Basin Electric Power Cooperative s Dry Fork Station north of Gillette was one of the last coal-fired power plants built in the U.S., commencing operations in 2011. The $1.35 billion power plant has a generating capacity of 385 megawatts. (Dustin Bleizeffer).
Wyoming lawmakers are considering a suite of bills to help keep aging coal-fired power plants in the state in operation, including one measure that would allow the state to possibly take over ownership of a coal plant.
House Bill 259 – Public utilities-regulatory amendments would allow “the Wyoming Energy Authority, any other instrumentality of the state, a cooperative electric utility or a municipal utility” to purchase a coal-fired power plant otherwise slated for early retirement.
President Joe Biden’s Jan. 27 order to pause oil and gas leasing on federal lands hit Wyoming on Friday as the BLM postponed the auction of 383 parcels covering almost half a million acres.
The leasing pause will enable a review that’s part of an all-government fight against “a profound climate crisis” exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels, Biden’s order states. The BLM had scheduled the first-quarter 2021 sale of development rights on 476,506 acres for March 15 after deciding the sale would not “significantly affect the rate of change” in the environment. The agency did not say when a lease sale might be rescheduled.
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Satellite images of the land outside Artesia, New Mexico, show an arid brown landscape pockmarked with dots. Zoom in a bit, and a semiregular grid pattern appears, which could be mistaken for a suburban development. Zoom once more and the truth becomes clear: oil drilling sites, thousands of them. Each of these wells will one day need to be cleaned up: the borehole plugged and the land restored. When abandoned, wells like these will leak methane and other pollutants into the atmosphere for years.
More than 1,500 miles east and north of Artesia, among rolling hills of Appalachia, there are streams tinged orange by acid mine drainage and mountaintops flattened by companies seeking the hard, black coal seams underneath. Many of these companies are now bankrupt, or shadows of their former selves, while the industry’s legacy persists in billions of dollars in cleanup costs.
Credit Cooper McKim
A landowners group voiced objections to Eagle Specialty Materials, LLC s Eagle Butte mine application for a five-year permit renewal. The Powder River Basin Resource Council raised concerns in a requested informal conference regarding the company s reclamation ability, legal right to mine, and connection to violations. These all stack up to be fairly concerning issues that [the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality] should address and we hope that you will address in order to try and avoid a more serious problem in the future, said Jill Morrison, executive director of the Powder River Basin Resource Council.
The DEQ held the informal conference in order to help its director Todd Parfitt make a decision regarding the five-year permit renewal application of Eagle Butte.