By Bryan Leonard

Imagine that you are a private landowner interested in tapping oil or gas reserves beneath your property. You own one square mile of land, which is surrounded by alternating squares of federal and private land. You may even own many square miles of land, but they only meet at the corners, because you live in a part of the country called the checkerboard, which arose from federal land grants made to railroad companies in the 1800s.

Many of the landscapes beset with this fragmented ownership pattern also happen to hold vast energy resources, ranging from oil and gas to wind and solar. These resources—and the infrastructure needed to develop them—are often larger than the one-by-one-mile squares within the checkerboard, and the consequences for energy development can be significant due to regulatory spillover from adjacent public land.

Odds are, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is in charge of the federal squares around you, both the surface estate, meaning the right to use what is aboveground, and the mineral estate, meaning the rights to belowground resources. The BLM administers oil and gas development across 700 million acres of public land, but in the checkerboard, its decisions about which areas to lease and under what conditions—along with parallel decisions made by federal agencies regarding surface use—have a substantial impact on private land as well.

Analysis of energy development on public versus private land in Wyoming indicates that those impacts are likely economically negative but environmentally positive. That is, the complex web of regulations that governs federal land makes energy development significantly slower and more costly than on private lands, but is also correlated with lower rates of, for example, oil and water spills. These regulations include the 1920 Mineral Leasing Act, the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, and the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. The extent of these impacts varies based on the type of energy development, the amount of pre-existing infrastructure, and the nature of potential environmental impacts.

For example, conventional oil and gas drilling on private land is often not directly affected by federal restrictions within the checkerboard in Wyoming because the state’s regulations for drilling are built around the operation of “spacing units,” which are usually only a square mile in size. Hence, the typical scale of development happens to exactly match the size of the squares in the checkerboard, and operators and regulators can make decisions one square at a time without directly affecting the operations on adjacent squares. This is likely neither accidental nor intentional, but rather a natural result of the Public Land Survey System dividing the whole western US into a grid of square-mile sections. The federal government used this grid to delineate the size and boundaries of the railroad grants, and the system is close enough to the approximate scale for conventional drilling that it made the most sense administratively to define units this way.

The advent of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, however, has upended this reality. A typical lease for a horizontal fracking project is one mile wide and anywhere from two to three miles long, which would require a row of several adjacent squares on a checkerboard. Hence, an operator would need to lease both private and federal minerals to assemble the acreage for a single well pad. If regulation makes leasing federal mineral acreage in the checkerboard difficult or impossible, the adjacent private mineral rights may not be economical to extract on their own, significantly reducing their value.

Research published in The Economic Journal confirms this, comparing oil production under different ownership patterns during the 2010–2015 fracking boom in the Bakken shale formation that underlies the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Similar to the checkerboard, historical federal policies have created a mosaic of parcels of varying sizes and owners—fee simple lands with one private owner, allotted trust land co-owned by multiple owners (with an average of 17 owners per parcel), and land held by the Tribal government.

Of note, most of the single and co-owned parcels are less than the two square miles needed to make shale oil extraction profitable, because of how allotment played out under the Dawes Act of 1887. The act initiated privatization across many reservations, taking land that was communally owned by Tribes and giving it to individual Tribal members (leading to fee simple lands with single owners). At first, however, parcels were held in trust until allottees were deemed “competent.” When the Indian Reorganization Act ended allotment in 1934, many parcels became stuck in trust, and a practice of passing those parcels to all of an allottee’s heirs has led to allotted trust parcels with more than 100 owners today.

Comparing oil production per acre across 8,000 parcels on the reservation—based on their size, ownership type, and the fragmentation of surrounding land—indicates that joint ownership and small, interspersed parcels of federal and private land had the most significant negative impacts on productivity. In particular, the presence of a small government holding near a private parcel cut expected production nearly in half.

Interestingly, this analysis also indicated that there is a threshold at which the higher costs of developing on government land are surpassed by the transactional cost of doing business with many individual private landowners. So, in the checkerboard, where federal and private lands are equally fragmented, private land tends to be more productive, but on Fort Berthold, larger, contiguous blocks of government land were more productive than many small parcels with many different owners. In fact, if all the allotted trust lands on the reservation had been consolidated into Tribal ownership, estimates show that the same land might have produced $90 million more in initial royalty earnings during the boom.

Beyond the ownership of minerals themselves, and the need to have enough space to make production viable and economic, there is also the matter of access and transport. In this, the issuance of rights-of-way on federal land can have a substantial impact on all forms of energy development on adjacent private land. Even when conventional oil and gas projects are feasible within square-mile tracts of private minerals, rights-of-way must be obtained across adjacent federal lands to install the necessary roads and pipelines to move drilling SAME BOARD, NEW GAME equipment in and bring the oil and gas out. Land use plans, like the BLM’s Resource Management Plans, will typically designate areas as “open,” “avoidance,” and “closed” for rights-of-way, depending on other resource goals like protecting sensitive habitat, historic trail corridors, or viewsheds. Avoidance areas can make it very difficult to obtain a right-of-way permit, and even open areas can still be subject to additional stipulations.

This same problem creates roadblocks to renewable energy development, for two reasons. First, installing high-voltage transmission lines across federal lands has long required surface rights-of-way. Hence, even for relatively small, utility-scale solar installations that can be less than one square mile, the inability to connect projects to the grid can render checkerboard development infeasible. The second reason is that, in the absence of specific federal legislation to create a framework for renewable development on federal land, the BLM and US Forest Service have opted to issue permits for wind and solar development as rights-of- way grants. This means that any renewable energy project with a footprint larger than a square mile would require federal rights-of-way for development within the checkerboard.

Although the spillover effects of federal regulation onto private energy development can be large—especially in places like Wyoming where significant fossil fuel and renewable energy resources overlap the checkerboard—these impacts are often given short shrift or overlooked altogether in federal planning processes. For instance, the draft version of the recent Rock Springs Resource Management Plan in southwest Wyoming entailed significant changes to federal land management within the checkerboard, but the 1,500-page environmental impact statement contained no analysis of potential impacts to private lands. My calculations indicate that the BLM’s preferred alternative would have potentially blocked access to an additional 502,000 acres of private surface and 231,000 acres of private minerals. However, the final version of the plan dramatically reduced rights-of-way exclusions of federal land, leading to much more modest impacts in the checkerboard.

Energy resources—like many other valuable natural assets—are highly site-specific. A geologic formation either contains valuable fossil fuels and other minerals, or it doesn’t. Similarly, the renewable energy potential of a particular location is largely fixed, given current technology. The scale of these resources often does not conform to administrative boundaries and landownership patterns, especially in the checkerboard. When this happens, resources are often developed less productively, at higher cost, or not at all. As the US energy generation mix increasingly moves toward renewable sources with larger footprints, the importance of accounting for private-land impacts of federal regulations in the checkerboard will only grow.

Bryan Leonard is an associate professor of environmental and natural resource economics and the SER Chair of Environment and Natural Resources in the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources and the School of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming. He is also an affiliate of the Environmental Markets Lab at UC Santa Barbara and the Ostrom Workshop at the University of Indiana.

By Mike Koshmrl

A dozen or so wild horse advocates and photographers were gathered on a ridgeline near White Mountain in August 2024 when news started spreading that federal land managers got the OK from the courts to eliminate two entire herds, and a part of another, from 2.1 million acres of the area known as the Red Desert. Cheyenne resident and amateur photographer Robyn Smith was immediately bummed. “Argh, oh crap,” she said. “That’s a lot of horses.” More than 3,000 horses, US District Court of Wyoming Judge Kelly Rankin had ruled, could go.  

The group of activists were gathered to oversee an unrelated horse roundup in the so-called checkerboard region of southwest Wyoming, a 40-mile-wide swath of land where one-square-mile blocks of private and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property meet at the corners. Fences are few in the region, so thousands of horses pass on and off the private land daily. These walkabouts, and the underlying land ownership pattern, have proven a land management quagmire that has been the source of a half century of conflict, despite sporadic coordination.  

Rankin’s ruling in favor of horse removal was just the latest development in the debate over whether and how many mustangs should be allowed to roam the checkerboard. The back and forth involves woolgrowers and cattle ranchers who don’t want the free-roaming horses on their private land, the BLM, an agency that’s required by the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act to maintain them on the federal property, and wild horse advocates, who want to protect the animals and health of the herds.  

Some 14 months later, however, the herds slated for elimination were still there. They’d even grown larger. The reason is litigation, which has dominated the 54 years since horses in the Red Desert became federally protected. As herd sizes continuously exceed goals, frustrations have grown. But middle-ground solutions have failed to gain traction as the camps in the checkerboard horse dispute have become gridlocked, leaving today’s land managers and horses at an impasse. 

Before 1971, when the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act passed, ranchers in the checkerboard who run cattle and sheep as a collective under the Rock Springs Grazing Association took wild horse management into their own hands. “They removed excess numbers, and at that time they went to slaughter, for the most part,” says Christi Chapman, who’s a longtime wild horse advocate: She co-founded the all-volunteer Wyoming Wild Horse Improvement Partnership. “They did a good job, because they cared about the land and they wanted to have enough room for their livestock. But they liked the horses—they didn’t want to see them go completely away.”  

After the Wild Horse Act passed, management shifted to federal officials. The law protects free-roaming horses from “capture, branding, harassment, or death,” prohibits commercial sale for slaughter, and declares them “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” It passed both chambers of Congress unanimously and was shepherded by the matriarch of wild horse advocacy, Velma Johnston, who was known as Wild Horse Annie.  

At that time, wild horses and burros roamed free on roughly 54 million acres of federal land, mostly BLM property. The new federal law didn’t demand blanket protections for equines everywhere. Land managers inventoried the West, looking at factors like vegetation and water, and ultimately defined 179 “herd management areas” covering nearly 32 million acres in 10 states where the landscape was considered able to sustainably support horses. In another 20-million-plus inhabited acres, free-roaming horses weren’t thought of as practical long-term residents because of habitat constraints or resource scarcity—these were labeled “herd areas” and are not managed for horses. In southwest Wyoming’s Red Desert and Green River Basin, nine HMAs were established, some of which included hundreds of square miles of the checkerboard.  

A key provision of the Wild Horses and Burros Act instructs agencies to “remove stray wild horses from private lands as soon as practicable” when asked by a landowner, who are prohibited from removing or destroying horses on their own. That made the broad swath of interchanging public and private land that forms the checkerboard tricky, and negotiations essential. Shortly after it passed, members of the Rock Springs Grazing Association met with Johnston and the BLM to discuss management for horse herds in the region. In the new era, the association had plenty of incentive to work with the BLM to keep horse numbers in check. Their livestock depended on the same rangeland and would have to compete for forage with the free-roaming horses, which can reach 1,000 pounds and face little predation. “They had a great conversation,” Chapman says. They even came to terms on population targets.  

But the horses thrived and the herds grew in the absence of rancher management—unchecked, herds can swell by 20 percent annually. The association’s ranchers tried to get the BLM to step in with large roundups to no avail, and by the late 1970s they sued. A negotiated legal settlement came out of it, and that deal was for four herds totaling no more than 1,600 animals in the Red Desert region. “BLM-Wyoming complied without delay, but it took from 1980 to 1985 to reduce the number of horses from almost 7,000 to 1,600,” Rock Springs Grazing Association Manager Don Schramm testified to Wyoming lawmakers in 2023. The herds had sprawled across the landscape and gathering them was difficult and costly—as was finding a home for them, because the free-roaming animals could no longer be killed.  

Horse populations fluctuated in the two decades that followed. Roundups would drive numbers down to near the 1,600-animal target, but then years would go by. “They would double by the time of the next roundup,” Schramm said in his testimony. “We did our best. We had the support of the state, BLM, wild horse interest groups, the Washington office employees, administrative officers and RSGA. It was a team effort.” But it wasn’t enough, and the wild horses spent far more time above the agreed-upon population limits than near or below the threshold.  

“I will say this: I feel like it’s not the BLM’s fault,” Chapman says. She pinpointed two reasons, naming constant litigation and a lack of resources for federal land managers to carry out their horse-removal duties. Wild horse management has proven to be an extraordinary drain on BLM coffers. Roundups, which rely on helicopters and big teams of wranglers, are pricey, but most of the expense goes toward paying for the horses to live out their days. Some rounded-up mustangs are adopted and domesticated, but most end up in long-term corrals and in off-range pastures where board, feed, and veterinary bills cost more than $100 million annually.  

Finally, in 2010, frustrated ranchers revoked their consent to tolerate horses on private land in the checkerboard, asking that the herds be removed entirely. The BLM went along, citing the act, and even sought to remove herds from the public land squares interspersed throughout the checkerboard. This would have been an almost unprecedented move. While roundups eliminating horses from the “herd areas” are somewhat routine, the designated herds have remarkable staying power. 

“BLM has only zeroed out a herd two times in history,” says Bill Eubanks, an attorney who has represented horse advocacy plaintiffs in the Red Desert dispute for over a decade. The Colorado and Nevada herds that were eliminated faced dire straits from a landscape that lacked enough resources for their survival. Animals were “emaciated,” Eubanks says, and federal law explicitly permits removing herds “in order to preserve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance” in areas. “The agency ultimately documented that they could not keep a genetically viable, self-sustaining wild horse herd,” Eubanks says, “because it was just impossible.”  

The rationale for getting rid of the Red Desert herds was starkly different. It hinged on the RSGA asserting its rights to have stray wild horses removed from private lands as soon as possible, and the assumption that herd elimination was the only reasonable way to do that in the checkerboard.  

The association sued BLM again three years later, and out of it came another settlement agreement. This one called for eliminating two herds and shrinking two others. Wild horse advocacy groups, represented by Eubanks, got involved with their own lawsuit, arguing violations of the Wild Horse Act, National Environmental Policy Act and other federal laws. After a federal district court defeat, the horse advocates prevailed when the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2016 that the federal agency broke the law by treating the entire checkerboard as if it were private property.  

Appellate Judge Monroe McKay and the court acknowledged the “practical realities of the checkerboard” and the need for BLM to find a “workable solution,” but still faulted the agency for ignoring a key provision of the act. “It seems to me that the only way the BLM can ultimately lawfully achieve its [ecological balance] duty to maintain wild herds and prevent destruction of viability caused by over grazing on public lands is to go back to step one and make appropriate judgments by redetermining the HMAs without the non-permissive use of private lands,” McKay wrote.  

While the BLM went back to the drawing board, the herds kept steadily growing. In the winter of 2022–2023, the federal agency commissioned an infrared aerial survey that found roughly 4,700 horses in the Red Desert herds. Roundups followed and a similar assessment at the end of 2024 found just shy of 3,700 animals.  

Around the West, the pace of roundups has long been inadequate to keep up with population growth, in some areas resulting in ecological harm rather than ecological balance. As of spring 2025, the number of free-roaming horses and burros nationwide was approaching 75,000—nearly triple the BLM’s targeted numbers. Nevada, which hosts nearly half of them, has been the poster child of feral horse overpopulation run amok, and its state biologists have reported that the equines eat more forage than all the native ungulate species, like elk and mule deer, combined.  

Impacts to wildlife have also been documented in Wyoming. A University of Wyoming-led research team examined how free-roaming horses influence sage grouse and found evidence that overpopulated Red Desert herds are hurting the imperiled birds’ survival rates by breaking up sagebrush, increasing bare ground and denuding watering holes. Wildlife managers on the Wind River Indian Reservation—which isn’t subject to the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act—reported dramatic, almost overnight changes after rounding up nearly 8,000 horses in 2022 and 2023. “It was at an ecological crisis point,” US Fish and Wildlife Service Supervisory Biologist Pat Hnilicka said at the time. “If something wasn’t done, there was no turning back.”  

In the Red Desert, near where her family ranches, Chapman has seen feral horses eat themselves out of a home during periods of drought and succumb to severe winters. It was especially hard to watch, she says, during the winter of 2022–2023. “We found families of horses dead within feet of each other,” Chapman says. “It was just really sad.” 

Wild horse enthusiasts, however, contend that equines are being unfairly scapegoated when it comes to impacts on the land. Casper College instructor Chad Hanson, who’s an avid horse photographer and writer, says that their impacts on grasslands are “red herrings”—arguments intended to distract from more significant concerns. “The BLM’s rangeland assessments make it clear: Livestock represent the most significant threat to the health and vitality of our public lands,” says Hanson, who joined the checkerboard horse lawsuit as a plaintiff.  

But there is a distinction between how horse and livestock impacts to rangeland are handled, according to Jim Magagna, a longtime lobbyist for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. “It’s the only major species of animals out there that isn’t managed,” he says of Red Desert horses. “We manage our livestock—we harvest our calves and lambs every fall. We manage our wildlife through hunting seasons.” Because wild horses, legally, are neither livestock nor wildlife, the BLM’s toolkit for managing them is much more constrained.  

Attempting to remedy the court’s concerns after the 2016 loss, federal authorities prepared an environmental impact statement and updated its resource management plans for the Rock Springs and Rawlins areas.  “We’ve been trying to come up with a solution,” says Brad Purdy, a senior advisor for the BLM’s Wyoming office. The federal agency’s analysis assessed different scenarios, in part demonstrating “adequate forage, water, cover and space” to support horses if the trimmed-down herds were confined to solid-block public land outside the checkerboard. Still, there were concerns the herds would easily drift back onto private land.  

Ideas for solutions included fencing the checkerboard and keeping horses on public ground, but that would require extensive fencing that would bisect big game migration routes and could even harm sage grouse prone to striking them. It was called “not technically feasible” and the gargantuan task was dismissed. 

The assessment also considered and dismissed a land swap to consolidate private and public property. “For a land exchange, you’ve got to have a willing partner—and I don’t think we had a willing partner,” says Purdy, the BLM-Wyoming senior advisor. “I’m not saying that in a negative way. It’s completely up to private landowners whether they want to engage in a land exchange with the Bureau of Land Management.”  

The option the agency ultimately landed on was to get rid of the Great Divide Basin and Salt Wells Creek herds, which dwell in areas that are respectively 48 percent and 72 percent checkerboard. The northwestern portion of the Adobe Town Herd, an area that’s 42 percent checkerboard, would also be lopped off and managed for zero horses. In total, the contested plans called for ridding roughly 2.1 million acres—an area about the size of Yellowstone National Park—of more than 3,000 free-roaming horses. “When you weighed it all out, this was the most informed and the best decision, I think, the BLM could have made,” Purdy says.  

