The reality is that long after I’m gone, most or all of those wells will remain unplugged. The companies and people who once owned them will have been allowed to walk away from their responsibility to clean up their mess.

Uncapped wells are what happens when the federal government enables the fossil-fuel industry to dominate energy policies, as is happening again now, both in the Interior Department and Congress. The policies emerging would allow companies, including many foreign ones, to profit from public lands and minerals that all Americans own. They would also leave taxpayers holding the bag for cleaning up leaking wells.

These abandoned wells already have consequences for wildlife, air, water and rural people. Kirk Panasuk, a rancher in Bainville, Montana, said: “I have personally experienced serious health scares after breathing toxic fumes from oil and gas wells near my property. And I’ve seen too many of my friends and neighbors in this part of the country have their water contaminated or their land destroyed by rushed and reckless industrial projects.”

Republicans and Democrats in previous administrations and Congresses took pains to reform this historically biased federal energy system because of the damage done to rural communities and American taxpayers. Now, the federal government is rolling back those reforms.

Recently, the Interior Department announced that “emergency permitting procedures” were necessary when carrying out NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. Timelines for environmental assessments for fossil-fuel projects were changed from one year to 14 days, without requiring a public comment period. The timeline for more complicated environmental impact statements was cut from two years to 28 days, with only a 10-day public comment period.

In May, the House Natural Resources Committee unveiled its piece of the House budget bill, which enables the federal government to expedite oil, gas, coal and mineral development. It gives Americans basically no say on whether those projects should move ahead, while keeping taxpayers from receiving a fair return on the development of publicly owned lands and minerals. 

The administration’s justification for expediting permits is that we face “a national energy emergency.” No such emergency exists. The United States is currently the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas and is producing more oil than any other country on Earth.

Both the House bill—just passed and now before the Senate—and the Interior Department’s policies, ignore the long-standing mandate to manage public lands for multiple uses. Instead, the new policies:

• Drastically reduce the public’s role in the permitting process.
• Allow large corporations to pay to evade environmental and judicial review.
• Exempt millions of acres of private lands with federal minerals and thousands of wells on these lands from federal permitting and mitigation requirements.

The House bill would also slash the royalty rate for oil and gas production from 16.67% to 12.5%, depriving state and local governments of funding they depend on for schools, roads and other essential services. An analysis by Resources for the Future found that the proposed lower royalty rates would result in a loss of nearly $5 billion in revenue over the next decade. 

The Interior Department’s emergency permitting procedures and the House bill are assaults the federal government has waged on public lands since January. The public has been shoved to the side as oil and gas drillers enjoy their energy dominance throughout our public lands.

Now, it’s up to the Senate to strip out these gifts to the fossil fuel industry, and it’s up to us tell our elected Senate representatives that these policies ignore the wishes of Westerners. We have told pollsters innumerable times that we support conservation, not exploitation of public lands for private interests. What’s happening now is radically wrong.

Barbara Vasquez is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. A retired PhD

biomedical researcher and semiconductor engineer, she is board chair of the Western Organization of Resource Councils and a board member of the Western Colorado Alliance.

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But that’s not the thinking of Amory Lovins, the 76-year-old co-founder of RMI, formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute in western Colorado.

A Harvard and Oxford dropout who’s been called the “Einstein of Energy Efficiency, Lovins said recently: “If we do the right things, we’ll look back and ask each other, ‘What was all the fuss about?’”

Lovins became famous in the 1970s after his research told him that building more polluting coal-fired power plants was a destructive mistake. His solution then was greater efficiency and reliance on renewables, and they, he insists, are still the answer.

“Though it’s invisible, efficiency will cut 50% of energy use and up to 80% if we do the right things,” he told me recently. “Most of the energy we use is wasted, which makes it much cheaper to save it, rather than buy it or burn it.”

According to a recent Princeton paper, he’s right: 84% of all energy consumed goes to waste during delivery or by leakage.

To prove it decades ago, he built a passive solar, super-insulated house at 7,100 feet of elevation in Old Snowmass, Colorado. It never had a heating system though winters regularly recorded 40 degrees below-zero temperatures.

When I arrived there recently at 8 a.m. it was 12 degrees F. Yet the house featured banana and papaya trees growing in natural light around a koi pond.

