This is the third story in a three-part series, ‘Greener Pastures,’ which explores climate workforce development in rural Colorado.
There’s a field near the airport in the tiny town of Hayden, Colorado, that may look like just a flat expanse of patchy grass and dirt. But exciting things are happening there—if you look below the surface.
“You wouldn't even be able to see our project,” said town manager Matthew Mendisco. “Because it's all underground, basically.”
That project is the start of a major geothermal energy network built earlier this year.
“We just completed the first phase,” Mendisco said. “We'll be entering the second, third, fourth phase over the next three years.”
This renewable, carbon-free technology will eventually heat and cool up to 800 thousand square feet across 20 buildings in the new business park the town is developing at the site. The town expects it to attract new businesses—and jobs—in industries from manufacturing to outdoor recreation. The idea is to help Hayden weather economic disruption as the nearby coal mine and related coal-fired power plant shut down, and the town transitions away from its traditional coal economy over the next few years.
“The business park was built by the town as a coal transition project to help boost jobs,” Mendisco said.
Town officials hope businesses moving into the development will create 75 permanent jobs in the community. An additional five permanent jobs will be tied to maintaining the geothermal network.
After considering the options, town leaders chose to equip the site with a campus-wide geothermal energy network. With multiple state and federal incentives for geothermal factored in, it made the most financial sense for the town. The network will allow them to provide extremely efficient and low-cost heating and cooling to potential business park tenants.
“Over time, we get to save them anywhere from 50 to 70% of their HVHC costs,” Mendisco said. “How do you bring business to a rural area? We had to try to be as competitive as possible at every development avenue.”
The system works by drilling a complex of boreholes in the ground, up to 1,000 feet deep, to tap into stable subterranean temperatures. Pipes circulate water between the borefield and the buildings in the network. Heat pumps in the buildings exchange thermal energy with the circulating water to regulate indoor air temperatures.
Thanks to many of the same incentives that supported the project in Hayden, these types of thermal systems appear set to take off across Colorado.
“There are dozens of feasibility and design studies happening right now,” said Lauren Suhrbier, the strategic development director at Clean Energy Economy for the Region (CLEER), a Northwest Colorado climate advocacy group.
Most of those projects are still in pre-development. But communities where they’re percolating are eager to usher their geothermal plans into reality.
“They have climate goals and they have very high utility bills,” Suhrbier said. “When you combine the two—we are looking to decarbonize and we have extremely high utility bills, and we have grant money, it’s kind of the perfect storm.”
To date, Colorado has doled out more than $23 million in geothermal incentives to communities from Durango to Joes, a small town on the eastern plains. The activity was spurred on by Governor Jared Polis’s “Heat Beneath Our Feet” geothermal initiative and a series of bills passed in the statehouse between 2022 and 2023. Policymakers support geothermal as an important climate solution and, crucially, a way to create jobs in communities like Hayden, in the process of transitioning away from the coal economy.
“There is potential for a lot of growth of jobs—high paying jobs,” Suhrbier said, though most of those jobs won’t materialize until more geothermal development starts breaking ground, which is likely to happen over the next few years.
Workers poached from fossil fuel
Right now, most geothermal companies fill their rosters by poaching workers with directly transferable skills from the fossil fuel and water well drilling industries. That means most of those high-paying geothermal jobs are done by people like Billy Baker, a driller who honed his skills over a 15-year career in the oilfields.
He left the oilfields a few months ago to take a job as a geothermal driller with Bedrock Energy, the company hired to build the network in Hayden. The pay is good, Baker said, a little better than the oil and gas wages he used to earn. The work is also interesting, and not far off from what he’s used to doing.
“It still uses the same skillset that was used in the previous oil and gas world,” Baker said. “It’s just much more stable and it's better for the environment. It feels better to be a part of it.”
But some in the geothermal world are concerned that the industry will eventually outgrow this ready-made skilled workforce. Under President Biden, the Department of Energy called for a dramatic expansion of geothermal drilling. The Trump administration has embraced it, too. Policymakers have identified workforce availability as a key obstacle.
“If you're looking to scale the industry rapidly, you just have this massive bottleneck that it's more or less impossible to pass people through,” said Andrew Iliff, the policy director at HEET, a Boston-based geothermal nonprofit.
According to Iliff, it takes years of experience to become a licensed driller, but so far, no one is intentionally cultivating that workforce outside.
“There is neither a particularly formal training process nor a particularly scalable one,” he said. “That is not set up to bring new entrants into the industry.”
Several industry groups, including HEET and the Geothermal Drillers Association, propose to solve the workforce pipeline problem by forming a network of Geothermal Drilling Centers of Excellence across the country. The vision is for a system of mobile geothermal education centers that could partner with unions, community colleges and other institutions to offer expertise along with credentials, to make geothermal training more accessible to industry newbies.
“If this takes off in the way that we hope that it will,” Iliff said. “Ten to 15 years from now, folks at technical high schools and community colleges see it as an option.”
That would be good for geothermal-forward communities like Hayden, where Mendisco says there will be plenty of geothermal construction work in the future. The town has big plans to expand well beyond its first project at the business park and hopes to convert all municipal buildings to geothermal heating and cooling.
The city recently established a municipal utility to be the central geothermal developer and operator in the area. Even private developers have started showing interest in connecting to publicly owned geothermal infrastructure.
Building that infrastructure could be an opportunity to tap into Hayden’s native workforce as part of the town’s coal transition activities.
“Coal transition means we're thinking long term about workers and skill sets,” Mendisco said. “We have some of the most amazing, hardworking people in our community that work at the power plant and coal mines. All their skills are transferable to come do this.”
As the coal transition generation turns over in the coming decades, job opportunities in the geothermal industry will continue gaining traction.
“I think about the economics of this all the time because we're trying to build a diverse economy,” Mendisco said. "Geothermal's here to stay and its workforce is going to get bigger.”
This story was supported by the Higher Education Media Fellowship at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