Initially, the courts were on board, upholding the agency’s plans. Rankin’s August 2024 opinion—the ruling that bummed out Smith and the other roundup observers—recognized the BLM’s bind of having to remove the private land horses and having no practical means of keeping others on checkerboarded public land. Repped by Eubanks, horse advocacy groups and individuals again appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.  

By spring 2025, BLM was already setting in motion its renewed plans, but history repeated itself, and again the 10th Circuit put a stop to the roundups. Like nearly a decade prior, the court faulted BLM for not demonstrating how removing all horses from public land in the checkerboard is necessary to achieve a “thriving natural ecological balance”—language from the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. “They said it’s the guiding principle of the act, as Congress wrote it, and you can’t just ignore that,” Eubanks says.  

Federal officials turned heads by announcing they were proceeding with the elimination roundups despite the appeals court ruling, sparking another lawsuit, then another—and eventually an assurance that nothing would happen before summer 2026. 

So several thousand Red Desert horses remain on the landscape, and land managers, stockgrowers and horse advocates are at a stalemate. “This whole controversy, it’s been a standoff for 15 years,” Chapman says. “I’ve been here since day one, right in the middle of it.” The 10th Circuit’s summer 2025 opinion instructed BLM to go back to federal district court to resolve concerns about “ecological balance,” but BLM’s earlier plans stated there was no ecological justification for removing the Red Desert herds. There was no scarcity of forage, water, cover and space, according to its own analysis.  

Pro-horse plaintiffs say the stakes are high. Herds around the West could be at risk if BLM prevails in removing whole herds because of the checkerboard’s private land, Eubanks says. Every herd management area in the country contains private inholdings or non-federal land. “Where do you draw the line?” the attorney says. “There’s not really any coherent reason why it could not apply elsewhere. Does BLM see this [argument] as specific to these herds, or is this really something that they’re testing out? We don’t know.”  

Meanwhile, ranchers’ patience has been exhausted after decades of legal disputes and the BLM failing to achieve targeted numbers. Magagna, at the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, sees few prospects for coexisting with free-roaming horses in the long-term. “At this point, the only way that the landowners could be satisfied outside of a total removal would be if they were reduced down to [agreed-upon] numbers, with a firm guarantee that the horses would be held at those numbers,” he says.  

Others say the potential solution was prematurely dismissed by the BLM. “I think the right solution is for the federal government to have land swaps with the checkerboard landowners and consolidate the private lands and the public lands,” says Erik Molvar, a biologist who directs the Western Watershed Project, an environmental group that focuses on negative impacts of livestock grazing. “Once you consolidate the private lands, then under the Wild Horse and Burro Act, the wild horses that stray can be removed back onto the public lands—and the private landowners can have wild-horse-free private lands.”  

As long as a decade ago, Eubanks was encouraging BLM to consider a land swap as a mutually palatable solution so that the Rock Springs Grazing Association would be unencumbered by horses, which would then dwell only on solid-block public lands. “Not one time has BLM even explored the idea—they just refuse to even consider whether it’s a viable option,” Eubanks says. “What’s especially peculiar is BLM does land exchanges of substantial size. They’re the agency that specializes in these federal/non-federal land swaps for precisely this type of purpose.”  

For now, the steady stream of litigation is keeping the Red Desert horse dispute in flux. As this story was going to press, the federal agency and Rock Springs Grazing Association had not shown their hand, declining interviews about legal next steps to satisfy the court’s concerns about “ecological balance.”  

“They could interpret the 10th Circuit opinion differently than I do,” says Eubanks. “We have very little intel on how they’re going to approach these issues. It may be that the outcome of their evaluation sparks more litigation. I’m sure that would be a surprise to no one.” 

This story was created in partnership with WyoFile, an independent nonprofit news organization that covers Wyoming. 

Mike Koshmrl is a Lander-based journalist who reports on wildlife and natural resource issues for WyoFile. 

Header image: Research in Wyoming has indicated that wild horses may threaten sage grouse survival rates by breaking up sagebrush, increasing bare ground, and denuding watering holes. Wild horse enthusiasts counter that horses are being unfairly scapegoated for environmental degradation, laying the blame on livestock instead. (Allegra Keenoo and Jacqueline Alderman/Bureau of Land Management)

By Jill Bergman

There are places in Wyoming where the sky is more imposing than the land. The force of wind and emptiness define this spare country. This is the home of sagebrush, prairie dogs, and coyotes. This is the home of golden eagles that soar on thermals, watching the ground for their next meal.

It is also the site of major wind energy development, with hundreds of turbines already turning and many more proposed. Wind power is an important solution for helping slow climate change and can provide new jobs, low-priced energy, and plenty of economic benefits for windy Wyoming. With new transmission lines planned, Wyoming’s wind power generation and connectivity is set to increase dramatically.

This has Mike Lockhart worried. Landscapes filled with wind turbines, each blade moving about 150 miles per hour at its tip, are deadly for bats, smaller birds, and raptors including eagles. Power lines threaten electrocution, and development means habitat loss, especially for golden eagles, which are particularly sensitive to human intrusion.

Lockhart, a wildlife biologist who started studying golden eagles in 1972, believes that “climate change is the most pressing environmental challenge in human history.” He supports clean energy development. But, he says, the transition away from fossil fuels can’t come at the expense of sensitive and valuable wildlife while there are alternatives available. He has spent the last decade collecting the data needed to keep that from happening, trying to protect eagles from being overlooked in the rush to increase wind energy generation.

In the Shirley Basin near a proposed wind farm, Lockhart drives a remote dirt road. He is looking for the perfect spot to set a trap for a wild eagle so he can examine it and fit it with a tracking device like a tiny backpack. Lockhart works with the US Geological Survey and Conservation Science Global Inc. with funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. In the last eight years he has captured 185 golden eagles and fit 122 with tracking devices on breakaway harnesses. Of those, eighty-nine were captured on or near wind project areas and proposed sites. The huge amount of data collected should help identify which wind projects will put eagles at risk.

When he finds the right place, Lockhart moves quickly. Eagles are so observant and wary that if they see him setting up his trap they will stay away. From the back of the pickup, he brings out his working partner of five years, a golden eagle with sharp curved claws, intelligent eyes, and one wing that was broken in the past and never healed properly. Although they have a comfortable relationship, and Lockhart cares for her like a family member, this eagle doesn’t have a name. She is a wild bird, not a pet.

This golden is a lure eagle, meaning her presence on the ground next to a dead prey animal will tempt other eagles to investigate. Although she can’t fly, Lockhart thinks she enjoys being out on the plains on trapping days, socializing with other birds. He tethers her near a game camera, a frozen jackrabbit, and a specially modified leg trap that only a golden eagle’s weight can trigger. Then he drives far away to watch through binoculars.

This part of Wyoming is expansive and uninhabited except for a distant ranch tucked against the foothills of the Shirley Mountains. There are no trees to block the view as Lockhart keeps one eye on the trap and one eye on the sky.

“Shirley and Laramie Basins—and adjoining hills and mountain slopes—are one of the most important habitat areas for golden eagles in North America,” he says. They support large, year-round eagle populations and are a major migration corridor and overwintering area for migratory eagles.

He has seen this spending hours poring over the GPS data from eagles he is tracking. The eagles are individuals to him; he knows the habits of each one. The longest migrator winters in Raton, New Mexico, and summers in Denali National Park in Alaska. Another eagle, tagged in 2016, successfully reared young for four years. Then, months after a wind project became operational, a turbine killed the eagle while it still had an eaglet in the nest. Wind turbines have also killed three other eagles Mike was tracking. The US Fish and Wildlife Service requires companies to check for eagle nests within a two-mile radius of newly proposed wind sites, but Lockhart says there are known nests well within that radius of wind turbines now.

It is federally illegal to kill or harm eagles, but difficult, if not impossible, for wind projects to avoid. Worst case, these eagle deaths go unreported unless discovered and prosecuted. Best case, companies operating turbines can seek incidental take permits, which allow a certain number of eagle deaths to happen without a fine. For the permit, the companies must have plans to minimize eagle collisions and enhance their conservation in other ways, like employing spotters who can have a string of turbines temporarily stopped if they see an eagle in the area. There is also new technology, the IdentiFlight system, which combines cameras with artificial intelligence to identify birds and their flight path and shuts down turbines where needed. Power companies can also retrofit power poles to prevent eagle electrocutions.

According to Lockhart, both spotters and the camera system are “far from fool-proof,” and “must not be used as a crutch to justify new projects in prime habitat.” That means stopping new developments in these important areas of the Shirley and Laramie Basins.

His data show that “most of Albany and Carbon counties [the location of Shirley and Laramie Basins] are exceptionally important habitat for golden eagles.” Also, they already have wind energy projects that cause significant eagle deaths. “Increased wind development,” he says, “will exponentially, profoundly impact both resident and migratory populations.” Lockhart believes there are alternative locations available, that aren’t in dense eagle habitat but still have enough wind to generate clean energy. Now is the time to include this valuable wildlife in the equation along with the other benefits, so that green energy isn’t devaluing a segment of the natural world while simultaneously trying to benefit the natural world.

Standing in the sparse, wind beaten landscape in the afternoon, Lockhart decides it’s time to pack up, even though he’s disappointed he hasn’t caught an eagle all day. Nothing is guaranteed out here—for the biologist looking for an eagle, or the eagles looking for a meal. Later, he’ll study the camera images to see which birds visited the site and the drama that unfolded around the jackrabbit bait while he was driving around other parts of the valley. For now, he kneels to let his lure eagle step onto the gauntlet protecting his arm. She flaps her huge wings and settles. As Lockhart stands, he strokes her feathers, a gesture of appreciation before the drive back home.

Jill Bergman, an artist and printmaker living in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, is originally from windy Wyoming. For years, she has worked to incorporate her interest in environmental issues and public engagement into her art practice. Learn more and see her artwork at www.jillbergman.com.

By Randy Rea

The Yampa River Basin is in trouble. Revered for its wild and unencumbered nature, the Yampa River starts high in the Flat Tops Wilderness at around 12,000 feet, flows down through the resort town of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and meanders westward roughly two hundred and fifty miles to its confluence with the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument. It has mostly avoided major damming, making it a prized river for recreation, including fishing, white water rafting, kayaking, and more. The Yampa River also serves as a critical water source for industries like ranching, farming, and energy generation. Historically, the Yampa’s annual flows have been sufficient to satisfy all its users, but a twenty-two-year megadrought exacerbated by climate change has left the West drier than any time in the last 1,200 years. With temperatures increasing, snowpack decreasing, and soil moisture plummeting, people and industries reliant on the Yampa have had their headgates shut and their river rafts forced ashore.

Simultaneously, plans to close two coal-fired power plants in the Yampa River Basin have moved forward. In the face of growing political, social, and economic pressures, utility companies like Tri-State Energy Generation and Xcel Energy are making hard decisions to transition their energy generation portfolios away from coal and toward renewable assets. Over the next eight years, Craig Station and Hayden Station, stalwart employers of rural northwest Colorado, will systematically retire their power units. While these retirements will undoubtedly have a drastic impact on the rural communities whose citizens work at the power plants (and the local coal mines that provide the coal), the closures present an unprecedented opportunity for creative solutions to both water shortages and economic hardship in the Yampa River Basin.

While pursuing a joint law and master’s degree at the University of Wyoming College of Law and Haub School of Environment & Natural Resources, I have taken a hard look at the Yampa River and how Colorado water law can be used to bolster its stream flow and offer auxiliary benefits to local communities. The way I see it, the Yampa River Basin has two problems: first, it is losing its largest employers and bedrock economic industry; second, its river and riparian ecosystem is deteriorating rapidly. Coincidentally, the first problem may offer a solution to the second. These large, industrial employers consume tremendous volumes of Yampa River water, and soon will no longer need it. So how can the Yampa River make a comeback? How can the water that supported the energy industry for over fifty years be repurposed to support an evolving rural community and the environment? One possible answer is by transferring water rights from these coal-fired power plants back to the state in the form of instream-flow water rights.

Legally, a water right is a type of property right; you own the right to use the water like you own the right to use a piece of land. Collectively, Craig and Hayden station have water rights to consume approximately 21,000 acre-feet of water for energy generation each year. A single acre-foot is roughly 326,000 gallons and, for comparison, the entire city of Steamboat Springs consumes approximately 3,000 acre-feet of treated water annually. Colorado’s rivers and streams are governed by the prior appropriation doctrine, two pillars of which are “beneficial use” and “temporal priority.” Water rights are only legally recognized for certain, specified types of use that are considered “beneficial” (for example irrigation) and it matters when they are first granted. A common catch phrase for prior appropriation is, “first in time, first in right.” This means those who obtain a water right before others will have senior priority to the water. Craig Station’s water right dates back in priority to 1951; Hayden Station holds a very senior water right with a priority date of 1897. These senior water rights have more bite than a simple decree on paper. If a river’s flow is so diminished that there is less water in the river than there are water rights to fulfill, like the Yampa River today, the state will begin administering water diversions based on priority dates. Thus, senior water right holders will be able to divert and use their entire allotment of water before junior appropriators may take any water out of the river. It pays to be first.

Interestingly, a water right is not exclusive to out-of-stream water users. Colorado is a leader in the West for a legal concept called “instream-flow water rights.” Instream-flow rights grant a property right to the environment, meaning the state can designate a particular stream segment with a minimum volume of stream flow and attach a water right to it. Just like any other appropriator on a stream, an instream-flow water right is a legally protected property interest and subject to the same priority administration in times of low flow. Instream-flow water rights are unique because they expand the definition of “beneficial use” beyond diversion, to include keeping water in the stream for environmental conservation. The General Assembly first authorized the Colorado Water Conservation Board to appropriate water rights for instream-flows in 1973, in order to protect the environment and conserve waters of the state. Since passing the Instream Flow Act, Colorado has protected 1,684 stream segments covering 9,720 miles of stream and 482 natural lakes.

For the Yampa River, an instream-flow water right could not only protect the river but also maintain the necessary water levels for four native fish species listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Colorado pikeminnow, razorback sucker, bonytail chub, and humpback chub. Punctuated by rushing, high-flow snowmelt from April to June, the Yampa River distributes nutrients and sediment and physically rearranges cobble bars and river banks, making suitable eddies and channels for spawning and rearing young fish. These type of flows make the Yampa one of the most important tributaries in the Upper Colorado River Basin for the recovery of these species. When flows are reduced, cascading effects disturb and diminish important recovery habitat.

Meanwhile, the rural communities along the Yampa River’s banks are set for a large economic down-turn. In Craig, Tri-State Energy Generation and Colowyo provide over $9 million in tax revenue and hundreds of high-paying jobs to the local residents. These business work in unison; Colowyo coal mine provides the coal that Tri-State burns to generate electricity. The tax revenues they provide are critical to support the school district, fire district, and other Moffat County municipal government functions, but when Craig Station shuts down, so too goes the tax revenue. While Tri-State is making significant investments in the community to aid in the transition, few things can replace such a singularly important economic pillar. More than likely, these towns will need to rely at least in part on the Yampa River and the intrinsic value of their natural landscapes to draw recreation tourism and community investments. An instream-flow water right on the Yampa could protect the area’s natural value and preserve the conditions needed for recreation like rafting, fishing, and kayaking.

So, how would it work? The Colorado instream-flow statutes establish clear and flexible options for transferring water rights for environmental purposes. While all instream-flow rights must be administered by the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Colorado Water Trust (CWT) is a statewide non-profit dedicated to ushering transfers of existing water rights back to the environment. In over twenty years the CWT has restored 13.5 billion gallons of water to 588 miles of rivers and streams throughout the state and, if this option lifts off, the CWT could take the lead. A permanent water right transfer requires a formal application to the Colorado water court and the CWT is versed in making transitions seamless.

Even if the details of a formal transfer could not be worked out by the time the plants officially shutdown, Colorado statutes allow for temporary, informal transfers through water right leases. This option could allow the stakeholders of each plant to generate revenue to aid in the transition process and provide vast volumes of water back to the Yampa during the lease, while continuing to weigh their long-term options.

While a transfer of water rights to instream-flows would provide a windfall of needed water to the Yampa, it may not be the most likely of options. First is the issue of funding. The Colorado Water Conservation Board is earmarked an annual budget of $1 million to acquire new instream-flow water rights, but it is not enough to complete an unprecedented, bona fide purchase of the Craig and Hayden Station water rights, which are potentially worth more than $100 million. An upfront purchase would require alternative funding sources, such as Great Outdoors Colorado, the Colorado Conservation Trust Fund, non-profits dedicated to the conservation of rivers, or additional Colorado General Assembly appropriations.

Additionally, there are many other competing entities for water in the region, like Colorado’s front range cities. Pumping water from the Yampa back over the Continental Divide has been proposed before and fought down multiple times. However, with the front range’s ever-growing demand, this may be an inevitable solution to quenching the greater Denver metro area. Another viable option would be for the Hayden and Craig Station owners to sell and transfer their water rights to another entity in the energy industry, like nuclear or hydrogen energy generation. These forms of energy generation technology are gaining steam in the region and require just as much water as coal-based energy generation. While these options may serve economic purposes for each plant’s respective stakeholders, they fail to recognize the Yampa River is dying for more water.

The West is in an unprecedented time. Water, not only in the Yampa River Basin, but also the broader Colorado River Basin, is in severe decline and every drop counts. Because no person can create more water, we must be willing to think outside of the box as to how water is divvied up. While it might be a long-shot, the retirement of coal-fired power plants possessing massive water rights provides such an opportunity. Craig Station and Hayden Station are just two of several coal-fired power plants in the Colorado River Basin facing retirement, and can serve as important case studies to alleviate the pressures on the very rivers and streams they have relied on for decades. The Yampa provided water to make their businesses possible, perhaps it is just to return that water at a time when the river desperately needs it.

Randy Rea is life-long admirer of the Colorado River. Growing up in the lower basin he vacationed just above Imperial Dam; now living in the upper basin, he has developed a passion for the river’s headwaters. Randy holds a J.D. and M.A. from the University of Wyoming with a focus on water law and water right transfers.

By Emilene Ostlind

Wyoming has long produced the most coal of any US state and lands in the top ten states for natural gas and oil production. In a fossil fuel driven economy, all that mineral wealth should make Wyoming rich, and sometimes it truly does. Consider the first decade of the 2000s when hydraulic fracturing opened up previously inaccessible natural gas reserves. In 2008 Wyoming’s economy—as measured by gross domestic product, personal incomes, state revenues, or number of jobs—flourished. State coffers were overflowing and citizens across the state benefitted from the bounty. 