We became acquainted when he read my January 2023 Writers on the Range column entitled; “The energy gap nobody wants to tussle with.” I’d advocated building small modular nuclear reactors to bolster the grid when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

Lovins called to set me straight, and after a second conversation and more research, I’m beginning to think he’s right.

Though Lovins has many solutions for the energy gap, he touts three major ways to find more energy in what we already do. Tops on the list is changing how we build and retrofit existing structures because buildings consume 75% of the electricity we buy.

Most energy jobs in the United States are already increasing efficiency, ranging from upgrading windows and other retrofits, far outpacing the shrinking fossil fuels industry. (energy.gov)

As one example, Lovins advocates “outsulation” for older structures, defined as adding exterior insulating panels to save heat. Courtesy of the European Union, my Irish in-laws recently had their house “wrapped” and saw their heating bills plummet.

His second way is demand-response, which Lovins calls flexiwatts. An example is cycling air conditioners off for 15-30 minutes at a time, a barely noticeable adjustment that cuts demand for peaker-power plants, those big emitters of greenhouse gases. 

His third way is using renewables more effectively. Diversifying renewables by location and type within a region evens gaps from windless and cloudy weather.

As for electric cars being a drain on the grid, they will prove to be sources of electricity, he said, as the next generation batteries will be cheaper and likely have double the storage. Daytime solar stored in vehicles will be bi-directional, spooling out power during peak evening demand.

Lovins also cites LED lights dramatically cutting the cost of energy. In just a decade, they’ve become 30 times more efficient, 20 times brighter and 10 times cheaper.

Lovins is quick to admit that an energy gap remains, but he predicts a single-digit gap—6%—between what renewables produce and what’s needed. That, he said, can be made up by stored, green hydrogen or ammonia, manufactured from water and air with solar energy, and burned in existing gas plants.

As for nuclear power plants, Lovins said even the best-case scenarios for the next generation of nuclear generators are at least a decade away, and at least eight times more costly than renewables today.

“It’s better to use fast, cheap and certain rather than slow, costly and speculative,” he said.

Though cutting loose from fossil fuels is a massive undertaking, Lovins said America is on track. “We are on or ahead of schedule on renewables, with 85% of net new additions to the grid from renewables, and $1 billion invested in solar in the world daily.”

For these reasons and more, Lovins sees our energy future as more of what we’re already doing—only smarter and faster.

Let’s hope that he’s right.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that exists to spur lively dialog about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

Correction: This opinion was corrected January 26 to read that $1 billion was daily invested in the world. Previously it read United States.

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Best is based in the Denver area, and his twice-a-month e-journal looks for the radical transitions in Colorado’s energy, water, and other urgent aspects of the state’s economy. These changes, he thinks, overwhelm the arrival of the telephone, rural electrification and even the internal combustion engine in terms of their impact.

Global warming, he declares, is “the biggest pivot of all.”

Whether you “believe” in climate change — and Best points out that at least one Colorado state legislator does not — there’s no denying that our entire planet is undergoing dramatic changes, including melting polar ice, ever-intensifying storms, and massive wildlife extinctions.

A major story that Best, 71, has relentlessly chronicled concerns Tri-State, a wholesale power supplier serving Colorado and three other states. Late to welcome renewable energy, it’s been weighed down with aging coal-fired power plants. Best closely followed how many of its 42 customers — rural electric cooperatives — have fought to withdraw from, or at least renegotiate, contracts that hampered their ability to buy cheaper power and use local renewable sources.

Best’s first newspaper job was at the Middle Park Times in Kremmling, a mountain town along the Colorado River. He wrote about logging, molybdenum mining and the many miners who came from eastern Europe. His prose wasn’t pretty, he says, but he got to hone his skills.

Because of his rural roots, Best is most comfortable hanging out in farm towns and backwaters, places where he can listen to stories and try to get a feel for what Best calls the “rest of Colorado.” Pueblo, population 110,000 in southern Colorado, is a gritty town he likes a lot.

Pueblo has been forced to pivot away from a creaky, coal-fired power plant that created well-paying jobs. Now, the local steel mill relies on solar power instead, and the town also hosts a factory that makes wind turbine towers. He’s written stories about these radical changes as well as the possibility that Russian oligarchs are involved in the city’s steel mill.

Best also vacuums up stories from towns like Craig in northwestern Colorado, home to soon-to-be-closed coal plants. He says he finds Farmington, New Mexico, fascinating because it has electric transmission lines idling from shuttered coal power plants.

