Making use of methane: Aspen Skiing CO. finds unlikely ally in quest to reduce carbon footprint.

• Author: Best, Allen
• Position: QUARTERLY ENERGY REPORT

Give Torn 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?

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They're the yin and yang of business, Aspen 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."

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 harnissed to produce electricity, both...