But then in 2012 natural gas prices were low and the state economy crashed. By 2015 it was up again. In 2016 it dropped. It improved somewhat through 2019. In 2020 it took another hit, leaving Wyoming’s GDP down more than 15 percent compared to 2008, while US GDP had grown more than 18 percent over those 12 years. 

Sometimes it feels like Wyoming’s economy is cursed. For every boom, there is a bust, leaving statewide institutions and citizens hurting. The crashes trigger layoffs in both private businesses and state agencies, with painful cuts to public services such as schools, mental health clinics, rest areas, and more. In 2020 the University of Wyoming, where I work, prepared to slash nearly 80 jobs and even whole departments. Which is why, when I heard of an economic concept called the “natural resource curse,” I wondered whether it haunts Wyoming. If it does, could looking at Wyoming’s economy through the lens of the natural resource curse help us bolster our economy, create resilience, and buoy the lives of our citizens? 

For decades, economists associated natural resource richness with wealth. The thinking went, a country or region with lots of natural resources—say, timber, minerals, fisheries, or farmlands—could parlay those into economic development and grow its citizens’ incomes to a higher standard of living. This played out, after all, in countries like Australia, the United States, and Great Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

But then, in the 1970s the Netherlands discovered and started to develop natural gas. Rather than enriching the country, the boom came with economic stagnation: unemployment rose, manufacturing declined, and corporate investment fell. This brought the link between natural resource richness and prosperity into question. 

After that, economists began to notice similar patterns in other regions. Geographer Richard Auty observed that economic development in countries with abundant natural resource wealth—Peru, Zambia, Papua New Guinea, and others—lagged that of countries with fewer natural resources such as Taiwan and Korea. He coined the term “resource curse” in 1993 to describe this correlation. Following that work, Harvard economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner examined dozens of countries’ economies for the years 1970–89 and found, again, the more a country depended on natural resources to fuel its economy, the weaker its growth had been.  

Then economists Elissaios Papyrakis and Reyer Gerlagh looked at data for the United States from 1986 to 2001 and found that states with big natural resource economies like Wyoming, Alaska, Louisiana, and Oklahoma had slower per capita growth in their GDPs than states less dependent on natural resources, such as New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Colorado. When University of Wyoming economists Alex James and David Aadland examined over 3,000 US counties for the years 1980–95, they found “clear evidence that resource-dependent counties exhibit more anemic economic growth.” They ended their paper with a case study of the counties in Maine and Wyoming and concluded, “Wyoming’s decision to specialize in natural resource extraction and production appears to have limited its relative potential for economic growth, at least for the sample periods since 1980.” 

Again and again, increasingly rigorous analyses of regions around the world revealed a natural resource curse. But, “There was a metamorphosis in the resource development literature throughout the 2000s,” says economist Alex James, who earned his PhD at the University of Wyoming and is now associate professor of economics at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. Researchers, himself included, realized there had been flaws in early natural resource curse studies. For one thing, ideas about the natural resource curse emerged from data spanning a time when the price of natural resource commodities was generally falling around the world. Further, for all those regions with lackluster growth, it’s not clear that natural resource dependence caused the poor economic outcomes, even in James’s own paper on US counties. 

“In my perspective, yes natural resources can curse economies and lead to bad outcomes, but that’s not the general rule or even the right question,” James says. “The question we should be asking is, what is the best way to manage natural resource wealth? Forget whether there is a natural resource curse.” 

To investigate that question, researchers scrutinize how natural resource dependent economies function and effects on the well-being of their citizens. One finding is that intensive natural resource extraction often brings social and environmental problems. “There is good evidence that resource booms do pull people out of college and high school prematurely. That finding is fairly robust.” James rattled off more examples: “Crime, different types of pollution—water pollution, air pollution—traffic congestion.”  

Also, a natural resource boom can drive wealthy landowners away from a region while attracting less-wealthy workers to, say, a natural gas or oil field. If some of the people who move out don’t come back, and those who moved in stay, “you’ve changed the composition of the type of people that live in these communities and that potentially has very serious long-run economic effects,” James says. 

It’s exhausting—if you work at a university or as a business owner—when you don’t know what’s going to happen to the state economy next year.

Further confounding the original concept of the natural resource curse, economists began to observe that in the short-term after a new resource discovery, “income goes up, poverty goes down, employment goes up, unemployment goes down. Every economic factor that you can think of is moving in the right direction when there is a sudden extraction of a natural resource,” James says. 

This played out in Wyoming in 2008. Energy resource prices were up, and the state produced huge amounts of coal and natural gas. That year, personal income also soared, unemployment bottomed out, government budgets were flush, and citizens across the state enjoyed the largess. 

And there are other ways Wyoming’s economic history does not seem to align well with the original view of the natural resource curse. Bureau of Economic Analysis data shows that since 2003, Wyomingites have enjoyed incomes higher than those of the average US citizen—in 2020 the per capita personal income for a US resident was about $59,500 while that of a Wyoming resident was over $61,800. UW economics professor David Aadland sent me data showing that incomes for Wyomingites grew more than those across the US from 1970 to 2020, “which is kind of counter to the resource curse, which surprises me actually,” he says. 

However, I did find one key factor that tempered this finding. Wealth is soaring in Teton County (a clear outlier in Wyoming) where incomes are much less tied to natural resources than in the state’s other 22 counties. In 2020, per capita personal income in Teton County was $220,645—the highest of any county in the US—while in the rest of the state it was $55,178. Indeed, with Teton County excluded, Wyoming’s income growth from 1970–2020 falls below that of the US, as do our actual incomes for the last five years, suggesting that Wyoming does suffer from at least a mild natural resource curse. 

Meanwhile, Wyoming’s 2008 boom points to a key feature of natural resource dependent economies that researchers are now trying to better understand: their volatility. While a diversified economy, like that of the US, can be expected to grow relatively evenly year to year, “It’s very clear that our [Wyoming’s] growth rates swing a lot more wildly than the US’s,” says Aadland. “When you don’t diversify your economy, you get these big ups and downs.”  

“[V]olatility is a quintessential feature of the resource curse,” wrote economists Frederick van der Ploeg and Steven Poelhekke in 2009, suggesting that “Future research should [focus] … on how to cope with such volatility and manage the associated risks.” This has guided some of James’s work, and he sees reason to be wary, even when booms are lucrative. “It’s not at all clear to me that these places that experience a short-run economic gain are going to experience a long-run economic gain,” James says.  

Volatility also creates challenges for governance. Managing an unpredictable budget is difficult. Researchers at the Natural Resource Governance Institute looking at international cases wrote, “Governments often get trapped in boom-bust cycles where they spend on legacy projects, such as airports and monuments, when revenues are rising and then must make painful cuts when revenues decline. Resource-rich governments have a tendency to over-spend on government salaries, inefficient fuel subsidies, and large monuments, and to underspend on health, education, and other social services.” 

Further, “It’s exhausting—if you work at a university or as a business owner—when you don’t know what’s going to happen to the state economy next year,” says James. “If you can just move to another state and avoid all that risk, why not do that?”  

So, what are policy makers to do? Can Wyoming apply an understanding of the natural resource curse and its features, including volatility, to optimize our economy? Two obvious approaches emerge. One, which Wyoming has done well, is to save during good economic times and dip into those savings during bad years. The other, which Wyoming has not accomplished, is to diversify both the economy and state funding streams. 

“You know, the Wyoming legislature is relatively, understandably, conservative and we want to be low tax,” says Wyoming chief economist Wenlin Liu. “Any time we have some extra revenue, we tend to save more.” In fact, Wyoming has created a complex network of savings accounts, all meant to ferret away funds during natural resource booms so that we can access them during busts. Perhaps the most secure version is our “sovereign wealth fund.”  

In 1975, Wyoming citizens overwhelmingly voted to amend the state constitution to create a severance tax on mineral extraction and direct a proportion of it into a permanent fund. Government officials can never withdraw money from the Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund itself. The interest goes into the state’s general fund. In the decades since its creation, the fund has grown to about $8 billion and in 2021, its earnings fed about $388 million into the state general fund, a quarter of that fund’s total revenue (with the rest coming from sales taxes, mineral royalties and severance taxes, income from other investments, and other sources). 

State senator Charlie Scott, R-Casper, has called Wyoming’s Permanent Mineral Trust Fund, “the smartest financial move the people of Wyoming have ever made” and “Wyoming’s fiscal savior.” Further, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan research organization based in Washington, DC, scores sovereign wealth funds based on 33 factors related to management transparency, soundness of the investments, ethics, and accountability. In 2021, that institute gave Wyoming’s fund a score of 93/100, the third highest score behind Norway and New Zealand and higher than any other US state. 

And that’s not our only savings account holding mineral income. The legislature has created an array of such accounts, including the Common Schools Permanent Land Fund, worth about $4 billion, which invests earnings from state trust lands and uses the interest to fund public schools. At over $1.5 billion, we also have the biggest rainy-day fund relative to our government of any US state, enough to fund our entire state government for about a year. In 2021, Wyoming dipped into that fund to help close a gap in K-12 school funding. Finally, the Hathaway Scholarship Endowment Fund ($591 million) and the Excellence in Higher Education Endowment Fund ($120 million) both direct mineral royalties to support higher education. “Things like that,” James says, referring to the Hathaway fund, “are a phenomenal thing to do, where you are turning an exhaustible resource—coal and natural gas largely, one form of natural capital—and turning it into human capital.” 

We will probably never go back to the boom of 2008.

The second proven approach to address the volatility associated with the natural resource curse is to diversify. “Wyoming is the least diversified economy in the country, depending on how you calculate,” says Liu. Establishing additional economic sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing, technology, or others—each of which will respond to external shocks in different ways—can smooth out a volatile economy. But attracting new sectors to the state’s economy won’t stabilize revenues unless Wyoming also taxes them. As it stands, bringing new businesses or workers to Wyoming actually costs the state; the Wyoming Economic Analysis Division, cited by the Wyoming Taxpayers Association, estimated an average Wyoming family in 2020 paid about $3,770 in taxes and cost the state about $28,280 in public services. Diversifying both the economy and state revenues (that is, creating new taxes) could help ease the pain of boom-and-bust cycles. 

But, one key take-away from the natural resource curse literature is that mineral extraction dependence interferes with a region’s ability to diversify economically. Any new economic sector that tries to establish must compete with the lucrative energy and mineral extraction industries for materials, infrastructure, labor, and possibly even funding.  

Another challenge is that resource dependence affects not only a region’s economy, but also its politics, according to natural resource curse studies. “I’ve been surprised recently … that the literature is continuing to find evidence of a political resource curse,” James says. That is, government officials and policy makers frequently accept both legal campaign donations and illegal bribes from natural resource industries. They in turn favor the industry over pursuit of wide-reaching economic security. In a 2022 paper looking at US states, James and co-author Nathaly Rivera found that, on average, “oil-rich U.S. states experience more corruption than their oil-poor counterparts, but only during periods of high oil prices.”  

Wyoming leaders have made efforts to diversify both Wyoming’s economy and revenue structure for decades, to little avail. “The goal for the Wyoming Business Council is trying to diversify Wyoming’s economy starting 20 years ago,” says Liu. “But it’s not that easy. It takes resources, takes money, takes time.” 

In 2021, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon wrote a proposal to the state legislature for how to spend some of the more than $1 billion coming from the American Rescue Plan Act, a federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He called for spending on such items as broadband internet, outdoor recreation and tourism, higher education, and wildlife conservation alongside matching funds for large-scale energy projects and economic development efforts to support mining. The proposal teeters between pursuit of economic diversification and bolstering the mineral extraction and energy industries.  

“In all of that, even though the words are not used, is the natural resource curse,” says UW economics professor Aadland of the proposal. Given Wyoming’s long interest in and failure at achieving economic diversification, it’s not clear that we can have both at once.  

According to resource curse studies, pursuing true economic diversification in this environment may require policymakers to back off on some support for the mineral extraction and energy industries—eliminate subsidies for energy production, establish stronger ethics oversight for political leaders, and create a tax structure that asks citizens and industries of all stripes to contribute more to the state. 

None of those are easy tasks, but they may be necessary. Data for both coal and natural gas production in Wyoming show steady inclines up to 2008 and steady declines since. State GDP tracks a similar pattern. “People slowly are starting to understand we have come to a point where we will probably never go back to the boom of 2008,” says Liu. Awareness of the natural resource curse, and how dependence on mineral wealth can trap us in an un-diversified economy subject to volatile and unpredictable swings, might help Wyoming move in the right direction.  

Emilene Ostlind edits Western Confluence for the Ruckelshaus Institute at the University of Wyoming.

Correction: This article has been updated. An earlier version stated that US GDP had grown 41.5 percent from 2008 to 2020, which was true but misleading. This has been corrected to 18 percent, which is the growth in real GDP. The earlier version credited the Wyoming Taxpayers Association with the analysis showing what an average Wyoming family paid in taxes versus cost the state in public services in 2020, and this has been modified to acknowledge that the Wyoming Economic Analysis Division conducted that analysis as cited by the Wyoming Taxpayers Association. The earlier version misquoted the paper by Alexander James and Nathaly Rivera saying “oil-rich U.S. states experience more corruption than their oil-poor counterparts, particularly during periods of high oil prices,” and this has been corrected to “but only during periods of high oil prices.”

By Birch Malotky

In early November 2020, the Wyoming Outdoor Council’s (WOC) staff huddled around a laptop and logged into their freshly minted account on energynet.com, an online marketplace where 199 leases for oil and gas development on Wyoming state trust lands were up for auction. When T28N, R103W Sec 36 in Sublette County came up, they submitted a bid. Leases for adjacent parcels had sold for just one or two dollars an acre, so “we were shocked as oil and gas companies kept outbidding us,” says John Rader, a conservation advocate and staff attorney at WOC. “I suspect their bidding was automated, but even when we backed out, a bidding war between two companies drove the final price up to $28 per acre.” Not to be deterred, WOC staff set their sights on a parcel in Southwest Wyoming’s Red Desert, just north of the Killpecker Dune Field. As the only bidder on that lease, they won it: the right to develop oil and gas on 640 acres of remote, rolling, sagebrush.

WOC, a statewide conservation group dedicated to “protecting Wyoming’s environment and quality of life,” had no intention of developing either parcel. Instead, they meant to protect environmentally important land from what Rader calls the “immediate threat” of the lease sale, which would have opened the land to oil and gas development and put the area’s wilderness character—as well as declining and culturally valuable wildlife—at risk. The first parcel WOC bid on was situated in the “Golden Triangle,” an area between Farson, South Pass, and Big Sandy “that contains some of the best sage grouse habitat on the planet,” says Rader. The longest mule deer migration ever recorded also passes through the Golden Triangle, and 90 percent of the auctioned parcel is within the migration corridor’s high-use area and borders a stopover site where mule deer gather to build crucial fat stores during the long journey. The parcel WOC won lies south of the Golden Triangle in the Red Desert, one of the last high-desert ecosystems in North America, a landscape of dunes, badlands, and sagebrush that’s important spiritually, historically, recreationally, and ecologically, and “surrounded by federal lands, including areas of environmental concern, wilderness study areas, and viewshed buffers,” Rader says. These are not appropriate places for roads, rigs, and other oil and gas development, says Rader, which could scare off mating and nesting sage grouse, fragment wildlife habitat, displace migrating big game, alter scenic views, and conflict with sacred sites.

There hasn’t been much that WOC or other conservation organizations could do to prevent development of environmentally important state lands. Advocates have, in the past, sent letters to state administrators and Wyoming’s governor requesting deferrals of oil and gas leasing in important wildlife habitat, but to no avail. Rader says, “I’m not aware of [the state] ever pulling leases off a sale for conservation concerns.” Fair enough, because the managers of state trust lands—the State Board of Land Commissioners—don’t have an environmental management mandate. Instead, they are constitutionally required to make money off state trust lands for the benefit of certain public institutions, which they do by leasing the land to private organizations and individuals. There are leases for oil and gas development, coal mining, hard rock mining, grazing, logging, and various “special uses,” but there has never been a “conservation lease.” At least, not yet.

After winning the Red Desert parcel in the 2020 oil and gas lease auction, Rader says, “we were prepared to write a check, but the state canceled the lease.” The Board of Land Commissioners determined that it was inappropriate for a conservation organization with no intent to drill to hold a lease for oil and gas development. This is in keeping with how the state manages all its leases, which it issues to a particular user for a specified use, each through its own process. Rader says, “the point [of bidding at the oil and gas auction] was to expose the lack of a regulatory framework for conservation organizations to purchase state land leases,” adding “if we can’t bid on an oil and gas lease, then there ought to be some other avenue.” That avenue would empower organizations like WOC to protect individual land parcels from disturbance, and buy conservation a seat at the state land management table for the first time ever. For WOC, the state canceling its lease was the beginning of a conversation around conservation leasing, not the end.

“It’s good to start every conversation about state lands with why they exist,” says Jason Crowder, deputy director of the Office of State Lands and Investments (OSLI), the administrative arm of the Board of Land Commissioners, which oversees day-to-day state land operations. At statehood in 1890, the federal government granted Wyoming millions of acres to be held in trust for funding a common school system, as it did for most western states. The Wyoming constitution and subsequent statutes charged the Board of Land Commissioners (comprised of Wyoming’s elected officials: the Governor, Secretary of State, State Auditor, State Treasurer, and Superintendent of Public Instruction) with managing trust lands to sustainably make money for specified beneficiaries while ensuring long-term growth in value. While there are occasional land sales and swaps, state lands generate revenue through rental fees (the yearly cost of the lease) and royalties (payments made for the right to develop minerals owned by the state). In fiscal year 21, the state’s 3.4 million surface acres and 3.9 million subsurface acres produced $100,587,888. Of that, roughly $85 million came from mineral leases and royalties, $66 million of which was from oil and gas. Though OSLI’s annual report doesn’t break down the rental versus royalty proportions, Crowder says “it’s heavily weighted towards royalties.” The year’s other $15 million came from grazing leases, special use leases, temporary use permits, payments for “surface damages,” and to a much lesser extent, timber and real estate sales.

The vast majority of state land revenue goes directly to K-12 education in Wyoming, contributing nearly half of the school system’s yearly operating costs and helping Wyoming lead the nation in per-pupil spending on education. Additional beneficiaries of state trust lands include the State Hospital, the State Penitentiary, and eleven other public institutions, with each beneficiary assigned a set of acres that benefit them. “So this is very much a financial revenue generating agency I work in, and these lands are utilized as assets to generate revenue for the beneficiaries,” says Crowder. In case it wasn’t clear, “[state lands] are for the beneficiaries, and solely for them,” Crowder says.