His Big Pivots may only have 1,091 subscribers, but story tips and encouragement come from some of his readers who hold jobs with clout. His feature “There Will Be Fire: Colorado arrives at the dawn of megafires” brought comments from climate scientist Michael Mann and Amory Lovins, legendary co-founder of The Rocky Mountain Institute.

“After a lifetime in journalism, his writing has become more lyrical as he’s become more passionate,” says Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability for the Aspen Ski Company. “Yet he’s also completely unknown despite the quality of his work.”

Among utility insiders, and outsiders like myself, however, Best is a must-read.

His biggest donor has been Sam R. Walton’s Catena Foundation — a $29,000 grant. Typically, supporters of his nonprofit give Big Pivots $25 or $50.

Living in Denver allows him to be close to the state’s shot callers, but often, his most compelling stories come from the rural fringe. One such place is the little-known Republican River, whose headwaters emerge somewhere on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. That’s also where Best’s grandfather was born in an earthen “soddie.”

Best grew up in eastern Colorado and knows the treeless area well. He’s written half a dozen stories about the wrung-out Republican River that delivers water to neighboring Kansas. He also sees the Eastern Plains as a great story about the energy transition. With huge transmission lines under construction by the utility giant Xcel Energy, the project will feed renewable power from wind and solar to the cities of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins.

Best admits he’s sometimes discouraged by his small readership — it can feel like he’s speaking to an empty auditorium, he says. He adds, though, that while “I may be a tiny player in Colorado journalism, I’m still a player.”

He’s also modest. With every trip down Colorado’s back roads to dig up stories, Best says he’s humbled by what he doesn’t know. “Just when I think I understand something, I get slapped up the side of the head.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

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For 60 years the air was dingy, polluted by two, enormous coal-fired power stations in nine units that produced 3,723 megawatts of generation — enough to power two million homes. Now, just 1,540 megawatts remain in two units equipped with modern, air-pollution control systems.

Starting in the 1960s, the town’s giant smokestacks could be seen from miles away, and their dangerous emissions helped add the designation of “national sacrifice zone” to this Four Corners area. Pollutants included “beryllium compounds, chromium compounds, cobalt, and five other carcinogens,” reports ProPublica.

But these days you might describe Farmington, population 46,422, as an attractive river town where “you can see mountains 100 miles away,” says Mike Eisenfeld, energy and climate program manager of the San Juan Citizens Alliance, a regional environmental powerhouse with 1,000 members.

Farmington is becoming known for its recreation, ranging from national parks and monuments to eight miles of river walks and mountain biking on 120 miles of trails.

“Jolt Your Journey!” is how the town promotes itself to visitors. A cultural battle, though, is being fought over what substitutes for coal as a power supply.

Given the town’s near-constant sunshine and underused grid tie-ins to Sunbelt cities, solar-powered electricity might seem the obvious replacement. However, the people with clout in town — Mayor Nate Duckett, City Manager Rob Mayes, and the nonprofit Farmington Electrical Utility — yearn for the good old days of fossil fuels.

Power from the now-closed San Juan Generating Station was cheap, says Mayor Duckett, who enjoys broad local support, having won his seat with 86% of the vote in his last election in 2018. “It was also homegrown,” he adds, “and there were good jobs,”

To keep its coal plant open, Farmington, chased a carbon-capture scheme even though its history is one of failure. All eleven of President Obama’s carbon capture projects have either gone belly up or were never built. A Mississippi coal project alone cost $7.5 billion, leaving only mountains of scrap.

Farmington’s failed carbon-capture scheme cost millions of dollars in legal fees and precious time. Without power-purchase contracts, Farmington Electric had no steady electrical supplier when its coal-fired electricity was switched off. The utility burned through a good portion of $100 million in reserves buying gas and electricity on the open market.

To rebuild a financial cushion, the Farmington utility raised customer rates in April. This angered many residents though resentment had been simmering for years. Everyone knew that coal was nearing its end, yet no plans had been made for developing a major replacement.

Aztec, a town of 6,163, was once a customer of the Farmington utility, but it rebelled, now buying carbon-reduced electricity from Guzman Energy. Neighboring Bloomfield, population 7,371, says it also wants to partner with Guzman. Meanwhile, solar development has been flourishing around Farmington, with 1,300 megawatts of utility-scale generation either planned or under construction.

