is now state law. It received a 33-2 vote in the Senate and a 58-7 vote in the House before it was signed by Gov. Jared Polis in early June. In a time when it’s harder than ever for Republicans and Democrats to work together, especially on energy issues, Sen. Woodward found a way.

Yes, our politics are polarized, but politics isn’t everything. When innovative technologies start transforming oil and gas infrastructure into renewable energy infrastructure, that’s something everyone can get behind.

Greg Brophy is a former state legislator from Colorado’s eastern plains and the Colorado director of The Western Way, a conservative nonprofit that seeks pro-market solutions to environmental challenges.

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