This money-making mandate can be limiting, because it means that OSLI and the Board of Land Commissioners can’t consider other types of value, such as scenic or ecological value, when they make land management decisions. Crowder says if someone suggests putting a casino on state land in Teton County adjacent to the national park, “that probably doesn’t make sense in the real world, but it could have a very large revenue stream, so we do have to look into it…and if a parcel is otherwise unencumbered, then there’s nothing really stopping us from moving down that road.”

But the focus on revenue itself, rather than how that revenue is generated, also creates opportunity. As long as it’s optimized and sustainable, trust managers have broad legal leeway to explore and accept creative ways of making money off state lands, according to a white paper WOC authored. OSLI does not need legislative action to broker new special use leases, for example, just approval from the Board of Land Commissioners. Developing these leases does require an initial investment of time, but it’s a normal part of OSLI operations that becomes more streamlined with repetition. Crowder says that wind energy “is a relatively new industry in our office but we’ve gotten pretty good at leasing for it,” administrating it as a category of special use. WOC’s white paper claims that OSLI could likewise use special use leasing to establish an explicit track for conservation leases.

Not only is it a possibility, Rader says, “arguably, the state has an obligation to use tools like conservation leasing if it’s truly going to maximize revenue generation on state lands.” That’s because state lands (typically sections 16 and 36 of each township) “were not strategically placed, they were kind of just shotgun across the whole state,” Crowder says. Some are in areas perfect for industrial uses, but many are not. Of the 199 oil and gas leases auctioned in November 2020, for example, 83 didn’t even receive bids. Dozens more were purchased at the minimum $1 an acre—perhaps speculatively—and may never be developed and therefore never produce royalties. In many of these cases, Rader says conservation offers the highest use value for the land, and the greatest value to state beneficiaries.

And yet, getting a conservation lease on the ground in Wyoming will require overcoming a few challenges. For one, thinking about conservation as a valuable “use” of land, particularly in monetary terms, is relatively new. In a recent Science paper titled “Allow ‘nonuse rights’ to conserve natural resources,” an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by the Property and Environment Research Center outlines how the laws and traditions around public land use were codified 100 years ago or more, when mainstream ideas about the environment centered on extractive and consumptive use. The research team goes on to say that today, non-extractive uses like conservation and recreation are increasingly in favor. But these “shifts in modern uses of public land aren’t reflected in the historical legal institutions,” says Temple Stoellinger, co-author on the paper and associate professor for the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. This can create institutional bias towards historical, consumptive uses of land. In Wyoming, Crowder pointed out that “conservation is a very new fish in this pond, up against 130 years of historical practice,” adding, “the state is extremely accustomed to its revenue streams from traditional uses, so trying to develop a revenue stream that might supplant those existing uses is a very hard conversation and a very slow starter.”

Overcoming the inertia of tradition is a challenge in itself, but moving too fast or without consideration for existing uses can also undermine the integrity of a conservation-oriented program. In Montana, after a conservation organization outbid a timber company for a logging contract on state trust land, industry representatives made it their “number one priority” to get the law that allowed it repealed. They succeeded, eliminating the possibility of future conservation licenses. Rader hopes that “a more cooperative stance will be more sustainable.”

There are also very real constraints on the time it takes to implement new ideas. Crowder says that OSLI has been talking about conservation leasing for years, but “we’re like any other state agency, we’re tapped as far as duties and bodies to complete those duties, so it’s difficult to chase down every initiative that needs chasing down.”

Since the oil and gas lease auction, WOC has taken the initiative on conservation leasing. In a letter sent to the Board of Land Commissioners and OSLI in early 2021, WOC emphasized that conservation leasing is a smart financial decision for state lands and their beneficiaries, one that can be made without stepping on the toes of industry. That’s because WOC is focused on parcels with high conservation value—which includes things like big game migration corridors and winter range; sage grouse habitat; riparian areas; historical, archeological, paleontological, and cultural resources; and national historic trails—but low oil and gas development potential. Low development potential might mean the land is difficult to access, burdened with inconvenient restrictions, unlikely to contain economically viable oil and gas deposits, or all three. The parcel WOC won at auction, for example, had no other bids, probably because developers weren’t interested in “cutting a road through this really remote desert full of federal protections in order to develop a parcel that probably doesn’t have much gas there,” Rader says. These types of parcels are low-hanging fruit because they minimize conflict with existing uses and offer clear financial advantages to the state, giving WOC the best chance of overcoming the inertia of historical practice to implement conservation leasing.

But how much conservation value do these parcels offer if they are unlikely to be developed? Rader says that as long as the right to develop exists, “there’s always a risk,” and some lands and ecosystems are too important to leave vulnerable. Conservation leasing offers surety, he says. As importantly, leasing is conservation’s ticket to the discussion around how state lands are used. Crowder says that “right now, [environmental interest groups] are just out there and they don’t have any rights to state land. The only way they get rights and get to be a part of the conversation of responsible development is to have an interest in that land, and right now the only way they can do that is through a lease.” The researchers behind the Science paper argue that opening leasing to conservation can also reduce conflict in natural resource management by giving environmental groups tools other than lobbying and litigation, which pit them as adversaries against industry. This should lead to more efficient and durable conservation gains, they predict.

When Crowder formally presented WOC’s conservation leasing concept to the Board of Land Commissioners in August 2021, they too saw it “as a way to get the conservation community a seat at the table,” and “as compensation that wouldn’t otherwise be there,” says Crowder. Since then, the focus has been on clarifying the process and terms for conservation leasing, with an eye toward promoting cooperation over conflict and ensuring that trust land beneficiaries are being compensated at fair market value.

Drawing on examples of conservation-oriented programs on state lands in Idaho, Arizona, Washington, and Oklahoma, WOC proposed that state agencies, local governments, nonprofits, charitable trusts, and the public should be able to nominate a parcel for conservation leasing, and the Board of Land Commissioners would decide whether that use offers the best chance of long-term growth in value and optimum, sustainable revenue production. Crowder emphasizes that once the board approves conservation leasing on a parcel, OSLI would not sell the lease at open auction, even though it might seem like direct competition between all potential users would maximize revenue generation. That’s because, “[conservation leasing] has to be sustainable,” says Crowder, “OSLI has been here for 130 years and we’re going to be here for another 130. Having a situation where one industry is elbowing out another does not lead to a sustainable solution.” Across lease types, OSLI avoids pitting different categories of users against each other, and special use leases in particular are negotiated, not won. WOC needs to identify the specific environmental attribute they want to protect, determine the degree of protection they are asking for, and try to evaluate what it’s worth, Crowder says. “Then we can have the lease negotiations that OSLI is accustomed to,” he says, which would take into account internal appraisals and the potential value of other uses of the land to ensure fair market value.

The negotiation might even include compromise around shared use of the parcel. Though WOC’s initial focus has been on the low-hanging fruit of high conservation value, low development potential parcels, both Rader and Crowder envision scenarios where conservation leasing is combined with compatible uses. A conservation lease could be stacked on top of a recreation or grazing lease that stipulates seasonal closures, for example, or on top of an oil and gas lease where lateral drilling allows for the parcel itself to remain undisturbed even while there is subsurface development. With lease stacking, says Rader, “no one really stands to lose.”

Thinking about the spectrum of possibilities and the strong foundation WOC and OSLI have laid, Crowder says he’s confident that there will be a conservation lease on the ground within a year. Rader is working on a lease proposal and says that WOC has already approved funding for a lease purchase. He is positively cheerful about the prospects of environmental organizations getting the tools and voice they need—and have never had—to protect assets like wildlife habitat, headwaters, and other rich natural and cultural resources on Wyoming’s state lands. Plus, he says, “it’s kind of heartwarming, that the public can raise money to pay for public education while protecting the environment and wildlife…It’s a rare case of a real win-win.”

Birch Dietz Malotky is a Research Scientist and the Emerging Issues Initiative Coordinator for the Ruckelshaus Institute at the University of Wyoming.

By Tessa Wittman

In the natural gas fields of western Wyoming, innumerable dirt roads cut through the sagebrush steppe, connecting gas wells and carrying heavy equipment. Sublette County hosts both the Jonah Field and the Pinedale Anticline, two of the most productive gas fields in the continental United States. Mule deer and pronghorn skirt the dusty web of roads, shying away from the noise and activity. Male sage grouse strut and show, struggling to attract hens amidst the cacophony of heavy truck traffic and thumping well pumps. Many studies have shown the negative impacts of active roads on local and migrating wildlife, but what happens when the traffic stops? Is it possible to restore native sagebrush habitat when a road is decommissioned?

“Sagebrush community restoration in itself is not an easy undertaking,” says Pete Stahl, “and then it’s complicated when you have all the compaction of soil that’s caused by roads.” Stahl is a soil scientist and the director of the Wyoming Reclamation and Restoration Center at the University of Wyoming where he also teaches restoration ecology. Stahl says restoring sagebrush habitat on decommissioned roads “can definitely be accomplished consistently, if the proper planning and practices are used and time is allowed.” There are also preventative measures that can help drive successful road restoration in sagebrush.

Roads are the most extensive and enduring human disturbances across Western landscapes. Colonization of North America established roads that may never be erased. Ruts from wagons carrying nineteenth century travelers on the Oregon Trail are still visible from Wyoming to Oregon. Vast networks of highways and dirt roads now cut across the landscape, and escaping the noise of traffic anywhere in sagebrush is increasingly difficult. Unlike most transportation infrastructure on our landscapes, roads built in gas fields are meant to be decommissioned after the well goes dry. Sometimes that’s within a few years of construction, but more often after 20 or more years of use. 

Restoring native sagebrush communities on decommissioned roads increases available food, habitat, and resources for wildlife while reducing erosion and restricting the potential for invasive plants like cheatgrass to spread. In an environment of extremes—with high winds, little precipitation, hot summers, and very cold winters—the sagebrush steppe hosts diverse plants and animals. Some animals, including pronghorn, pygmy rabbits, sage grouse, and sagebrush lizards, rely entirely on sagebrush for at least part of their lives. In addition to animals, sagebrush also fosters native grasses and wildflowers, both by providing shelter above ground and supplying water and nutrients below ground. It has a deep tap root that reaches as far as 13 feet below the surface. With this taproot sagebrush can transport water to dry portions of the soil profile through a process known as hydraulic lift. Additionally, sagebrush can create islands of fertility by trapping organic materials near the soil surface, thus retaining water and supplying wildflowers and grasses with nutrients. In return, the grasses and wildflowers shade the surrounding soil, reduce erosion and evaporation, attract pollinators, trap snow, and help build healthy surface soil. 

Soil is foundational to successful restoration. Restoration ecology is the science of assisting the reassembly of native communities of plants and animals. It is a young science, and sagebrush community restoration is not well understood. Sagebrush itself is notoriously difficult to cultivate. Further, many native plants in sagebrush are perennials which grow from well-established roots year after year. The roots allow these plants to survive years of drought, wildfire, and other disturbances, but too much disturbance—such as heavy traffic—can kill the plant. Re-establishment can be very difficult because seedlings struggle to germinate and survive in the harsh climate. Additionally, few seed sources exist for many native sagebrush steppe plants. For some plants, no known cultivated or collected seeds exist, and collection requires precise timing. Even if restoration ecologists can find seeds to plant, it may take years of expensive and time-consuming reseeding until the right set of conditions allows these perennial plants to reestablish. Planners generally allot a two- to five-year window for assessing the success of a restoration project, but it can take longer to reestablish diverse sagebrush communities.

Planning is critical to restoration. Stahl says, “With a little forethought you can avoid a lot of problems.” Factors to consider in planning road construction include salvaging appropriate layers of topsoil. Stahl advocates for including a soil scientist on the construction team, indicating equipment operators can become adept at saving important soil layers when they collaborate with a soil scientist. Planners should avoid steep slopes wherever possible to reduce erosion during use and facilitate seeding during restoration. Stahl also advises against disturbing sensitive habitats where there may not be a seed source for some of the native plants. 

Once a road is decommissioned, deep ripping or tilling that reaches under the compacted soil is critical to allow roots and water to penetrate. That ripping can also make a decommissioned road impassable, thus preventing recreational traffic. Land movers can then replace the salvaged topsoil in a way that replicates the pre-disturbance topography that was shaped by regional climate. Seed mixes should be sourced from nearby seed companies so the plants are adapted to local conditions, and the mix should reflect the pre-disturbance plant diversity in representative proportions. Many considerations in road restoration are specific to the location, and the weather is always a gamble. Restoration should plan for the possibility that seeding may fail due to unpredictable weather and that it may take repeated applications before plants establish.

When asked if he sees any common misconceptions around roads, Stahl says people’s perceptions of roads may be part of the problem. “A road in itself may not be that harmful or have that many impacts on wildlife habitat. It’s the traffic on the road that may be more important than the road itself.” But traffic does not necessarily stop when gas production ceases. In the sagebrush steppe, anything resembling a two-track is considered fair game for motor vehicles like ATVs. That traffic disturbs wildlife, prevents seedling establishment, and hampers restoration.

Thanks to the Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, which mandates extensive pre-disturbance ecological surveys and bonded restoration plans, coal mines have pioneered restoration ecology in the sagebrush steppe. Oil and gas extraction is not regulated under such comprehensive restoration legislation. However, with Environmental Impact Assessments increasingly mandating restoration plans and some companies voluntarily undertaking restoration to maintain a good relationship with the surrounding communities, oil and gas sites might be able to replicate coal mine restoration efforts. 

The Dave Johnston coal mine, just east of Casper, Wyoming, provides one example of successful road restoration. After the mine was retired, soils were replaced, topography rebuilt, and sagebrush was seeded on late winter snow to replicate natural conditions. In his early visits to the mine, Stahl travelled along retired mine haul roads with substantial soil erosion and compaction issues. He returned years later to find little or no evidence of the reclaimed roads. This site presents one of the only successful large-scale sagebrush restoration projects in the West and offers tested methods that can improve restoration efforts elsewhere. “With good planning, good ripping, and good practices, roads can virtually disappear,” Stahl says.

Tessa Wittman earned her bachelor of science in wildlife biology and environment and natural resources from the University of Wyoming. She currently works as a research scientist in the Ruckelshaus Institute assessing wildlife-livestock conflict on public lands in the American West.

On an unseasonably warm day last October, Richard Fox pulled up to the construction site of his future home near Pavillion, Wyoming, in an old Toyota pickup. Builders were fast at work raising walls and securing exterior panels in hopes of getting a roof in place before the snow started to fly. Located a few miles from where he and his wife, Hadley, spend their winters overseeing a small farming operation in west-central Wyoming, the site overlooks an irrigated field of pinto beans and alfalfa giving way to expansive views of the towering Wind River Mountains in the distance.

So far, the home looked like any other. Set upon a large foundation amid stacks of milled lumber, piles of dirt, and heavy equipment, an airy labyrinth of posts and studs soared to the sky framing windows and interior walls.

But what’s different about the Fox place is that, when it’s all said and done, the home won’t generate a utility bill.

That’s because it was engineered to produce as much energy as it consumes on an annual basis. It’s what’s known as a net-zero energy home. And if all goes as planned, it will be one of many in Wyoming.

“We’re confident that if we can build a couple of these homes, more people will see them and will want one,” says Jon Gardzelewski, the architect who designed the home, as he leads me on a tour around the build site. An associate lecturer of architectural engineering at the University of Wyoming, Gardzelewski specializes in ways to make buildings use less energy. “Ten years ago,” he tells me, “someone interested in sustainability might tack on a few solar panels or shading devices to help increase building performance and make their home more sustainable. While that can do some good,” he admits, “in most cases, poor design made them inefficient for passive solar heating and solar control.”

So in 2013, he and colleagues at the University of Wyoming set out to change that by forming the Building Energy Research Group, or BERG. Gardzelewski teamed up with Tony Denzer, head of the Civil and Architectural Engineering Department at UW, Liping Wang and Gang Tan, assistant professors in the College of Engineering with expertise in heating and cooling systems, and Ben Gilbert, an economist in the Department of Economics and Finance. The group conducts research on topics such as building performance and renewable energy options for residential customers like solar photovoltaics, wind, and geothermal, with the overarching goal of helping to improve the energy performance of buildings in Wyoming.

While it may sound far-fetched, the net-zero energy building concept is actually quite simple: start by reducing a home’s heating, cooling, and lighting loads as much as possible through architectural design and detailing (think Energy Star appliances and LED light bulbs); then make up the remaining energy needs with on-site wind or solar energy production. Homes are typically grid-tied for backup and to unload excess energy back onto the grid.

“What’s fundamental to net-zero energy designs is thick, well-insulated walls with super tight construction,” explains Denzer. “Then orientation.”

In the case of the Fox home, this equates to super-insulated exterior wall panels, air-tight spray foam insulation between the studs, and an abundance of south-facing windows to take full advantage of the sun’s natural energy. By incorporating lots of glass on the south side of the house and very little on the other three sides, the home is essentially engineered to heat itself through passive solar design.

Here’s how it works: in winter, low-lying sun shines directly through south-facing windows and warms up a large concrete floor. The thermal energy absorbed during the day then radiates into the living space at night, keeping the home at a comfortable temperature well after the sun goes down. A radiant heating system, powered by solar panels on the roof, runs through the floor and distributes heat evenly through the home. Heavy window shades help keep heat in at night.

“There’s enough thermal mass in this floor to keep this home at a pleasant, warm, livable temperature even on the coldest winter nights,” assures Gardzelewski.

Alternately in summer, rooftop overhangs block summer sun to prevent overheating. Strategically placed windows move air across the thermal mass of the floor, drawing out stored heat to cool the building.

“Every important technical challenge with regard to green building has already been solved,” asserts Denzer. “There is no new futuristic discovery that we’re waiting on. You can build a net-zero house tomorrow with commercially available, off-the-shelf stuff.”

To prove the point, BERG worked with architectural engineering students at the university to develop a catalog of net-zero energy home designs available for free to Wyoming citizens and homebuilders, a product line they’ve termed Frontier Zero.

“We looked at the housing market in Wyoming and other states across the West to see what kind of homes people were buying,” says Gardzelewski. As a result, many of the designs in the catalog were inspired by the craftsman style and other western traditions that complement the landscape and history of architecture in Wyoming. Model names like “Red Desert,” “Elk Mountain,” and “Fremont Peak,” are designed to appeal to Wyoming residents.