Farmington could easily get into the action since it can self-permit. It also owns those valuable grid tie-ins through its substations. In fairness, it has vague plans for a solar array, but an inefficient, gas-powered plant is what’s in the process of getting built to augment a big gas plant they already own.

Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which gave a boost to nonprofit utilities like Farmington Electric, there’s federal money available to help build solar arrays. The Act allows a utility to build and sell renewable electricity while also raking in generous government incentives. Farmington’s need is pressing, as both New Mexico and the region aren’t producing enough homegrown energy.

All of the financial support right now for developing solar power adds to the frustration of area conservationists.

Mark Pearson, executive director of the San Juan Citizens Alliance, says, “Farmington… wants to export chemicals manufactured from natural gas in the region. But they have the means to export a finished product — electricity made from the sun — via high-voltage electric lines.”

 The Alliance’s Eisenfeld thinks a tipping point is fast approaching. “You need the philosophical buy-in that the transition from coal to clean energy is actually upon us,” he says. “Then it all happens quickly.”

But for now, the good ole’ boys are still in charge. Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

This column has been corrected. Aztec, buys carbon-reduced, not carbon-free electricity from Guzman Energy.

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According to state records, this well last produced oil in 2007, and even then it was at a rate of about 25 to 50 barrels per year. Though the state inexplicably lists the well’s status as “active,” it’s not. And the listed owner is a company that no longer exists in any solvent form.

In other words, State Senate #2 meets the criteria for an “orphaned” oil and gas well. It’s just one of more than a million such wells nationwide, which are a growing environmental threat resulting from decades of policy failure by state and federal regulators.

“Orphaned” is an inaccurate term. The parent companies that originally drilled and profited from these wells mostly didn’t die—they fled. Once the wells stopped making money, they were sold to smaller, less solvent companies that then vanished into a haze of bankruptcy. The unplugged wells were left to ooze methane and other nasty stuff with no one around to clean it up.

It’s abandonment, plain and simple.

The State Senate #2, for example, was originally drilled by Standard Oil Co. of Texas — yes, that Standard Oil — back in 1960, but the hole was dry, so workers plugged it and moved on. Two decades later, Raymond E. Sitta, Jr., took over the lease and applied for a permit to reopen the well. When oil came bubbling out, he named it State Senate #2.

After Sitta died in 2008, his estate sold the well to BIYA Operators, a local mom and pop company, which sold it in 2014 to Colorado-based Diversified Resources.

Three years later, Diversified filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and abandoned its interest in all the mineral leases in the Horseshoe Gallup field. That’s how State Senate #2, along with some four-dozen other wells and a leaky pipeline network, became wards of the state.

It’s a common story. The Horseshoe Gallup field is rife with such stories. Another group of wells down the road changed hands several times before being acquired by Chuza Oil, owned by the Dallas producer of a reality television show called Cheaters. Now Chuza is bankrupt, and its wells and assorted other detritus are a methane-oozing mess.

The pattern repeats across New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. Wyoming has at least 1,500 “orphaned” wells.

In theory, the companies took care of the cleanup tab as a condition of their drilling permit. In reality, the required bond amounts don’t get close to covering the costs. The Bureau of Land Management, for example, requires an operator to put up just $10,000 per individual well. Bigger operators can take out a single, $150,000 blanket bond that covers all of their wells — whether it’s five or 500 — on public lands nationwide.

Yet the average cost to plug and reclaim a single oil and gas well, according to a 2021 study, is a whopping $76,000, with costs for deeper wells shooting up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That would add up to a $3.8 million cleanup bill for Chuza Oil’s 50 wells in the Horseshoe Gallup field.

Court records show the company’s reclamation bonds with the Navajo Nation and federal government add up to less than $130,000, or about $2,500 per well. That means federal taxpayers — you and me — are on the hook for the remaining $3.7 million and change. And that’s just for one company’s wells in one location.

Equally maddening is that the regulators must have seen the warning signs but didn’t — or couldn’t — act to make the responsible parties take responsibility while they were still somewhat solvent.

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act authorized $4.7 billion in federal funds for cleaning up abandoned oil and gas wells. On the one hand, it’s necessary to end this massive threat to the climate, the environment and public health.

But the truth is that it’s also a corporate bailout.

