Inside NMC’s $20 Million Geothermal Project

A 96 percent reduction in carbon emissions: That’s the gain Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) expects to get from its new geothermal exchange system. The project has been under construction since May, with drill rigs punching two bores daily deep into the ground beneath the college’s Cherry parking lot. The system will ultimately be responsible for heating and cooling five key buildings on NMC’s campus.

Those buildings – Scholars Hall, the Osterlin Building, the Tanis Building, the Biederman Building, and the Health & Science building – have historically been heated by an aging power plant on campus. According to Troy Kierczynski, NMC’s vice president of finance and administration, the college identified the need to replace that facility all the way back in 2020, and has been working toward this geothermal project ever since.

“[The power plant] has four massive boilers, and three of them are over 50 years old,” Kierczynski tells The Ticker. “We saw that as a risk to the college, and knew we needed to come up with a project to address the issue and ensure stability of our buildings.”

In 2021, NMC hired the Holland-based GMB Engineering to do an energy study, looking at both “what it would cost to replace all of our current systems with the same status quo equipment” and what alternative energy options might look like.

The college had already gone the geothermal route for the Timothy J. Nelson Innovation Center, a $14.4 million, two-year rebuild of the college’s West Hall that opened in September 2020. That building, which runs on its own geothermal system, gave NMC a preview of the environmental benefits and energy savings a more comprehensive investment could achieve. The 2021 study, which indicated the aforementioned 96 percent carbon emissions reduction, prompted NMC to take the plunge.

Thanks to former United States Senator Debbie Stabenow, the college received $2.7 million in congressionally directed spending in 2023 “to seed the project,” Kierczynski says. Then, in February, the NMC Board of Trustees voted to allocate $5 million from the Boardman Lake Campus sale toward the project. Finally, in May, NMC’s contractor, the Christman Company, broke ground on the $20 million investment.

According to Kierczynski, a huge amount of work and infrastructure goes into building this type of system. All summer, the Christman Company has had five drill rigs operating at NMC’s Cherry Lot, drilling two bores per day. Each bore goes 465 feet deep and has a “U-shaped loop,” intended to carry a water-glycol mix deep into the ground and back again in a closed loop system. NMC can then harness the thermal energy in the ground to heat and cool its buildings.

“Once you get below 10 feet into the ground, the ground temperatures are stable, so this system allows us to take advantage of those consistent temperatures,” Kierczynski says.

All told, NMC needs 220 bores to create a bore field large enough to handle the heating and cooling for the five buildings the system will serve. For those doing the math, that means 38 miles of piping will soon be running beneath the Cherry Lot.

The parking lot itself is expected to reopen after the first phase of work finishes next month. Most of the system will be underground and out of sight, but the Cherry Lot will have one new feature: a “manifold building,” with windows that allow passerby to look in and see the tippy-top of the geothermal network.

“With this bore field, all those different pipes running into the ground are going to solidate into one supply pipe, and that's where the manifold building comes in,” Kierczynski explains. “So, you’ll be able to see all the pipes coming into that building, and really see how the system functions and distributes the energy. We see the opportunity to use this as a demonstration facility for our environmental and engineering classes, and some of the instructors have already reached out to me looking for a chance to show their students the facility once it's completed.”

While that visible part of the system should be finished by the end of October, the system itself won’t actually be up and running for another year.

“We're going to pause work until next summer,” Kierczynski says. “That's when we will be taking all the buildings offline that this system is going to serve, and redoing all the mechanical, HVAC, and electrical upgrades to those buildings to connect them to the system.” The exception is Osterlin, which will remain open next summer as a “flex space” for students and employees displaced by the other four building closures.

Once switched on, the geothermal system will start its long journey of paying for itself.

“We started the project with an assumption that it would take 25 years [to recoup the investment],” Kierczynski notes. “Now, that doesn't factor in that we can get 30-50 percent of the project cost back through the Inflation Reduction Act. So, we think the payback period could actually be as early as 20 years, which isn’t much when you consider that this system is built to last for decades. I call this a once-in-a-lifetime investment, because I think we're going to continue to see rewards from this system for the next 75 years.”

Pictured: The still-under-construction geothermal system at NMC's Cherry Lot.