“We have big houses, we have small houses, we have homes that were designed for narrow lots, designs that are urban, suburban, and rural,” explains Denzer. Interested clients who don’t find exactly what they want in the catalog can contact BERG to come up with a custom design. Though the building requirements seem prescriptive, Denzer says there’s flexibility when designing and building net-zero energy homes to accommodate finances, client preference, or whatever the builder is comfortable doing.

With the first edition of the Frontier Zero catalog out and another on the way, BERG hopes to soon build Wyoming’s first neighborhood of net-zero energy homes and establish a net-zero energy home market in Wyoming.

Elsewhere around the country, net-zero energy homes have become increasingly popular in recent years, propped up in part by policies and initiatives that encourage, even mandate, zero-energy building designs.

For example, in California, which claims nearly half of the more than 3,500 residential net-zero energy buildings in North America, state leaders in 2007 set an ambitious goal requiring that all new residential construction be net-zero energy by 2020 and that all new commercial construction in the state be net-zero energy by 2030. And just south of Wyoming’s border in neighboring Colorado, communities like Fort Collins and Boulder have set aggressive targets toward emissions reductions that use net-zero energy techniques and building styles as a means of achieving those goals.

Still, the net-zero movement has been slow to catch on in the state. “The barriers at this point are cultural, and maybe a little bit economic in the sense that it costs a little more upfront,” asserts Denzer.

About 10 percent more, to be exact.

To demonstrate, he lays out a scenario: say you build an ordinary home and the monthly mortgage payment is about $2,000. You’d still have to pay for heat and electricity, which is probably around $200 a month. So, it’s $2,200 for the ordinary house including utilities, but it’s also $2,200 for the net-zero house. If you build a net-zero energy home, the mortgage payment will be slightly higher, around $2,200 a month, but there is effectively no utility bill.

“You’re paying a 10 percent premium up front, but you’re getting back enormous benefit by not paying a utility bill for the life of the home,” explains Denzer. Not only that, net-zero homes aren’t subject to fluctuating utility prices and may actually prove to be a moneymaker in the long run.

While net-zero energy homes can be built for just a little more than the cost of a conventional build, Gardzelewski says they sell for a lot more once constructed.

“What we’ve seen around the country is that people are willing to pay a relatively high premium for homes with design-integrated solar and no utility bill,” says Gardzelewski.

Unfortunately, increased value for net-zero energy homes is something appraisers in Wyoming have yet to acknowledge. So even getting a bank loan for the extra 10 percent to build a net-zero home can be a challenge.

“We might try to work on that someday,” says Denzer.

Back in Pavillion, Gardzelewski continues to show me around the build site, pointing out nifty features like the ground-source heat pump that drives the radiant heating system in the Fox home.

“There’s an old adage that goes something like, ‘pioneers get slaughtered while settlers prosper,’” explains Gardzelewski. “But we’re trying to help the pioneers, the early-adopters, prosper too.”

When I ask Richard Fox if he’s at all worried about being the first to build a BERG-designed home, he says not really. While he had some concerns that building a net-zero home would mean sacrificing priorities like spaciousness and livability, the BERG design actually enhanced those things. He says the net-zero choice made sense financially and environmentally.

“We live in a beautiful and unspoiled part of the state. As farmers, we pride ourselves on being good stewards of the land and environment.”

By Kit Freedman

Kit Freedman is the Project and Outreach Coordinator for the Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. Learn more about BERG’s research and design services at uwberg.org.

Keeping the lights and heat on at the University of Wyoming is a challenge. A campus quickly expanding with energy-intensive buildings is straining UW’s ability to meet its energy demand, even with a $10.8 million annual utility budget. While Wyoming enjoys some of the lowest energy costs in the country, the university is searching for ways to save money amidst major state budget cuts. UW Operations, the division responsible for buildings and utilities on campus, has so far managed energy demand with straightforward efficiency measures in both new and existing buildings. But with many energy-saving efforts already accomplished and even more new buildings in the queue, UW is now looking for additional ways to save both energy and money as the campus grows.

University campuses typically reduce energy use and utility bills through both conservation and efficiency efforts. Conservation relies on cost-effective behavioral changes, as simple as turning off the lights, to use less energy. UW has instead mainly focused on efficiency measures—infrastructural and equipment upgrades that perform the same work with less energy. Those measures have stabilized energy demand even as the campus has grown to over seven million square feet, an increase of nearly one million square feet in the last 10 years. Those efficiency measures have included lighting retrofits and ventilation upgrades in multiple buildings. Building automation systems, which control indoor climate and lighting based on typical occupancy schedules, have also yielded substantial savings.

The existing Biological Sciences building originally constructed in 1969, for example, underwent many of these lighting, ventilation, and building automation efficiency upgrades in 2012 and 2013. Improvements include equipment that recovers and recirculates heat from air handling units in the winter; low-flow fume hoods, which ventilate chemicals at workstations; low-horsepower laboratory air supply and exhaust valves; energy-efficient fluorescent lighting; and 50 percent reduced air exchange rates when labs are unoccupied, which decreases the total energy needed to move air in and out of the building. The building’s energy use per square foot now rivals that of some office buildings on campus, a major achievement for a historically high-energy-use laboratory building.

Many efficiency efforts in existing buildings have additional benefits beyond energy savings. A major air filter upgrade implemented across 17 buildings in 2014 has reduced maintenance and waste costs, as the new filters need less frequent replacement than older models. UW Operations estimates that the filter upgrade in the Berry Biodiversity Center alone will result in a 37 percent cost reduction compared to older filters due to savings in energy, labor, and waste.

UW has managed energy use in some of its new buildings as well. The Bim Kendall House, a 1950s-era building renovated into offices and meeting rooms for the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources, relies on simple energy-saving measures. Opening a window cools a room and daylight reduces reliance on light fixtures. Variable frequency motors, expensive on the front-end, pay back quickly by reducing the amount of energy needed to push hot water through the baseboard heating system. Roof-mounted photovoltaic panels further offset the already relatively low energy use in this building. The even newer Marion H. Rochelle Gateway Center uses LED lighting throughout and operates with highly efficient chillers and boilers, which, in combination with its building automation system, result in a well-performing building.

While these efforts have reduced energy use in existing and new UW buildings, additional buildings will increase overall demand for heating, cooling, and electricity. Recent and upcoming buildings are among some of the most energy hungry on campus. The Michael B. Enzi STEM Building completed in spring 2016, the soon-to-be-completed High Bay Research Facility, and the in-design Engineering Education and Research Building and the Center for Integrative Biological Research, all require energy-intensive laboratory infrastructure that will add to UW’s utility bill even as the university’s budget decreases. “We’ve got a lot more to do,” to save energy and reduce utility costs, says Forest “Frosty” Selmer, deputy director for utilities management, who has been a champion for many of UW’s existing efficiency efforts. “A lot more.”

UW stakeholders, including the Campus Sustainability Committee, students, and UW Operations itself, are now advocating for next-level energy reduction measures in both existing and upcoming buildings. Selmer suggests installing digital thermostat controls in older buildings that lack automation systems to help regulate indoor climate and save energy. He also recommends frequent retro-commissioning, a sort of building tune-up that examines building performance to inform upgrades to building systems and major equipment—most commonly those related to air handling and distribution, heating, and cooling.

Another solution would be to fully fund UW’s Conservation and Efficiency Revolving Fund (CERF), which received approval from the university administration in 2014. The CERF would accept competitive proposals for investment in high-payback energy reduction projects and then track and revolve financial savings back into the fund to support future projects. The university piloted the CERF with funding from UW Operation’s major maintenance budget to support projects such as a proposal from undergraduate students to upgrade metal halide lighting to more efficient LED’s on Prexy’s Pasture. But the CERF requires a major infusion of external funding to invest in bold energy-saving projects. Similar revolving funds have been extremely effective at universities and colleges across the country, with projects yielding an average 28 percent return on investment. The CERF could serve as both a money-saver and a money-maker for efficiency at UW.

Designing all new buildings to use less energy from the outset would further curb energy use at UW. Students in the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources’ spring 2016 Campus Sustainability course proposed minimum building efficiency standards for UW. Those standards, now in consideration for inclusion in the internal UW Design Guidelines, focus on energy efficiency and building life cycle analyses to account for operating costs as well as construction costs. And room remains to adopt even bolder standards.

Conservation—the behavioral change counterpart to efficiency—could also be an important part of the solution, one that Bill Mai, Vice President for Administration who oversees UW Operations, appreciates. “I think it really starts with people using what they need to use,” says Mai.

Students in the Campus Sustainability course have led the way on one major conservation effort by researching fume hoods, many of which operate on a variable rate system—the more open the sash (or window), the more energy the fume hood uses. They examined campaigns at universities across the country that ask lab users to keep fume hood sashes shut when not in use and as low as safely possible while in use. At MIT, “Shut the Sash” saves $41,000 per year for the Chemistry Department alone. The UW students designed a similar program that launched in January 2017 with the support of Risk Management and the Campus Sustainability Committee. The program is just one example of a simple behavioral change. A concerted, campus-wide conservation program could realize substantial cost savings for the university.

UW still has plenty of room to implement combined conservation and efficiency measures to further reduce energy consumption and cut costs. Oklahoma State University, an institution in a state with an energy economy similar to Wyoming’s, has saved over $30 million through energy efficiency and conservation since 2007. Major savings are possible when a university invests in energy reduction as another resource, alongside traditional and renewable energy. But such upfront investment and long-term thinking about savings can be difficult even in the best of times, especially in energy-rich Wyoming.

While these investments remain challenging in Wyoming with its abundant and low-cost energy, UW compares to institutions like sustainability leader Colorado State University in terms of energy use per square foot of building space. But in terms of square foot—and thus energy use—per student, UW is among the least efficient universities in the country. “We’ve got some poorly utilized buildings,” says Selmer. Since it’s far easier to raise funds for new building projects than it is for renovations of existing space, the campus is likely to continue to expand for the foreseeable future.

With more new buildings on the horizon, the university’s high energy use per person and overall utility costs will only increase. In light of that, Mai says it’s time to think big about efficiency. “If you don’t do it now, we are handing a massive problem forward to whoever succeeds us. And it just seems really irresponsible to do that.”

By Rachael Budowle

Rachael Budowle, a PhD candidate in Anthropology, co-chairs the UW Campus Sustainability Committee and teaches sustainability courses in the Haub School.

Before Macy Miller moved into her 232-square-foot tiny home in Boise, Idaho, she lived in 2,500 square feet in neighboring Meridian, Idaho, and typically spent “a couple hundred a month” on utilities, including gas and electricity, with some months costing even more. “It was never fun to pay a $400 electric bill,” she says.

After moving into the tiny home, her family’s typical monthly electricity bill dropped to just $8-12; the highest was $50. She shares her home with her partner, James, their two small children, Miles and Hazel, and a 140-pound Great Dane named Denver.

Miller is one of many people who are embracing tiny home living in an effort to downsize and simplify their lives. One benefit of downsizing comes in the form of reduced energy consumption. While society waits for changes in technology, infrastructure, and policy to address our carbon emission woes, the most straightforward piece of the solution may take a cue from the tiny house movement—get smaller, and emit less carbon in the process.

Fifty years ago, the average American single family home was 1,500 square feet. In 2015, newly constructed homes averaged nearly 2,500 square feet. Americans consume more and more energy to heat and cool these growing homes and power the devices inside, from laptops to microwaves. Per capita energy consumption jumped more than a quarter, from 250 million BTUs in 1960, to 316 million BTUs in 2010 according to the US Energy Information Administration. (A BTU, or British Thermal Unit, is the amount of energy needed to heat 16 ounces of water one degree Fahrenheit.)

While tiny house dwellers typically use less energy overall than those who live in traditional homes, official research on the topic is lacking. Many owners put their homes on trailers and classify them as recreational vehicles both for portability and to avoid mandatory minimum structure sizes required by building codes.

Despite the lack of hard data about energy use in tiny houses, many experts believe they represent a move in the right direction in terms of energy consumption. Kateri Callahan, president of the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit coalition seeking enhanced energy efficiency, points out that tiny homes—typically only 100-450 square feet—are just a fraction of the size of the typical US home.

“That is downsizing significantly,” Callahan says. “Where you’re going to get the largest reduction is energy use because you’re not heating and cooling so much space.”

That was certainly true for Miller and her family in Boise. “In a tiny house you’re more aware of what you’re doing in every way,” says Miller. She can name every energy-consuming item in her tiny home including the propane-powered water heater, stove, heater, and a handful of electrical devices, including an air conditioner. These systems keep the family cozy on 14-degree-below-zero days—aided by ample body heat—and maintain a comfortable 72 degree temperature on scorching 114-degree days.

“Energy consumption can vary greatly from one tiny house to another,” says Vivien Luo, engineering and construction management professor at California State University, Fresno. Luo leads the Fresno State Tiny House Project, a hands-on learning experience where students build a net-zero-energy 190-square-foot tiny home. “It depends on the mechanical and electrical systems used to power the house and the appliances inside the house,” she says.

Over 2,500 miles east of Boise in Vermont, Murphy Robinson opted for a wood stove in her ultra-tiny home. She has lived in just 72 square feet for over three years. “Theoretically, I could harvest my own wood for the winter sustainably from the lot where I live,” she says. “I really like the relationship with the land.”

Her 5.5-foot by 13-foot space isn’t only her home—she also runs her business, Mountainsong Expeditions, out of it. She leads wilderness-based expeditions, courses on ethical hunting and archery, and even a women’s trail running archery course.

While she saw a huge drop in energy consumption when she transitioned to her tiny home, the downside is that the cabin freezes when she’s not stoking the fire. “I don’t have any frost-free space, and it won’t stay warm if I’m not there,” she says. She keeps items that can freeze in the cabin and stores perishables, such as olive oil, with a friend.

The cooler and ice pack she used in lieu of a refrigerator for her first two years in the tiny house, didn’t work as well as she’d hoped. “On hot days, even when I changed the ice pack every day, I was still throwing away kale after a day and a half,” she says. Now she uses a small refrigerator hooked up to a nearby solar panel, but she still finds the woodstove’s warmth affects the shelf life of her perishables.

While not everyone would want to live in 72 square feet and deal with frozen olive oil and wilting kale, the tiny home principles of living lightly on the land, reducing debt, and minimizing energy consumption in an era of climate change have sparked wide interest. For example, the 2016 Tiny House Jamboree in Colorado, with three days of speakers, workshops, films, and tiny home viewings, drew 50,000 attendees.

While moving into a tiny house can reduce a person’s energy consumption and carbon footprint, living simply also reduces a different type of energy expenditure: the amount of time and effort needed to afford and maintain a massive home. Robinson finds it hard to store just about anything in her 72-square-foot structure. With only one five-foot-long bookshelf, she doesn’t acquire many material possessions. For every item she acquires, she typically has to part with something else.

“Overall, I’m pretty immune to the allure of knick-knacks because there’s nowhere to put them,” she says. This also saves energy, since less is required to produce, transport, and sell these items.

While technological fixes, such as LED lights, solar panels, and hybrid cars, can reduce carbon footprints and energy consumption, the simplest and most effective path may simply be to downsize.

By Kristen Pope

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer and editor who specializes in science and conservation topics and lives in Jackson, Wyoming.

Community solar benefits consumers in many ways. It allows customers who do not own property, who have shaded roofs, or who cannot afford a major home installation to invest in solar energy. It gives customers ownership over their electricity generation. And these mid-sized projects tend to cost less per energy unit than smaller individual solar installations.

Twenty-five states have active community solar projects. In some states, like Colorado, legislation has paved the way for community solar by putting into law how utilities must meter and account for such projects. In states that don’t have existing installations or state laws, such as Wyoming, communities might negotiate directly with their utilities or approach state utility regulators to create a community solar project. For example, the Town of Jackson and its utility, Lower Valley Energy, are investigating a possible community solar installation.

By Stephanie Kessler and Scott Kane

Stephanie Kessler is director of external relations for the Wyoming Outdoor Council. Scott Kane is co-founder and co-owner of Creative Energies, a solar installation company based in Lander, Wyoming.

Forty-four states have laws or rules governing net metering. States vary in the size of systems, number of meters on a property, and renewable energy technologies they allow; how customers are billed; how credits roll forward; and other parameters. In Wyoming, at the end of the calendar year, the utility pays the customer for any remaining energy credits at a wholesale rate. Wyoming’s law was created in 2001, and given that renewable energy systems have advanced over the last 15 years, is due for an update. For example, Wyoming only allows net-metered renewable energy systems up to 25 kilowatts. That’s more than enough for the average residential home, but too small to be worth the investment for larger buildings and facilities such as commercial businesses, government offices, and educational institutions.

Solar is booming across the country as customers clamor for low-carbon energy and cost savings. The solar energy sector now supports 218,000 jobs nationwide. Many states are inviting this economic surge by making their net metering laws more flexible to accommodate a wider range of renewable energy options such as wind and hydropower. A recent proposal to update Wyoming’s net metering law would have increased system size limit to 1 megawatt for non-residential facilities, allowed for multiple meters on a single utility bill, and adjusted the billing time period to April 1 to March 31 so that customers could use up credits they earn during the sunny summer over the darker winter months. Such changes could make new solar installations—and the jobs and energy savings that come with them—feasible in the state. However, utilities protested and the proposal failed in legislative committee.

By Stephanie Kessler

Stephanie Kessler is director of external relations for the Wyoming Outdoor Council.

California and Wyoming make strange bedfellows, but when it comes to sharing electricity, the two states have been flirting. Wyoming has the reliable, renewable wind energy that California needs. California has the energy customers that Wyoming wind developers are looking for. But while their first date—a foray into a shared electricity market—is going well, the two states are wary of one another. California worries about Wyoming’s less-green electrons and the loss of new renewable energy jobs. Wyoming chafes under California’s oversight of a shared electricity grid and the prospect of more turbines on the horizon. Popular wisdom holds that Wyoming has little to gain from wind farms that mar the horizon for the benefit of California consumers.

But University of Wyoming research shows something else—Wyoming stands to gain a lot from harnessing its wind potential. Sure, more wind farms in Wyoming would help California meet its renewable energy requirements, and save California money in the process. But studies show that wind could be a moneymaker in Wyoming too, enough to help diversify Wyoming’s struggling economy when there are few new revenue sources. Those findings come at a critical time, when the impediments to exporting wind-generated electricity are beginning to abate: the price of wind development has dropped, the demand for clean energy is high, and a bigger electricity grid is in the works. Wyoming could become a major renewable energy player in the western US.