The antiquated federal royalty rate of 12.5% must be jacked up considerably — 25%, anyone? — to bring it in line with what states charge. A portion of the royalty should also go into a reclamation fund so that corporate owners pay to clean up the messes they leave.

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the editor of the Land Desk and a longtime Western journalist.

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Alice Jackson, former CEO of Xcel energy’s Colorado operation, was blunt at a renewable energy conference in February 2020: “We can reliably run our grid with up to 70% renewables. Add batteries to the mix and that number goes up to just 72%.”

Grid experts now say that Jackson’s number is 80%, but still, how will that utility and others produce that missing power?

Bill Gates and a raft of other entrepreneurs see the answer in small, modular nuclear reactors, pointing to the small nuclear engines that have safely run America’s nuclear submarines for decades.

Here’s what we know about these efficient reactors: They’re built in factories, and once in operation they’re cheap to keep going. Each module is typically 50 megawatts, self-contained, and installed underground after being transported to its site. The modular design means that when more power is needed, another reactor can be slotted in.

Breakthrough features include safety valves that automatically send coolant to the reactor if heat spikes. This feature alone could have eliminated disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl, where water pumps failed and cores started melting down.

If small nuclear modules don’t fill the renewables gap, where else to find the “firm power” that Jackson says is needed? The Sierra Club calls on pumped hydro and geothermal as sources of reliable electricity you can just flip on when renewables slow down. But the best geothermal spots have been taken, and pumped hydro has geographic limits, and environmental resistance.

Another proposal is linking grids across the country for more efficiency. The idea is that excess wind blowing in Texas could be tapped after the sun goes down on California’s solar farms. This holds incremental promise but progress has been routinely blocked by conservative lawmakers.

There’s also the cost argument — that renewables are cheaper. In a fossil-fuel-dominated grid that’s true. However, MIT points out that as renewables dominate the grid, on-demand forms of power rise in value.

The extreme danger to the grid is the dreaded “dunkelflaute,” a German word for cloudy, windless weather that slashes solar and wind power generation for weeks.

So the problem remains: To avoid rolling blackouts, we need reliable power at the right times, which are usually from 5-8 p.m. That’s when people come home and fire up their gadgets and appliances.

The increasing demand for electricity only adds to the problem: A 2020 Washington Post article predicted that electrification of the economy by 2050 would result in a usage bump of 38%, mostly from vehicles. Consider Ford’s all-electric F150 Lightning, cousin to the bestselling gasoline F150. The $39,000 entry-level truck was designed to replace gasoline generators at job sites, meaning vehicle recharge happens when workers go home, just as renewables flag.

This calls into question what many experts hope car batteries can provide — doing double duty by furnishing peak power for homes at night.

Longer-lasting storage batteries have long been touted as a savior, though Tara Righetti, co-director of the Nuclear Energy Research Center at the University of Wyoming, has reservations. “There are high hopes that better batteries will be developed. But in terms of what is technically accessible right now? I think nuclear provides an appealing option.”

Meanwhile, small nuclear reactors are underway, with Bill Gates’ TerraPower building a sodium-cooled fast reactor in the coal town of Kemmerer, Wyoming. One 345-megawatt reactor, which generates enough electricity for 400,000 homes, will be paired with a molten-salt, heat storage facility.

Think of it as a constantly recharging battery in the form of stored heat. In the evening as renewable power flags, it would pump out 500 megawatts of power for up to 5 hours.

These reactors also tackle the little-known problem of cold-starting the electrical grid after an outage. In 2003, suffering a blackout, the Eastern grid could not have restarted with renewables alone.

However we choose to close the energy gap, there’s no time to lose. Wild temperature swings have grid operators increasingly nervous. California has come close to rolling blackouts, and temperatures in the West now break record after record.

As our climate becomes more erratic, reliable electricity is becoming a matter of life and death.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Colorado.

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Ever since boycotts started blocking Russian petroleum products, social media has been rife with memes that blame rising gasoline prices on “the cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline.”

Example: “Sooo, if shutting down Russia’s pipeline(s) will hurt their economy, wouldn’t shutting down ours hurt our economy? Asking for a buddy.”

Most of the criticism comes from people who recycle truthiness. Former vice president Mike Pence: “Gas prices have risen across the country because of this administration’s war on energy — shutting down the Keystone Pipeline.” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan: “Biden shut off the Keystone Pipeline.”

