Mike Kaplan, the dapper chief of Aspen Skiing Co., looked a tad awkward in his hardhat and neon safety vest. But the powder-skiing executive was expounding with the passion that defines his leadership at one of the greenest resort companies on the planet.

Arms spread wide, he spoke of optimism. Coming together despite political differences. Bridging regional and ideological chasms and fighting through frustration to forge impacting change.

And there, in early November at Oxbow Mining’s Elk Creek Mine in Somerset, Colo., thousands of feet beneath his muddy dress shoes, lies the 60 million tons of bituminous coal that provided Kaplan and the traditional energy industry with their unifying common ground. Or more accurately, their common gas.

“Regardless of where we all come from, we are saying, ‘How can we get together to utilize a wasted resource for the common good? Can we find common ground?” he says, flanked by a host of mine executives and energy consultants as they prepared to open the nation’s largest coal mine methane-to-electricity system. “This makes sense. It should be happening 100 times across the country, and I’m hoping we can be a model for that not only here but beyond.”

Aspen Skiing Co. (ASC) has been prodding the resort industry to do more than just cut its energy use. It has argued that the industry should be a model for corporate behavior when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint.

And it’s not shy about acting as that model. ASC dropped $5.5 million cash for the $6 million system, which harvests methane vented from the coal mine below.


GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY
The 340-employee Elk Creek Mine, like most coal mines, has long spewed the gas into the air. Methane is a troublesome yet volatile byproduct for a coal mine operator. It’s highly explosive and deadly to workers below. (In April 2010, 29 coal miners were killed in a methane gas explosion 1,000 feet deep in the Upper Big Branch Mine near Charleston, West Virginia, marking the worst mine accident in 40 years.)

As the mine delved deeper into its coal seam, the methane concentrations grew. The mine several years ago added special in-seam drainage systems to divert and vent the gas byproduct.

While simply venting the gas into the air contributes to the build-up of greenhouse gases that warm the earth, venting is the most economically viable option for a company focused on coal production. Mining companies typically don’t go scouting for business opportunities beyond mining.

Capturing methane for power was not worth the effort before Aspen Skiing and Tom Vessels came along, proposing a most unlikely partnership that would put a mining company critical of climate change science in bed with a mountain resort company that ardently trumpets the impending dangers of global warming.

Vessels, whose Denver-based Vessels Coal Gas Inc. built the Elk Creek Mine methane harvesting system and a similar 150-kilowatt generator on a dormant mine in Pennsylvania, says the partnership was a hard sell. He proposed methane capture to a dozen major coal mines before Elk Creek opened the door. Ultimately, he persuaded Elk Creek officials to let him install the generators on a small parcel next to the mine’s massive, methane-spewing vents.

Today, Elk Creek Mine methane is captured, cleaned, compressed and forced through three 1-megawatt piston-engine generators that feed Holy Cross Energy’s rural cooperative network. The system is the largest of its kind in the country, by a factor of 20. It churns out 24 million kilowatt hours of electricity every year, enough to power 2,000 homes.

It’s also roughly the same amount of electricity used to power Aspen Skiing’s 43 chairlifts, 13 restaurants and three hotels across all four of its Roaring Fork Valley resorts, some 70 miles northeast over the Elk Mountains.

Aside from generating electricity, the methane harvesting also keeps 96,000 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the equivalent of pulling more than 13,500 cars off the road every year. It’s not a perfect system; the 10-year-old Elk Mine still vents almost $1 million worth of unused methane into the atmosphere. But it’s a big improvement.

And that’s a key aim of Aspen Skiing’s vice president of sustainability, Auden Schendler. He says his company could have spent a fraction of the methane project cash on Renewable Energy Credits, but that would not have resulted in destroying methane flowing from several coal mines in Colorado’s Delta and Gunnison counties.

Randy Udall, an energy consultant and champion of energy sustainability who helped forge the unique methane harvesting program, hopes the Oxbow/ Aspen Skiing/Holy Cross partnership inspires similar projects across the country. “I really hope that this project will be expanded many times in the future,” Udall says.

