Category: WYOMING_CN

The Bureau of Land Management is asking for public input on a large oil and gas drilling project proposed by an eastern utility giant on federal lands in southern Wyoming.
Dominion Energy Wexpro — an exploration and production arm of the Richmond, Va.-based utility — wants to drill 150 federal oil and gas wells. It would carry out the proposed drilling program over five years in the desert south of Rock Springs, Wyo., and north of Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument.

There’s something familiar about the high stakes water use drama playing out in the U.S. Southwest.
The mighty Colorado River serves as an economic artery of the region, powering massive hydroelectric dams and supplying water to farmers and rapidly growing cities across the region. But continued overuse during a massive yearslong megadrought—the driest stretch the area has experienced in more than a millennia—has caused water reservoir levels to fall to unprecedented lows, imperiling water supplies and the operation of crucial power plants.

States in the Colorado River basin are scrambling to propose steep cuts in the water they’ll use from the river next year, in response to a call by the federal government for immediate, drastic efforts to keep the river’s main storage reservoirs from reaching critically low levels.

Every summer, millions flock to Yellowstone National Park and wait for the reliable eruption of the geyser Old Faithful. This week, visitors were caught in a unpredictable and massive explosion of water that coursed through the region and swept away homes, bridges and roadways.

Floodwaters that rushed through Yellowstone National Park and surrounding communities earlier this week moved through Montana’s largest city on Wednesday, flooding farms and ranches and forcing the shutdown of its water treatment plant.

The Biden administration on Thursday gave final approval to a 416-mile electric transmission line that will help connect more wind and solar energy to the Western U.S. grid.

A majority of Americans see the effects of climate change in their own communities and believe the federal government should do more to stop them. Despite growing concern about the climate crisis, some states are doing far less than others to boost energy efficiency, decrease the use of fossil fuels, and protect air, water, and soil quality. Are you living in a state that’s taking environmental actions?

Reporting on clean energy from my kitchen table is one thing. Standing atop the Continental Divide — wind whipping at my face, construction workers grading roads nearby, pronghorn jogging across the sagebrush landscape — is something else entirely.

“I feel good about how prepared we are, but I know we’re going to have some tough days, some bad days,” Mike Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, said during a recent presentation of the state’s fire annual wildfire plan.

Early this January, a geyser in West Texas started spewing tens of thousands of barrels of salty water a hundred feet into the air and coating the nearby land with salt deposits. It took about 10 days to discover the culprit was an old, dry oil well plugged in 1957 by Gulf Oil. By the next day, the Texas Railroad Commission had turned over the blowout and remediation to Chevron (who acquired Gulf Oil in the 1980s), who assumed full responsibility immediately and without question.