At least as early as 2012 the Four Corners region was seen as a geothermal powerhouse where Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories assembled plans for energy development.
Colorado could tap orphaned oil and gas wells to supply hot water for electricity generation especially now that the state is falling behind on its own self-imposed emissions-reducing mandates.
Since 2019, when the legislature ordered the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to reprioritize health and environment as they considered drilling permits, the state has been adding provisions to advance one of the few untapped sources of clean energy in Colorado: geothermal. To get electricity from a geothermal plant in the Mount Princeton area to the Sangre de Cristo Electric Association, for example, the plant would have to tie into an Xcel Energy high-voltage transmission line running from near Dillon to just west of Salida and then into the San Luis Valley through two main lines, one owned by Xcel Energy and one shared with Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, according to Tri-State spokesman Lee Boughey. The Lost Creek group also worries about noise pollution and odor the proposed plant would create. Hits to the housing market, damaged real estate value, and viewshed impact round out the Lost Creek group’s complaints. [A fight is brewing to build Colorado’s first geothermal plant as neighbors oppose development]In 2021 the Bureau of Land Management sold a geothermal lease in Hidalgo County, New Mexico despite a 2016 blowout near a $43 million geothermal electricity plant erected by Cyrq Energy in 2013 when Republican Susana Martinez was governor. Cyrq Energy has four working geothermal projects including Lightning Dock Geothermal Power Plant near Animas. It's a 15.3 MW binary geothermal plant with two production wells and 7 injection wells that sells power to Public Service of New Mexico (PNM) with firm baseload power.
Using an enhanced geothermal system at its Project Red site in northern Nevada Google-financed Fervo Energy completed a full-scale, 30-day well test able to generate 3.5 megawatts or enough electricity to power over 2,600 homes full time. Fervo employs a hydro-shearing process and believes it can deliver about 400 megawatts by 2028 or enough electricity to power 300,000 homes at once from half a dozen other sites across the western US.
Whether Xcel survives as a company remains a mystery.
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