Oxbow Mining executive vice president Mike Ludlow agrees. He says the partnership should inspire other small, yet very different businesses to work toward resource management goals. “Diverse cultures have come together for the common good,” he says.


EXXON, PACIFIC GAS, AND—ASPEN?
Aspen Skiing hopes so, too. It owns the Elk Creek project and sells the power to Holy Cross Energy. And ASC is pursuing similar methane projects at other coal mines in Colorado and Illinois.

While no other mountain resorts have approached the resort company concerning similar projects, Schendler says other companies are interested. They are all impressed to hear that the project will pay back Aspen Skiing’s $5.5 million investment in a mere seven to eight years, at which point it begins to cash flow at 12 percent, Schendler says. That’s considered an extremely good ROI for a power station.

“We think we can do a lot of these in the U.S.,” he says. “It’s a business opportunity that happens to target a key greenhouse gas. You can think of this as business diversification, and it could be a separate spinoff one day. The point of it would be to create a new revenue stream, not necessarily to buff out our ski operations.”

But cash returns are simply a nice reward for doing the right thing, Schendler adds. Aspen Skiing doesn’t necessarily expect other resorts to follow suit and forge partnerships with local coal mines.

“It’s just too hard for the average ski resort to pull something like this off,” says Schendler. It took some convincing to sway the mine executives. But ultimately, he says, they saw methane as a resource, and “they don’t want to waste a resource.”

Colorado’s congressional leaders joined in the project’s grand opening and applauded the partnership. Both Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet heralded the deal as an inspiration for across-the-aisle collaboration.

“This partnership shows that even when people have divergent interests, they can set aside their differences and work towards a common goal,” read a statement from Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet. “This joint effort is exactly what people want to see. Congress could learn a thing or two from this example.”

Schendler hopes that the winter sports industry will also learn something from his company’s across-the-mountains cooperation and ramp up political action on climate change.

“Climate change threatens our business,” Schendler says, quoting a 2012 study by Protect Our Winters and the Natural Resources Defense Council that shows the resort industry has endured $1 billion in losses due to warming temperatures. “The National Ski Areas Association has done some things, but not nearly enough given the scale of the problem. We are going to be pushing very, very hard on the trade groups to do much more than they currently are on climate activism, and if they don’t move we will find other trade groups that will.”

COW POWER
Aspen Skiing isn’t the only resort company tapping methane for power. Vermont’s Killington ski area this year began turning its K1 Express Gondola using electricity generated from methane. But while Aspen Skiing sources its methane from coal mines, Killington is gathering methane from cows.

Cow poop, to be precise.

Last fall, Killington joined a 10-year-old Green Mountain Power program that harvests methane from manure, yielding 300,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. In a state with the highest ratio of cows to residents, converting poop to power was a no brainer, says Killington’s Sarah Thorson.

“It’s just the coolest thing,” she says. “We are always looking for ways to improve our environment, and working with local Vermont farmers just fit perfectly for us.”

The Cow Power program enlists 13 Vermont dairy farmers, who gather manure from 10,000 cows. (Each bovine can plop 30 gallons a day.) The waste is mixed with wash water and fermented at 100 degrees Fahrenheit in anaerobic digesters at each farm for three weeks. The solids are used for livestock bedding, replacing plant fibers and sawdust. The liquids are used as fertilizer. And the methane powers generators that feed Green Mountain Power’s electrical grid and ultimately spin Killington’s gondola, capable of ferrying 2,000 riders an hour.

Killington joins regional colleges, a brewery, clothing maker, woodwork shop and a car dealership in the Cow Power program. The resort, which already offsets 100 percent of its power through the purchase of Renewable Energy Credits, plans to expand its role in the Cow Power program by powering the new 22,000 square-foot Peak Lodge with cow manure electricity. “This is just the first step,” Thorson says.