Green Options » wyoming

2,000 MW Wind Farm Will Send Power from Wyoming to Southern California

Timothy B. Hurst — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:33:54 +0000

Add the name of Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz to the growing list of investors throwing their hats into the ring of a booming wind energy and transmission industry in the American west.

The Anschutz Corp. said Tuesday it has acquired the rights to a proposed $3 billion, 3,000-megawatt transmission project that will bring electricity from Wyoming to Southern California, Las Vegas and Phoenix.

The 900-mile TransWest Express Project will carry power from a 2,000-megawatt wind farm Anschutz is developing in south-central Wyoming, a large portion of which will be built on a ranch he has owned for about 15 years.

Drought Causing Old Faithful to be Less Faithful

Jennifer Lance — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:55:55 +0000

A new study suggests that geysers, like Old Faithful, are affected by climate conditions, such as droughts. Shaul Hurwitz, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, Ashish Kumar, a Stanford University statistician, and two National Park Service scientists have discovered that changes in the supply of underground water to a geyser can influence the amount of time between eruptions. “Coupled with this decrease in precipitation, we see an increase in eruption intervals with all the geysers we analyzed,” explained Hurwitz.

Image credit: tiarescott at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Via: Casper Star-Tribune

Wyoming Passes Carbon Capture & Sequestration Legislation

Timothy B. Hurst — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:57:54 +0000

Law Helps Smooth Way For “Clean Coal”

Last week, Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal signed a bill that recognizes that surface owners control the underground pore spaces where carbon dioxide could be stored or sequestered. A companion bill, gives the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality the authority to regulate the long-term storage of carbon dioxide.

“With the signing of these two bills today, Wyoming puts itself in the forefront of carbon sequestration legislation. This is a forward-thinking approach to protect both Wyoming’s economy and Wyoming’s environment.” Gov. Freudenthal called the legislation a “groundbreaking” framework for carbon capture and sequestration

Earlier this year, Freudenthal told the Joint Judiciary Interim Committee that the Wyoming Legislature had an opportunity to lead the nation in regulating long-term carbon capture and sequestration.

Coal Plants Cancelled in Wyoming

Maria Surma Manka — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:43:36 +0000

I may begin to sound like a broken record here, but yet another coal plant has been pulled because of global warming-related concerns.

Back in October, the Kansas Department of Health denied a coal plant permit solely because of its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (CO2 is a major contributor to global warming). Not long after, Washington state rejected a coal plant because of its climate change pollution.

The most recent example hails from Wyoming, where two coal plants planned for the southwestern area of the state have been pulled because of concerns about global warming regulation. Specifically, the uncertainty of what sort of CO2 regulation will ultimately be decided upon makes utilities and investors nervous about putting money into a technology that will likely be costlier in the near future.

Untapped Coal Reserves: A Bridge to Cleaner Energy Solutions?

Joshua S Hill — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:39:58 +0000

One of the problems that advocates of global warming awareness face is what is actually causing global warming. As a whole, we have a tendency to blame global warming on anything that comes our way, from coal to cats. It opens us up to counter attack, and at the rate at which it happens, it degrades our credibility. What we have to be careful of is not attributing everything that is reported as being a cause of global warming with our full support; occasionally, people are wrong.

So that is why the news of massive coal deposits underneath Wyoming and Montana has to be treated with kid gloves.

An American federal report released last week identified an estimated 550 billion tons worth of coal in the Powder River Basin that straddles Wyoming and Montana. According to the report, Wyoming has an estimated 510 billion tons of coal, and Montana some 40 billion. This coal reserve is enough to power America’s current electric appetite for the next 493 years.

It is not up for debate that the current process of converting coal in to energy for earth’s populations has been detrimental to the planet. The carbon emissions released by burning the coal has substantially added to the already growing mass of greenhouse gases choking our atmosphere, and burning a hole through the ozone above Antarctica.

However, this time around, we may be looking at a less damaging process, considering the political mess it would cause and the geological issues.

The major issue is the fact that, at 500 feet underneath the earth, this bank of coal is well beyond conventional mining methods, ie, strip mining and turning the surrounding area in to a lunar like impact crater.

John Wold, chairman and CEO of GasTech Inc., has come out saying that "The need here in America is for development of technology to get that…" coal. In fact, GasTech is expecting to make an announcement soon regarding a partnership that will pioneer a new form of mining for coal.

The process would involve underground gasification, a process that turns carbonaceous materials in to various forms of energy, including syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen released from the gasification process.

The new mining method would involve drilling down to the coal, and manipulating the coal reserves underground. By creating the process underground, the next step would be to then pump the refined product to the surface to produce the electricity.

Underground gasification is theoretically safer for the environment, as well as a productive means of acquiring coal reserves too deep for normal strip mining. And though it may be prohibitively more expensive, gasification has long been held as a possible answer to the need for cleaner energy sources.

In fact, gasification is hoped to one day be able to create energy using anything from wood – not all that ecologically friendly – or plastic – rather more ecologically friendly, considering the growing piles of it in the worlds trash heaps.

So is a relatively cleaner use of coal going to be the bridge between the abusive power generators of our generation to the renewable sources such as ocean and wind power? Or is it just another grab by the coal industry to continue making money with no regard for future generations?

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