But first it has a choice to make. Will Wyoming court California’s wind market or send it packing? If the financial benefits of partnering with California outweigh the downsides, a marriage could spawn new wind farms on the Wyoming landscape.

Wyoming’s wind in demand

Wyoming’s relentless westerly wind is a rich commodity. Wind flows east down Wyoming mountain ranges to a low spot in the Continental Divide, creating air currents that are fast enough to generate electricity but not so fast as to cause damage (usually). The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that Wyoming has some of the best on-shore wind in the United States, with about 250 gigawatts worth of the high-quality resource that developers look for. That’s nearly five times the total annual energy consumption of California.

Of course, not all of that wind will be captured and converted to electricity, but Jonathan Naughton, who leads the University of Wyoming’s Wind Energy Research Group, thinks Wyoming could develop as much as 10–20 gigawatts of wind energy. With 1.4 gigawatts already installed, that’s 7 to 15 times as much wind development as is currently in the state, and comparable to the 17.7 gigawatts produced by wind-electricity leader, Texas. But Wyoming’s small and stable population isn’t looking for additional electricity, and without a renewable portfolio standard (see Policy Box: Renewable Portfolio Standards [link to this page]), the state doesn’t need renewable power. If wind developers want to capitalize on Wyoming wind, they have to look for customers outside the state’s borders.

Many of those would-be customers live in California. In 2015 Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill into law that upped renewable energy requirements for California from 33 percent by 2020, to 50 percent by 2030. California has already recruited a lot of solar—both rooftop installations and industrial concentrating solar collectors—to fill its renewable needs. So much so that now solar power is causing problems. On sunny days, solar power outstrips demand in the middle of the day when most people are at work, causing voltage fluctuations that can burn up lines and circuits, leading to flickering lights and even blackouts. Before that happens, California utilities pay someone, usually Arizona, to take their excess electricity, not because Arizona needs the power, but because Arizona power lines have space to handle it.

But California still needs more renewables to fill its ambitious portfolio standard. “The worst thing California could do is add more solar to their system,” says Naughton. Adding in-state wind could help even out energy supply, but because sites in California are windy at more or less the same times, the benefit is minimal. So California still relies on natural gas-fired power plants to fill in when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. California needs a reliable energy source that will produce when its solar and wind do not. What California needs is Wyoming’s wind.

As part of a $4.5 million Department of Energy grant called Atmosphere to the Grid: Addressing Barriers to Energy Conversion and Delivery, Naughton has brought together engineers and economists to explore western states’ energy compatibility and the impediments to their electrical union. Starting with California, he and his students compared the power production, cost, greenhouse gas emissions, and even water use under different renewable energy build-out scenarios to assess how Wyoming’s wind could complement California’s renewables.

Both within a day and throughout the year, Wyoming wind could fill in when California renewables lag, Naugton found. Whereas in California wind blows most in the summer and usually at night, in Wyoming wind peaks in the winter and tends to blow in the late afternoon. Combining renewables across a large geographic region can smooth their inputs to the grid, allowing greater use of renewables and less reliance on backstopping by fossil fuel power plants. Wyoming’s wind could save California millions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions, billions of gallons of water that would otherwise cool traditional power plants, and $70–80 million annually.

The Front Range of Colorado could also use Wyoming’s wind. Similar to California, Colorado requires 30 percent renewable energy by 2020. And like California, the more in-state wind and solar it installs, the more ramping—the big swings in power supply that cause problems for customers—it can expect, so it too could benefit from geographic diversity in its renewables. Seven other western states also have renewable portfolio standards that must be filled.

Favorable financials are also increasing the demand for wind development. A federal tax credit that incentivizes new wind projects is scheduled to expire in 2020, prompting companies to launch development before the deadline. The price of wind has also dropped markedly. Lazard’s Levelized Cost approach combines capital and operating expenses into a single cost estimate to compare traditional and renewable energy sources. The 2015 Lazard study estimated the cost of generating electricity from wind is now as low as $32 per megawatt-hour, lower than the cost for coal-fired power, which starts at $65, and natural gas-generated electricity, which starts at $68. It’s also much cheaper than utility-scale solar photovoltaic, which starts at $50–59. And that’s without the federal subsidy for wind.

So now that wind energy is cheap, there’s a big and growing market for renewable energy, and Wyoming’s wind is some of the best in the nation, why hasn’t Wyoming had a single new wind development since 2010?

Less-stranded assets

The first problem is transmission. “We really have no way to get any more power out of the state right now—everything’s full,” says Naughton. Without transmission lines, Wyoming’s wind is a stranded asset, just like coal before railways. Limited transmission capacity holds back renewable energy throughout the West.

Even if more transmission lines were available to shuttle Wyoming’s wind electrons, the western electricity grid is terrible at handling renewables and their big swings in power output, as California knows too well. “The new sources of electricity—solar, wind, geothermal—present a different set of transmission needs than when you built your coal plant outside the city to deliver power,” says Naughton. “The bottom line from the transmission point of view is that we’re trying to do things that our grid was never designed for.”

Both problems—a lack of transmission and grid problems with renewables—could be alleviated by changes to the flow of electricity in the West. Collaboration among some big energy players is better connecting western energy markets and could ultimately provide greater transmission capacity to handle burgeoning renewables. The resulting more-modernized grid could overcome Wyoming’s challenges to greater penetration in the western renewable energy market.

Wyoming is part of the Western Interconnection, one of three electricity grids that generate and distribute electricity in the United States. Except for a few portals along the interconnection borders, electricity is not readily shared across grids. Within each grid, electricity producers sell power to consumers, with balancing authorities, often utilities, serving as intermediaries. Although western electricity producers and consumers are connected by power lines, long-term contracts and arcane regulatory structures functionally isolate them. Those contracts and regulations constrain balancing authorities’ ability to optimize real-time supply and demand. That makes the grid less efficient.

But now two of the biggest players in the western grid are partnering up. PacifiCorp is the utility that supplies power to much of Wyoming and five other western states. CAISO, the California Independent Service Operator, is the balancing authority that connects electricity buyers with utilities for 80 percent of California and a bit of Nevada. In 2014, the two groups agreed to sell power back and forth, and the paradoxically named Regional Energy Imbalance Market was born. Utilities in other states have since joined the market and the footprint of the regional market is now substantial.

Three grids, known as interconnections, cover the continental United States. Within the western interconnection, utilities are gradually joining the Regional Energy Imbalance Market under the California Independent Service Operator, making energy exchanges more efficient. Data from CAISO.

Grid integration is a game changer for Wyoming. First, it could provide the transmission Wyoming needs to connect to renewable energy consumers. CAISO and PacifiCorp commissioned a study on the benefits of regional coordination, which showed that grid integration would lead to more efficient use of existing transmission lines, but also greater capacity to build new lines. The study concludes that when better integrated utilities plan for energy transmission together, costly DC lines, like those needed to move electricity from Wyoming to distant California markets, will become more feasible (although still slow given the onerous regulatory hurdles of siting lines).

Second, grid integration creates a bigger market, connecting energy producers and consumers across a much larger service area. That keeps power flowing logically from areas of high production to areas of high demand, alleviating the power surges and troughs that currently plague the grid. It also realizes cost savings. Cindy Crane, who oversees PacifiCorp’s operations in Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah says the Regional Energy Imbalance Market makes it easier for the utility to buy someone else’s excess energy instead of always generating their own. “And that helps us keep our rates low.”

The emerging western energy market has enjoyed some early successes such as lower rates, but full grid integration is still in the works. Still needed is agreement among the participants on equitable distribution of costs, including new regional transmission fees, grid management charges, new meters, and others. Wyoming has some of the cheapest electricity anywhere, so while the integration efficiencies may be a net gain for the six-state PacifiCorp market, Crane worries that Wyoming’s rates could increase. “This isn’t an opportunity for the California utilities to get a windfall,” Crane says.

There’s also the issue of governance. CAISO is currently managing the emerging market and its utility participants. But some western states won’t stomach having their utilities governed by a California-based balancing authority forever. Wyoming players in particular, would like to see an independent governance structure that would loosen California’s control.

Grid integration makes California cautious too. Policy-makers prefer to keep new renewable energy jobs in-state, rather than exporting them to Wyoming. And some West Coast environmental groups worry about pulling power from a grid sullied with carbon-fired electrons. Kathryn Philips, Director of Sierra Club California, expressed this fear: “A regional power market could increase greenhouse gas emissions and prop up out-of-state coal plants that threaten clean air and water across the region.”

The chasm between Wyoming and California is filled with ideological differences. In the end, will western states tie the knot through a fully integrated grid? “I think eventually they will work it out,” says Rob Godby, a University of Wyoming economist on the Department of Energy grant. “The benefits are too big on both sides to walk away from it.”

Integrated energy markets could shift the future of renewable energy in Wyoming. But the grid is just one of two significant roadblocks to new wind development in Wyoming. The other is desire.

Rolling up the welcome mat

Even if transmission is solved through more lines and better grid integration, wind energy is anathema to many Wyomingites, including key policymakers. Ironically, it’s the environmental downsides of climate-friendly wind energy that give Wyomingites pause.

Why does a state that typically embraces big energy balk at the prospect of more wind turbines? Well-known impacts to birds, bats, and other wildlife worry some, but viewshed concerns dominate. Towering wind turbines could chop up Wyoming’s prized horizons.

A 2011 study by Arizona State professor Martin Pasqualetti found that similar perceptions motivated opposition to four wind farms around the world, regardless of location. Immutability, the sense that “the landscapes with which we are most familiar, those that provide both our livelihoods and our greatest comfort will not change over time,” creates strong resistance to towering wind turbines, Pasqualetti wrote.

The power of wind farms to permanently change the landscape that Wyomingites love, is something that Wyoming Senator Cale Case struggles with: “My son, my grandchildren will never see the Wyoming I saw,” Case told the Casper Star-Tribune in May. “With wind, that viewshed is lost forever. It is severed.” (Wind farms can be decommissioned, but it hasn’t happened much yet in this relatively new industry.)

Professor Pasqualetti also found that opposition to wind stems from a sense of imposition, the feeling that wind projects are “someone else’s idea, for someone else’s benefit.”

Wyoming Senator Ogden Driskill echoed the sentiment that Wyomingites don’t have much to gain from wind. “If wind doesn’t provide some form of significant benefit to the state of Wyoming, I don’t care if it is here,” Driskill told the Wyoming Business Report.

Whereas fossil fuel companies pay severance taxes to the state for removal of non-renewable resources, severance taxes don’t apply to wind, even if it feels like the viewshed is lost forever. The sense that wind farms create a permanent loss has helped to motivate Wyoming’s unique $1 per megawatt-hour wind production tax (see Policy Box: Wyoming’s Wind Tax [link to this page]).

In 2016, the Wyoming legislature’s Interim Revenue Committee, on which Driskill and Case both serve, considered increasing the wind production tax to better compensate Wyomingites for viewshed losses. And it wouldn’t hurt if it could also raise more revenue for the state’s ailing economy (if the higher tax doesn’t kill interest in new wind developments outright). The proposal to up the wind tax failed that time but could come back.

As Pasqualetti found, lots of communities oppose wind development. But wind has a particular perception problem in coal country. As coalmines lay off workers and wind turbines sprout up in the United States, some on the Interim Revenue Committee perceive that pro-wind factions are “seeking to shut down the coal industry,” the Casper Star-Tribune reported in May.

The idea that Wyoming’s wind development is driving coal out of business “flat out isn’t true,” Naughton contests. Because with regulations and social pressures for energy sources with low carbon dioxide emissions, “if it wasn’t wind it would be something else.” Given its low price, that something else is currently natural gas, another Wyoming commodity.

Economist Rob Godby, takes it a step further. He says that instead of being competitors, wind and coal are good partners, working well together to capitalize on multiple markets. Wyoming sells wind energy as electrons to Western Interconnection markets, while the state exports coal in raw form by railcar across grid boundaries to the Eastern Interconnection and Texas.

But the wind-coal tension persists, perhaps because of the perception that the ideas that have spurred wind energy development—including the need for clean energy that will slow climate change—are the same ideas that have hampered the coal industry. Thus to embrace wind is to be complicit in the demise of coal.

Regardless of the reason, the dominant narrative is that Wyoming, like an energy colony, would bear the costs of big wind development—loss of viewsheds and traditional economies—without reaping the benefits. But that assumes that without severance tax and mineral royalties, wind has little to offer the Wyoming economy. The data tell a different story.

The surprising financial benefit of wind

It turns out that Wyoming stands to make real money from wind, even without an increase in the wind tax. In a 2016 report to the Wyoming Business Council and the Carbon County Economic Development Corporation, Department of Energy grant participants and UW economists Godby, Tex Taylor, and Roger Coupal estimated the potential revenue from five Wyoming wind projects in the works. Those include what would be the biggest wind development in the United States, the three-gigawatt Chokecherry-Sierra Madre wind farm near Rawlins, plus four more projects scattered around the state. Together, they would produce 6.1 gigawatts of wind power.

Godby and his colleagues found that, if completed, those five projects would generate an estimated $1.9–2.1 billion in tax revenue in Wyoming over 20 years from property taxes, sales and use taxes from construction and operating activities, and the current wind production tax. Wind development also creates some jobs, although mostly in the construction phase, and most of that comprising a specialized, temporary workforce. Still, new jobs, including some permanent ones, with an average annual salary of about $58,000 would generate $3 billion in estimated labor income to Wyoming over 20 years. Altogether, those five wind farms would yield some $7.1 billion in new economic activity to the state. Big numbers to be sure, but are they enough to matter?

When I ask him over coffee whether an even bigger build-out of wind, on the scale estimated by Naughton, could generate enough revenue to fill the hole in Wyoming’s economy left by fossil fuels, Godby at first says, “It’s not even close.” But then he pauses and says, “Let’s just do a thought experiment.”

We assume 12 gigawatts of new wind, which would include the six gigawatts of wind farms on the drawing board plus as many new projects not yet conceived. That’s at the lower end of Naughton’s estimate of 10–20 gigawatts of realistically producible wind power. (Godby, however, thinks it’s on the outer limits of what’s possible.) He doubles the tax revenue projections from the five new wind projects to represent the hypothetical 12 gigawatts of new wind. That would yield an average of $210 million per year, without considering jobs and other forms of economic stimulus from wind development.

For context, declines in severance taxes from oil, gas, and coal during 2015 totaled $340 million in lost tax revenue to Wyoming. So potential new tax revenue from wind would equal more than 60 percent of lost severance taxes (recognizing that severance taxes are not the only revenue source from fossil fuels). Put another way, total new tax revenue from 12 gigawatts of wind would be slightly greater than the state’s current budget deficit, which the Wyoming Legislative Service Office estimates at $203 million per year after major reductions in spending.

As important as wind revenue could be, it does not neatly offset losses from fossil fuels. First, tax revenue from wind is “lumpy,” says Godby. More revenue would come early on during the construction phase, so some years would see well above $210 million in tax revenue and other years would see less. A larger proportion of wind’s tax revenue—40 percent—would go to local governments compared with just 9 percent from coal for instance. That would boost revenue in places that have not traditionally benefitted from mining, but leave gaps at the state level and in counties reliant on coal. Wind tax revenue would also contribute significantly to state coffers including the School Foundation account that funds K-12 education, but would not completely fill the losses from fossil fuels. The other caveat, Godby says, is that it will take at least 10 years to see new money from wind given the slow pace of creating wind and transmission projects, while the budget crisis is now. Still, wind development could be a big chunk of the long-term economic diversification puzzle.

Naughton adds that wind development can also be an “enabler,” kicking open the door to other revenue sources for Wyoming. “What kind of economic opportunities can we have here because we have cheap renewable electricity—the cheapest in the country?” he asks. Big data companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are on track to be among the biggest power users in the world, already using an estimated 10 percent of global energy production, according to one industry report, The Cloud Begins with Coal. They’re looking for clean energy sources.

Case in point, in late 2016 Microsoft committed to purchasing 237 megawatts of wind from Wyoming and Kansas for its Cheyenne data center. Since, “we’ve probably missed the ability to attract lots of wind turbine manufacturers because other states did that,” says Naughton, enabling data centers and other electricity-hungry industries is a key opportunity.

From ranchers who lease land for turbines, to counties that get a big share of wind farm tax income, many individuals and communities would gain financially from more wind development. The question is whether those gains are enough to overlook the costs, to see past the turbines on the horizon. If the answer is yes, Wyoming will have to move fast.

Standing at the threshold

Even with its first-class wind resource and proximity to hungry western markets, the window of opportunity for Wyoming to play big in the wind market is closing. Technological advances in wind turbines, “have improved productivity in places that have less wind resource than we do,” letting neighboring state generate comparable power to wind-rich Wyoming, says Godby. Wyoming’s competitiveness is fading.

Plus, the rush for new wind developments that is sweeping through the United States won’t last forever. Wind turbines are being added at twice the rate that will be needed in the 2020s, says Godby. “What that suggests is that the big boom to build wind turbines might slow down significantly” in the next decade. If the pace of current transmission projects is any indicator, new transmission lines take 10 years or more to site, permit, and build. That means Wyoming will have to get those projects off the ground quickly to capitalize on the wind market before it fades. Godby thinks it’s not too late.

If indeed, Wyoming chooses to develop wind at levels meaningful for economic diversification, what would that look like? Assuming 6–12 gigawatts of total wind development from two-megawatt turbines, Wyoming could see between 3,000 and 6,000 turbines. Naughton says southern Albany County and Laramie County north of Cheyenne, ideal because they don’t conflict with sage-grouse populations, could see the most development. Wind farms could also sprout up north of there, near Douglas and Casper.

“Would you see more wind? Yes.” Is the whole state going to look like Tehachapi, California, with its endless forest of wind turbines? “No,” says Naughton. But some remote places would be profoundly changed, challenging the desire for “immutability” of our western landscape.

The good news is that the future of Wyoming’s wind is a choice, not an arranged marriage. It’s less a question of whether clean-energy-hungry western states will drive unwanted wind developments to Wyoming. The question now is whether Wyoming might want to court that new market.

Naughton thinks that choosing wind will be one step of many needed to finally end Wyoming’s boom-bust problems. “If we get it right, we’re going to say, wow, we did it right. If we get it wrong, you could really have to repeat this whole thing again.”

By Nicole Korfanta

Nicole Korfanta is the associate editor of Western Confluence and director of the William D. Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources.

Further Reading

Energy and Environmental Economics, Regional Coordination in the West: Benefits of PacifiCorp and California ISO Integration (San Francisco, Energy and Environmental Economics, 2013).

Robert Godby, David T. Taylor, and Roger Coupal, An Assessment of Wyoming’s Competitiveness to Attract New Wind Development, and the Potential Impacts Such Development May Bring the State (Laramie: University of Wyoming, 2016).

Lazard, Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis—Version 9.0 (New York: Lazard, 2015).

Jonathan Naughton, Wind Diversity Enhancement of Wyoming/California Wind Energy Projects (Laramie: University of Wyoming, 2015).

Jonathan Naughton, Thomas Parish, and Jerad Baker, Wind Diversity Enhancement of Wyoming/Colorado Wind Energy Projects (Laramie: University of Wyoming, 2013).

Martin J. Pasqualetti, “Opposing Wind Energy Landscapes: A Search for Common Cause,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101 (2011).

Renewable energy is on the rise in the western United States, and the world. That trend needs to continue if we’re to meet the emissions reduction targets that most climate scientists deem necessary for staving off catastrophic climate change. But according to Carl Zichella, who directs the Natural Resource Defense Council’s work on western energy transmission, we can’t get there with the outdated grid we have now.

Today, the energy grid in the western United States is run by 38 different entities called “balancing area authorities,” many of which are operated by a single utility. It’s hard for these disjointed segments of the grid to share renewable energy. A single west-wide system would be more reliable and make better use of renewable energy, helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions. According to Zichella, who has been working on grid policy since 2008, the West already has a model for this more modern, unified grid. It’s the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), a third-party, federally regulated, nonprofit organization that coordinates the many electricity producers and utilities in California’s energy system. Zichella and others have been working on policies that would expand the CAISO model throughout the West, creating a grid with more capacity for renewable resources.

Western Confluence spoke with Zichella about his ideas for updating the grid to keep pace with the West’s changing energy landscape.

Western Confluence: How does the energy grid in the western US work today?

Carl Zichella: The grid is the most complicated machine we’ve ever built. It’s gigantic, it is complex, and to get the most efficient use out of the system we have to use it in the most coordinated way that we can.

In the West today our grid is broken up into all these small, little areas that really use the system pretty wastefully and require us to build duplicative resources like power plants we may not need. That’s because each of those 38 areas is responsible for balancing demand and generation within their footprints.

In other parts of the country there are entities called independent system operators that run large portions of the regional grid. The independent system operator is like the traffic cop of the system. But in the western United States there aren’t these independent system operators, with the exception of California. It makes it hard to take advantage of renewable energy resources.

WC: Why is that?

CZ: Renewable resources are variable resources that don’t always operate 24/7. But in a big footprint across the western US, the wind is always blowing someplace. So [with a better integrated grid, one managed by a large independent system operator] we could take solar power from California and send it to Oregon… We could take the wind energy from Wyoming and use it to operate any hours that wind power in Oregon’s Columbia Gorge isn’t operating, for example.

We would have the ability to use renewable energy resources just as reliably as we would a gas or coal plant, as long as we could use them over a big footprint. But we can’t do that in the West today because our grid is broken up into all these small, little areas. So it’s very wasteful.

There have been numerous studies done about how best to clean up the grid, to use more and more renewable energy resources. And all of those studies point to better system coordination as being a key feature of being able to bring renewable energy resources in.

WC: What is the path for turning those 38 entities into one operating system overseeing the western grid?

CZ: So we already have this nucleus around which we can build the grid of the future in the west.

You start by expanding the independent system operator in California. Then, if the utility that serves Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and a little tiny part of California, joins the independent system operator, it opens up the grid. Then other utilities gradually join the independent system operator.

The utilities will form a regional market, where they’re using the most efficient resources first and using the least efficient and most polluting resources less and less. You can take advantage of the resources that are operating in any part of the system to support the rest of the grid. That’s not possible in a system that’s highly Balkanized and fragmented into these many different pieces.

WC: Are there concerns about changing the grid system?

CZ: Yeah, I think whenever you make a major change like this there’s a lot of resistance. Some states have built up their economies around mining and burning coal. It’s a very tough decision for Wyoming, for example, that has 70 percent of its state revenues coming from levies on extractive industries. When those industries begin to vanish, well of course there’s going to be some resistance.

So we have to help every participant in the western electrical system and economy be able to recognize and realize benefits from the change. And we can do that. But there’s going to be some pain. You’re losing thousands of coal mining jobs, for example, that’s not an easy thing to replace.

WC: What can people do if they want to see a more coordinated grid?

CZ: They can make clear to their state representatives and their utilities that they want clean energy, that they want a more efficient grid, that they want to stop wasting resources and money on a system that is quickly becoming outdated, that we need to modernize the way that we build, plan and operate the system.

The decisions people make about how they use energy and what kind of energy they use are very critical to this. That can help us make the transition more cost effective too, whether it’s by putting solar panels on their house, or insisting that the utilities invest in renewable energy.

WC: What’s at stake if we continue to use the current grid system?

CZ: Well, what’s at stake is we don’t meet the goal of an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse house gas emissions worldwide by 2050, which is what the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are calling for. And if we don’t meet those goals then we have a very grim prospect ahead of us. We’re already seeing climate impacts across the western United States like the extended droughts that we’ve been seeing in the southwestern US and in California, the unusual weather events that we’ve encountered across the western United States. That has implications for fish, for wildlife, for cities, for agriculture, for every single thing that we touch in our lives.

By Sarah Jane Keller

Sarah Jane Keller is a freelance science and environmental journalist based in Bozeman, Montana. Find more of her work at sjanekeller.com.

As project developers blew into Wyoming, the legislature began viewing wind as a potential source of tax revenue. Wyoming does not have a corporate income tax so the only tax revenue available from existing statutes was property taxes on the towers and turbines. At the time Wyoming exempted renewable energy equipment purchases from sales tax.

In 2009, perceiving no need to incentivize wind when there was so much development pressure, the legislature cancelled the sales tax exemption except for projects already underway. Also in 2009, the legislature began evaluating additional ways to tax wind. The state embraced a generation tax, the first and only such tax on wind energy in the nation, which imposes an annual levy of $1 per megawatt hour. The legislature adopted the generation tax in 2010, and it has since brought in about $4 million per year, 60 percent of which goes to the counties where the turbines are located and 40 percent to the state general fund.

By the end of 2010, Wyoming’s wind energy boom busted. No new large projects have come online in the state since. The reasons for the bust were many, including uncertainty over federal tax policy, but wind developers also perceived Wyoming as unfriendly to their industry. This perception arose from not just the generation tax, but also statewide sage grouse management policies that disrupted wind projects and other indications that Wyoming citizens and political officials were ambivalent about wind energy. Wind farms continued to be developed in states, such as New Mexico, with more favorable tax and regulatory policies.

Still, several large Wyoming wind projects are methodically moving forward, including the Chokecherry/Sierra Madre project coupled to the TransWest Express transmission line. Funded by Denver billionaire Phillip Anschutz and located south of Interstate 80 in central Carbon County, Chokecherry/Sierra Madre could become the country’s largest on-shore wind energy development. As of late 2016 it was nearing the completion of federal permitting.

As such massive projects have gained momentum, the state legislature, faced with declining revenue from the collapsing fossil fuel energy industry, again sought to bring in additional money from wind. The Joint Interim Revenue Committee made two proposals: increase the generation tax from $1 per megawatt hour to $3, and make developers transfer a portion of their production tax credit (a federal incentive for wind projects) to Wyoming.

Wind developers and local governments raised a storm of protest. The issues came to a head at a September 2016 meeting in Buffalo, Wyoming, where the committee heard hours of testimony opposing the changes. Not a single person testified in favor of increasing the generation tax. Faced with that onslaught, the committee voted against both proposals. Individual legislators may bring back the generation tax increase proposal in the 2017 legislative session. However, given the strong opposition from developers and the public, and the Governor’s resistance to the proposed tax, it is not likely to be successful.

By Lawrence J. Wolfe

Lawrence Wolfe is an attorney with Holland & Hart specializing in conventional and renewable energy and natural resources law.

The goal is to replace high-carbon-emitting electricity generation such as coal-fired power with cleaner energy sources, especially wind and solar. States enforce RPSs in different ways. In some states, if a utility doesn’t sell enough qualifying renewable energy to meet the RPS’s target, it pays a fine relative to the number of megawatts by which it fell short.

So how well do they work? Economists and policy analysts have determined that RPSs do result in replacing greenhouse-gas-emitting power generation with cleaner sources. About 60 percent of the 100 gigawatts of new non-hydro renewable energy generation capacity that has come online since 2000 fulfills RPS obligations. In 2013, renewable energy sources under RPSs reduced greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 59 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to the National Renewable Energy Lab and Berkeley National Laboratory.

While RPSs do effectively clean up power generation, it doesn’t come for free. The Berkeley Lab estimates that in 2014, RPS compliance cost $2.6 billion above what energy costs would have been without the renewable requirements. That sounds like a lot, but it averaged to less than 2 percent of electricity customers’ bills.

States adjust their RPSs for many reasons: to improve how they operate, increase the future renewable targets, require more or less of certain kinds of renewable energy, or to respond to changing politics. For example, in 2015 the California legislature upped the state’s renewable target from 33 percent by 2020 to 50 percent by 2030. States can also repeal their RPSs. Kansas demoted its RPS to a voluntary goal after its legislature flipped from mostly democrats to majority republicans in 2015. (Oddly, Kansas had already surpassed the amount of renewable energy required by its RPS, so repealing the law didn’t change the state’s energy trajectory.)

Wyoming does not have an RPS, but because it exports so much energy, other states’ RPSs influence Wyoming’s energy portfolio. Wyoming already generates more than a gigawatt (1,000 megawatts) of wind energy that helps states to the south and west meet their RPSs. As states like California and Colorado strive to achieve the escalating targets of their ambitious RPSs while meeting their citizens’ growing energy demands, they may look to Wyoming’s wind as a source of clean electricity. But that will require overcoming barriers such as national and state politics and the huge cost and general unpopularity of interstate transmission lines.

By Lawrence Wolfe and Emilene Ostlind

Nearly 500 Wyoming coal miners were laid off last spring, and in the past two years roughly 5,400 oilfield workers lost their jobs in the state. In 2015, Wyoming saw the highest unemployment spike in the nation. Fossil fuel industries here support a whole host of related businesses that provide supply, repair, transportation, legal, accounting, and other services to mining operations. Those suffered dramatically, too. The subsequent drop in tax revenue led to a budget shortfall of roughly $150 million this past fiscal year and deep cuts to public services statewide.

Wyoming at present is experiencing a grim case of déjà vu, thrust by low commodity prices into an economic slump after a decade of good times. Previous busts have been temporary, and workers needed only to wait until energy prices rebounded for the industries to right themselves and offer more jobs. But the current situation is prompting economists, government officials, and workers alike to wonder if we might be catching a glimpse of Wyoming’s future in a fossil fuel-free world.

“This storm looks long, like a structural change, not just a cyclical downturn,” says Robert Godby, director of the Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy at the University of Wyoming.

Some in Wyoming look forward with hope to Donald Trump’s presidency, since he made sweeping promises about saving the coal industry. But market forces—not regulation—are largely responsible for the downturns in the oil, gas, and coal industries.

“If there’s any culprit in terms of coal’s woes right now, it’s natural gas, and has been since 2008,” says Godby. Fracking, which ramped up nationwide around 2008, enabled companies to overproduce and thus create a supply glut of oil and gas, deflating fossil fuel prices across the board and hitting coal particularly hard.

Regardless, Wyoming’s economy is famously homogenous. Mining—mostly for oil, gas, and coal—employs more than ten percent of the state’s total workforce at salaries far higher than the statewide average. A larger percentage of Wyoming’s population works in fossil fuels than does that of any other state. Wyoming’s second largest industry, tourism, offers mostly low-paying service jobs. Scattershot opportunities exist for laid-off miners in smaller local industries like construction, but options for good work are widely limited. It is easy to understand why, from the vantage of Wyoming, a world transitioning away from fossil fuels appears a foreboding landscape—one in which fossil fuel workers bear the brunt of a societal shift.

Amidst the debates over climate change taking place worldwide, voices calling for a “just transition” are becoming louder and more highly regarded. The notion of a “just transition” originated in the 1990s among labor groups whose members worked with toxic chemicals that government regulations were phasing out. It evolved in the era of global warming to describe a transition to renewable energy that does as little harm as possible to workers—in fossil fuel industries and otherwise.

Jeremy Brecher said climate activists and labor organizers are working more closely than ever to protect jobs and slow global warming at the same time. Brecher is the co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability, a coalition formed in 2009 whose notion of sustainability relates not only to climate change, but to employment and social justice as well. Brecher noted the International Association of Machinists, whose membership includes railroad workers who haul coal to West Coast seaports, passed a major resolution in September recognizing the union’s need to support climate action. In 2015, the International Trade Union Confederation, which represents more than 180 million workers in 162 countries, hosted a summit on global warming titled “No Jobs on a Dead Planet.” And even though national labor unions in the United States have been reluctant to support many measures to fight climate change because of a perceived jobs risk, activist stirrings among local chapters indicate a rank-and-file willingness to advocate for climate justice. For instance, although five of the country’s largest unions officially came out in favor of the Dakota Access Pipeline, in October a sizeable contingent of union workers set up camp alongside Native American water protectors on the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota to help stop its construction.

“It just shows that people are becoming aware that this threat is so serious that we have to act on it, even if that makes some economic problems for us,” Brecher said. “But we have to address those economic problems, as well, and find a worker-friendly way to move to fossil-free energy.”

According to a Labor Network for Sustainability study, the switch to renewable energy has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of jobs nationwide, mostly in manufacturing and construction. An ideal “just transition” might fill these positions across the country with laid-off Wyoming miners.

“The overall effect [of a switch to renewable energy] is very jobs-positive—numerous other studies have come to the same conclusion,” Brecher said. “A lot of people who work in Western coal mines have the skills of construction workers, like the capacity to operate big machinery. There will be a lot of jobs in building the clean energy economy for people with those skills.”

But while some of those jobs already exist, most do not. And while some of them will exist in Wyoming, many will require displacement. Crews broke ground in September in the southern part of the state on what will be the largest wind farm in the world, but the construction will mostly be executed by specialists not likely from Wyoming or inclined to stick around after the wind farm is complete. The state did hardly anything to attract related industry that would provide high-paying jobs in the long term, such as turbine manufacturing. While building a renewable energy infrastructure will be jobs-positive on a national and global scale, little at this point indicates Wyoming will take advantage of the opportunity.

In the absence of readymade jobs to fill, Brecher said a support system should be put in place to buoy workers set adrift by climate policies. The best model, he said, is the GI Bill of Rights that helped soldiers returning from World War II re-enter the working world. Their benefits included access to a full education as well as low-interest home mortgages and business loans.

“We need something that makes that kind of boost available to anybody whose job is lost as a result of policies that are necessary for the future of the world,” he said.

Last year, as the coal industry buckled, President Obama unveiled the POWER Plus Program, which allocates money for struggling coal communities. It remains to be seen whether President Trump will push for federal funds to help these communities and workers, whose recovery looks difficult even without regulations. But Wyoming officials seem eager to find a market solution to fossil fuel’s woes, even if the market caused those woes in the first place.

Jeremiah Rieman, natural resources policy director for Wyoming Governor Matt Mead, scoffed at Obama’s programs. First, he argued, any measure to abandon coal would be “a troubling, shortsighted move”—a dig at Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which Trump has promised to scrap. Furthermore, Rieman said, Obama’s POWER Plus program is unfair to Wyoming because it relies in significant part on money the state’s coal operators have paid into the Abandoned Mine Lands Fund—allocations that would normally return directly to Wyoming. Instead, the lion’s share of POWER Plus money is slated to go to eastern and Appalachian states like Virginia and Kentucky, which are also facing a coal crunch.

“In the last POWER proposal I saw, very little would be available for Western states,” Rieman said. “At the same time Wyoming is being impacted by these [climate] proposals, there’s very little to suggest that we would benefit from the programs that are being put forward.”

Godby, the economist, said instead of using AML funds, the best way to financially support workers and communities impacted by climate policies would be a national carbon tax. Recent reports from the Brookings Institute note such a tax could, conservatively, generate up to $1 trillion in revenue in the span of a decade.

“The big benefit of a carbon tax is that it raises revenue to cover the transition costs of imposing regulation—to at least do something to offset some of those effects, whether it’s for training or economic development,” Godby said. “With any other approach—including the Clean Power Plan—you’re going to have to generate additional revenue somewhere else or reallocate expenditures to help the transition.”

Compared to the Clean Power Plan, which clocks in at 1,560 pages and requires massive amounts of centralized oversight, a carbon tax would be simple, transparent, and cheap to implement, Godby said. But imposing such a tax would require an act of Congress, and in this political climate, Godby said, “‘tax’ is a four-letter word. People hate taxes. We should probably start by renaming it. Maybe call it a ‘fee.’”

Rieman said coal is already considerably taxed, at an effective rate of 39 percent including royalties and fees, and if anything, taxes should be decreased because they’re overburdening the industry.

“It’s better to invest in miners and mining and continuing to mine and investing in technology as a solution, rather than taxing these resources out of use,” he said.

Elsewhere in the state government, members of the Wyoming Business Council are working to expand the economy beyond just mining. Touting the nation’s friendliest tax policies, the council’s ten-year plan calls for courting companies to expand five target industries: manufacturing, advanced conversion technology (clean coal), data centers, logistics and distribution (shipping), and lifestyle entrepreneurs (which the Northeast Wyoming Growth Alliance describes as “the telecommuter who works via wifi on her front porch; the fly-fishing guide who schedules appointments online; the potter or the writer who creates in a back-yard studio”). Spokesperson Ron Gullberg said the council is beefing up its outreach, redesigning its website to present a more attractive digital front end, and developing a “business ambassadors” program to generate leads. It recently entered into a partnership with XPRIZE, a $20 million global competition to find ways to transform carbon emissions into saleable products (the winner will be the first tenant of the new Wyoming Integrated Test Center, a new research hub studying “clean coal” technology).

“A lot of what might seem like little things are very important,” Gullberg said. “We’re getting our storytelling up there, getting word out about infrastructure and Wyoming’s business advantages—the low cost of doing business here, with no corporate or income taxes.”

One major tool for spurring development, however, has been lately diminished: state funds. The Wyoming Business Council relies heavily on its Business Ready Community Grant program to incentivize companies to choose Wyoming. In recent years, for instance, the council awarded farming technology upstart Bright AgroTech $2.85 million for a new headquarters, it granted tech firm UL $3.3 million for a new facility, and firearms accessories manufacturer HiViz received $2.9 million to relocate from Colorado. But statewide funding cuts did not spare the council. Its grant program was slashed roughly 30 percent from the prior biennium, down to $38.5 million for 2017–2018. Another $20 million pool the council used for one-time business funding was eliminated altogether.

Gullberg said the state-level belt-tightening made some members of the council eager to explore options for federal funding, like those available from Obama’s POWER program. Wyoming faces difficulties attracting businesses because it’s such a small market, not densely populated, and it competes with regional urban hubs like Denver and Salt Lake City that offer firms access to more economic activity. Being able to offer a company $3 million for shiny new headquarters definitely helps.

But Dave Spencer, director of the Wyoming Business Council’s northeast region, took one taste of Obama’s program and soured to it. After learning of POWER in 2015, Spencer and his colleagues in the region crafted a set of proposals for the Economic Development Agency, which oversees POWER funding. These included studies related to tourism, plastics manufacturing, and a research facility in the area’s small towns.

“We put together a bunch of projects, but the EDA kind of turned their nose up at them,” Spencer said. “Their requirements are so stringent that they’re really hard to work with, and we just didn’t feel like it was worth pursuing.”

Among the POWER plan’s requirements for funding is a local match—something the Wyoming Business Council would need to provide, since, Spencer said, “None of these communities have money for a match.”

But Spencer’s experience speaks to deeper divisions between the federal government and conservative, fossil fuel producing states. It suggests the movement for a “just transition” has a long way to go before everyone is convinced that a big pot of government money—whether it comes from AML funds, a carbon tax, or elsewhere—is going to provide a smooth ride to the New Energy Future.

“The state’s not in great shape financially, so any outside help we could get might be welcome,” Spencer said. “But our typical experience with using those kinds of funds on state projects is that it adds a level of complexity to the point that you wonder whether it was worth it or not. They’re not easy to work with. Maybe we’re just too independent out here or something.”

By Nathan C. Martin

Nathan C. Martin is a freelance writer from Wyoming.

The world needs more energy. More than 1.4 billion people live without access to electricity. Over a million people, twice Wyoming’s population, join the world’s population each week. And the parts of the world where the population is growing most rapidly are places with the least energy and the greatest poverty.

Under almost any energy scenario, world energy demand will continue to grow. And if choices are made, as some advocate, to “leave it in the ground” and limit fossil fuel or nuclear energy, who will determine the energy haves and have nots?

We have the resources to meet the world’s energy demands. The challenge is that those fuels that are the most affordable, available, and abundant—oil, gas, and coal—also produce the most carbon dioxide, or CO₂. And with that increase in CO₂ comes the specter of climate change.

How will the world meet the challenge of providing more energy while reducing CO₂ emissions?

I’m an oil and gas veteran who’s worked in uranium, coal, renewables, and finance. I started in the late ’70s teaching geology. My first job in the energy business was exploring for uranium on the Colorado Plateau, followed by a stint with the US Geological Survey mapping coal seams in western Wyoming. In 1984, I took a job in oil and gas with Shell, a journey that eventually took me to more than 40 countries and to Royal Dutch Shell’s top role in global exploration. In the course of my Shell career I established a financing business for small oil and gas producers, oversaw Shell’s global upstream and downstream strategy and planning, helped run a 900-megawatt wind business, initiated gas-to-transport pilot projects and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) ventures, and acquired and developed shale gas and light tight oil.

This on-the-job education across the energy spectrum in industry, government, and academia instilled a healthy dose of pragmatism in my thinking about our energy and climate challenges. Despite the welcome and remarkable growth of renewable electricity generation, fossil fuels still provide more than 82 percent of the world’s primary energy—what we use to move our planes, trains, and automobiles; heat, cool, and light our homes; fuel our factories; manufacture our products; farm our fields; and power our communities, schools, hospitals and businesses. Energy, including fossil fuels, has been, is, and will be a force for good. As Elon Musk, head of the electric vehicle company Tesla said about oil and gas, “If we didn’t have them, we would have economic collapse and people would be starving to death.”

Transitioning to lower CO₂ energy sources is not easy. Energy is not microchips where significant rates of new product penetration are measured in quarters and years. Market penetration of new energy sources is typically measured in decades. It took almost 70 years for coal, 65 years for oil, and more than 80 years for natural gas to garner a 20 percent market share of the world’s energy. Today, nuclear still only supplies about 5 percent of the world’s primary energy supply. Despite massive cost reductions, tax credits and subsidies, wind and solar are still less than 3 percent of the global energy mix. “Zero-carbon” electricity’s percentage of total global electricity supply has been decreasing the past decade as nuclear power plants have been shut down and new coal-fired power plants are installed. And despite great advances in electric vehicles, more than 80 million new gas and diesel automobiles are still purchased each year, and each has an average life of over a decade. CO₂ emissions continue to grow.

As we seek solutions, recognize that there is a cost for everything. An implementable vision for our energy future requires a shift in mindset to move beyond that of the theoretical fabulist. The world will need all the energy that it can get, and that energy comes with tradeoffs—CO₂ and particulates from fossil fuels; perceived radiation risk and waste storage from nuclear; reliability, footprint, and distribution for wind and solar; land use and ecological disruption from hydro. “Not in my backyard” for all.

An ideal energy system would be affordable, abundant, available, safe, secure, and sustainable, with low emissions and a small footprint. Price, reliability, and scalability matter. Costs must allow economies to grow at a sustained pace and be competitive with existing energy sources.

Nothing is perfect. No single energy source meets all these criteria. Instead, we should embrace a portfolio of diverse energy sources, conservation and efficiency measures, technology research and development, and CO₂ mitigation projects that merit action now. What might this portfolio include?

On the supply side, natural gas power plants provide affordable, reliable baseload power generation with half the CO₂ of older coal-burning power plants. Cost reductions have made wind and solar more commercially attractive in many regions and hydropower has long competed as a low-cost, zero-carbon energy source. New transmission infrastructure and smart grids will be essential to increasing power reliability and expanding renewables. Nuclear energy, including new modular technologies, brings significant advantages of scale. The importance of existing nuclear facilities should not be underestimated. For example, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California, a candidate for early shutdown, contributes twice as much power as all the solar panels in California. That’s a lot of zero-carbon electricity.

Energy conservation and efficiency is one of the best ways to assure there is enough energy to go around while lowering CO₂ emissions and saving money. Pathways available to us now include energy-efficient appliances, heating, cooling, lighting, and building materials; innovative architectural and urban design; retooled and redesigned manufacturing and industrial processes; accessible public transportation; fuel-efficient transportation (including electric vehicles); and much more.

We need a giant step change in energy research and development. US government support for energy R&D is anemic, about one-third of what it was during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Bill Gates and others have called for a “moonshot” approach to solving our energy dilemmas. Of particular interest to Wyoming is research and development in carbon capture, storage, and utilization and negative emissions technologies, both crucial to achieving lower CO₂.

There should be many opportunities for new industrial-scale energy pilot projects in Wyoming, including carbon capture and usage for coal. Support for wind (which Wyoming is blessed with in abundance) and solar, will continue to grow as costs are increasingly competitive and reliability is improved. What is the potential for natural gas in transport and manufacturing? How can electric and fuel-efficient vehicle use be expanded? Wyoming, building on programs and initiatives at UW and partnerships with industry, could lead energy research and development.

Meeting the energy transition challenge will not be easy. Bipartisanship, disengagement, and divestment are not solutions. It’s a time for action, partnerships, and investment across the entire energy sector. The challenge of energy and climate may lead to setbacks and to cynicism in some. But others, Wyoming included, should see enormous opportunities for individuals, business, and society and step up to lead.

By David Lawrence

David Lawrence is a University of Wyoming 2016 Energy Law and Policy Fellow. He is Chairman of Lawrence Energy Group, LLC, a firm investing in emerging stage energy opportunities. Lawrence received his PhD in geology and geophysics from Yale University, is past chairman of the advisory board of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute, and retired as an Executive Vice President of Shell after a global career spanning three decades.

“If we disconnected that 14-inch pipe and pointed it upward, the water would blast nearly 600 feet into the air,” says Les Hook over the loud hum of the hydro turbine.

Of course, the City of Buffalo public works director would land in jail if he pulled a stunt like that, but his scenario reveals just how much water pressure it takes to turn the 225-kilowatt turbine housed in a mostly underground concrete bunker at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains in north-central Wyoming.

“That turbine is breaking about 250 pounds per square inch of water pressure down to zero,” Hook says. “That’s a heck of a lot of thrust!”

Buffalo, like a growing number of utilities, electric coops, municipalities, irrigation districts, and agricultural producers across the West, is using water and modern technology in the form of hydro turbines to generate “green” electricity. In particular, small-scale hydropower—those projects that produce less than five megawatts of electricity—can provide reliable, low-carbon, renewable energy for decades. And in a mountainous state like Wyoming, with plenty of streams and irrigation canals flowing downhill, the potential for additional small-scale plants like the one in Buffalo is anything but small.

At the Buffalo facility, nearly 50 gallons of water per second have blasted down a pipeline and into the Pelton turbine since going online in 1998, churning out enough juice to power about 150 homes in the regional grid. Electricity is sold to Rocky Mountain Power, and since the turbine was built to last 100 years, the city stands to profit on its long-term investment. But the Buffalo project never would have come to be without a loan from the Wyoming Water Development Commission. Even small projects like this one cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and take years to pay off. The state can play a role in incentivizing this clean energy source by pulling together funds from a variety of sources, including state, federal, and private, among others.

For ideas on how to promote hydropower development, Wyoming might look to its southern neighbor, Colorado, where a hydropower movement is gaining speed. The US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) recently awarded a $1.5 million grant to the state to help fund small-scale hydro projects on ranches and farms to address water quantity, water quality, and energy resource concerns.

An additional $1.5 million came from the state and a host of partners, including American Rivers, Hydro Research Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, and Rocky Mountain Farmers Union as well as a number of Colorado energy, water conservation, rural electric, and hydro boards and associations.

“Since Colorado enacted the citizen-led Renewable Energy Standard in 2004, the state has been very progressive in promoting renewable energy projects,” says Sam Anderson, Colorado Department of Agriculture energy specialist. He is overseeing the $3 million in grants that will help fund about 30 hydro-mechanical and hydro-electric irrigation systems in the state over the next three years. Colorado’s Renewable Energy Standard, the first voter-led initiative of its kind in the nation, requires investor-owned utilities (currently Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy) to generate 30 percent of their electricity from renewable energy by 2020, including 3 percent from small-scale energy resources such as hydro, solar, and wind. The 22 rural electric cooperatives, meanwhile, must generate 20 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2020.

In addition to the Renewable Energy Standard, concerns about flood irrigation are also motivating the push for hydro in the state. “We use the hydro power as an incentive to encourage farmers and ranchers to engage in more efficient irrigation practices,” Anderson says. Converting from flood irrigation to center pivots saves water and reduces leaching of salts and selenium into waterways. Grants pay about 70 percent of the total project costs on farms and ranches, while ag producers fund the rest. Among those jumping on board is Susan Raymond, who operates a farm and veterinary practice in west-central Colorado near the small mountainous community of Hotchkiss.

Raymond was awarded grants from NRCS and the Regional Conservation Partnership Program to help install a hydro-electrical system and two center pivots, which collectively replaced labor-intensive flood irrigation and are helping her to grow better crops with less water. Produced electricity not only runs the pivots, but also her veterinary facilities, and any surplus goes into the power grid.

Colorado is playing a central role nationally in advancing small and micro hydropower, Anderson says. Working with NRCS and other partners, the state is developing an innovative program, and there is tremendous potential in other states to develop hydropower as well.

“Wyoming has great renewable energy resources, including hydropower, and the state can put that to work for the betterment of the people and the environment. It just takes a local champion to get that going,” says Milt Geiger, who served for six years as energy coordinator for University of Wyoming Extension and the UW School of Energy Resources. In 2016 he took a new job as the first alternative energy administrator for Poudre Valley REA, a non-profit rural electric association based in Fort Collins, Colorado.

During his time in the Cowboy State, Geiger co-authored the Wyoming Small Hydropower Handbook and hit the state’s highways to promote the publication and meet with citizens interested in small-scale hydro development, including those who operate farms, ranches, and irrigation districts.

The handbook states that hydroelectric installations are the most common and often least expensive sources of renewable electricity in the United States today. That’s appealing in a time when interest in low-carbon-emissions energy is escalating. But sizeable hydropower plants—notably those in dams backing up large rivers—come with their share of environmental problems and associated opponents. That’s why Geiger and his co-authors wanted to share information about small-scale hydro, which can be built into existing small dams or other infrastructure associated with irrigation districts. If designed properly, such projects can protect surrounding ecological values such as river flows, water quality, and fish and wildlife habitat.

One of Geiger’s co-authors, Skylor Wade, works for the Cheyenne engineering firm Wenck and Associates, which recently designed a new hydroelectric facility to run the city’s Sherard Water Treatment Plant. Construction of the 700-kilowatt unit begins in early 2017, and the plant is expected to be online in 2018. “I think there is a tremendous amount of potential for small-scale hydro in the state, but it will take support from a lot of people, including legislators and the Wyoming Public Service Commission,” Wade emphasizes.

Back at the Buffalo plant—where the thick, heavily reinforced concrete floor vibrates under Les Hook’s boots as water roars into the Pelton turbine—talk turns from pounds per square inch and kilowatt hours to the attitudes of people and our energy future.

“Yes, I definitely believe in promoting green energy,” emphasizes the public works director. “But it’s going to take action by legislators, public service commissioners, and utilities, to name a few. If a movement gets going, I believe renewable energy in our state, hydro included, will begin to fly.”

By Robert Waggener

Robert Waggener is a Laramie, Wyoming-based editor, writer, and photographer focusing on agriculture, natural resources, and science in Wyoming and the West.

Further Reading

ACRE3: Agricultural Hydro. Colorado Department of Agriculture. 2016.

Hydro Power Vision: A New Chapter for America’s 1st Renewable Electricity. US Department of Energy. 2016.

Milton Geiger, Sarah Hamlen, and Mike Vogel, editors. E³A: Micro-Hydropower for the Home, Farm, or Ranch. University of Wyoming Extension, Montana State University Extension, and Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. 2016.

Skylor Wade, Dylan Wade, and Milton Geiger. Wyoming Small Hydropower Handbook. University of Wyoming Extension Bulletin 1262-1. 2015.

Save

Brady Godwin was on the lookout for river otters. In 2010 and 2011, he floated by raft down southwest Wyoming’s New Fork River, the Upper Green River above Fontenelle Reservoir, and the Green River within Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge, searching for signs of otters. Only a few western US watersheds—including the Green River and its tributaries—are home to these members of the weasel family. As a University of Wyoming graduate student, Godwin’s aim was to survey otter distribution within the Green River Basin to obtain baseline numbers so he could analyze how expanding energy development affected the species.

“We wanted to see where they were,” Godwin explains. “There wasn’t a lot of historical information about them in the area.”

He didn’t expect to see many of the reclusive animals, but he thought he’d see plenty of signs, such as scat. The area was prime otter habitat with plenty of fish. He searched for otter latrines—shared defecation sites—and marked each one by GPS. He collected fresh otter scat from every latrine 12 times during each year and used hair snares at high-activity locations to collect hair samples for DNA analysis.

While both the Green River and the Upper Green River showed about the number of animals expected in such prime otter habitat, otters were conspicuously absent from the New Fork River.

“I found the occasional otter scat but nothing at all that would indicate persistent resident populations,” Godwin says of the New Fork River. His advisor, University of Wyoming wildlife ecology professor Merav Ben-David, even brought her otter-sniffing dog to investigate. When the dog couldn’t find evidence of otters either, they began to wonder why.

The absence of otters in the New Fork River was especially concerning because they are top predators in freshwater ecosystems. They control populations of fish, crayfish, and other aquatic animals and keep the ecosystems healthy by not letting populations get out of control. According to Ben-David, otters eat the equivalent of 10 percent of their body mass in fish each day, and that means toxins and heavy metals the fish might have consumed build up in the otters. This process, called bio-accumulation, can have a number of negative effects on otters including reproductive problems and death. Their sensitivity to environmental degradation, human-caused disturbances, and pollution makes them a “sentinel species,” a harbinger of potential water quality threats that could affect humans.

In order to figure out what was keeping otters away from the New Fork River, the scientists gathered data on several environmental factors. “We were immediately thinking of possible explanations for river otter absence—energy development being one of them—but [we] also looked at potential food, general habitat quality, disturbance, and anything we brainstormed that might be affecting the otters,” Godwin says. They obtained fish counts from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to see if the otters had an adequate food supply. To test whether disturbance was harmful to the animals, they compiled observations, aerial imagery, and GIS data including roads, power lines, buildings, and other forms of development. They also gathered information about potential noise and light disturbances. They wanted to examine every potential reason otters weren’t present, narrowing down the possibilities one by one.

Next, they used electrical conductivity loggers at four sites to indirectly test for pollution. One logger was above the Pinedale Anticline energy development field. The next was below a wastewater treatment facility that processes high-saline waste fluids from hydraulic fracking. The other two were further downstream, in the Upper Green River and wildlife refuge sections of the study area. The scientists logged conductivity levels daily from July through November in 2012.

All three stretches of river had similar habitat and food available, but Godwin’s calculations showed more disturbance along the New Fork River than in other locations. Furthermore, in September, they found a large increase in conductivity—1.6 times the expected amount—downriver of the wastewater treatment facility. Readings taken at the same time above the facility showed normal levels. The researchers didn’t find any runoff, changes in river hydrology, or other explanations for the findings.

“We don’t know what was actually creating that charge,” Godwin says.

The researchers did not have the resources to detect specific compounds in the river at the time, and they cannot definitively say why otters are absent from the New Fork River, though they wrote in their peer-reviewed article about the study, “otters appeared to avoid areas near energy development.” They are currently seeking funding to re-sample the Green River, collect water samples to identify compounds that may explain the abnormal conductivity, and expand the study to the Wind River, Big Horn, and Platte watersheds further east in Wyoming.

“We don’t have a smoking gun or anything,” Godwin says. “We just have some pretty strong evidence that what might be affecting the otters might not be a perfectly natural process.”

By Kristen Pope

Further reading

B. Godwin, S. Albeke, H. Bergman, A. Walters, and M. Ben-David. “Density of river otters (Lontra candensis) in relation to energy development in the Green River Basin, Wyoming.” Science of the Total Environment 532 (2015) 780-790. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.06.058

Save