Here’s what really happened: No one shut down, canceled, or shut off the Keystone Pipeline. It is fully operational, daily delivering 590,000 barrels of tar-sands oil in Canada to U.S. refineries.

What some pipeline advocates think is the “Keystone Pipeline” is a 1,700-mile “shortcut” called Keystone XL, or KXL. It would have sliced through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to the Texas Gulf Coast, delivering 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day. Many residents of those states fought fiercely against the pipeline cutting through their land.

Now, “Build the Keystone Pipeline” has become a social-media mantra, as if the United States could so decree. It is the Canadian firm, TC Energy, formerly TransCanada, that officially terminated the project once President Biden withdrew its permits.  

Even if construction on the pipeline began tomorrow, KXL could not be up and running in less than five years. The KXL pipeline was a project developed by a foreign company that would have delivered foreign oil products to mostly foreign markets.

When President Trump re-permitted KXL in 2017, his own State Department reported that it would not lower gasoline prices. The price of oil is set by the global market and certainly not by U.S. presidents. What’s more, the project was just about dead for a number of reasons, including litigation from aggrieved property owners whose land TC Energy seized by eminent domain.

We should also remember that rendering gasoline from tar-sands oil, the planet’s dirtiest petroleum, is far more polluting and energy-intensive than conventional refining. Some carbon content is burned off in a process that belches greenhouse gases and generates toxic waste called petcoke, which is dumped around the United States in piles six stories high. Petcoke billows through neighborhoods and infiltrates schools and houses even when windows are shut.

Bitumen, basically asphalt, continues to be strip-mined from what used to be Canada’s boreal forests in Alberta. Too thick to be piped, it’s spiked with volatile liquid condensate from natural gas and thus converted to a toxic tar-sands cocktail called ”dilbit,” short for diluted bitumen.

Dilbit, sent through the existing Keystone pipeline, contains chloride salts, sulfur, abrasive minerals and acids, and must be pumped under high pressure. It’s murder on pipes.

In addition to greenhouse gases and petcoke, tar-sands waste products include lakes, rivers, fish, wildlife and people. Between 1995 and 2006, when tar-sands extraction was accelerating, Alberta’s First Nations suffered a sudden 30 percent increase in cancer rates.

KXL, if built, also threatened the world’s largest aquifer — the Ogallala. Anyone who thinks Nebraska lacks water should visit Green Valley Township, where I encountered Ogallala water so close to the surface it flowed along dirt roads and ditches. Pintails, mallards, and widgeon billowed out of them. But parts of the aquifer are now depleted, and a major dilbit spill could finish those parts off.

In 2011 a pipeline representative named Shawn Howard assured me that ramming a dilbit pipe through the Ogallala aquifer would be risk free.

“Why,” he demanded, “would we invest $13 billion in a pipeline and put a product in it that was going to destroy it like these activists are trotting out? It makes absolutely no business sense.”

The existing Keystone pipeline has ruptured 22 times, including spills in 2017 and 2019 that fouled land and water with 404,000 gallons of dilbit. Business sense, as the oil industry consistently reminds us, is an attribute more often desired than possessed.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He writes about fish, wildlife and the environment for national publications.

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That’s the lesson of a historic victory won by a rural Oregon coalition of ranchers and farmers, climate activists, Indigenous tribal leaders, and anglers and coastal residents.

The victory occurred in December, when a Canadian energy company called Pembina announced that it would halt plans to build a 230-mile pipeline crossing more than 400 waterways across rural southwestern Oregon. The pipeline was to carry fracked gas from the Rockies to a huge, proposed Coos Bay terminal on the West Coast, then on to Asia.

When the export project was first proposed years ago, the odds of stopping it appeared slim. Supporters included the state’s governor and its two U.S. senators – all Democrats – plus most of the Republican political establishment.

But community organizers didn’t give up.

“We were already seeing the disastrous effects of climate change throughout the West,” recalls Allie Rosenbluth, campaigns director of Rogue Climate, a grassroots group in southern Oregon. “The last thing we needed was another giant fossil-fuel project and another major fire hazard just to profit an outside corporation.”

As a group committed to organizing across political lines, Rogue Climate did systematic outreach to hundreds of landowners whose property would be affected, while also working with local environmental groups like Rogue Riverkeeper.

Many landowners were conservative ranchers and farmers, and they were angry about threats from the company: If they didn’t let the pipeline cross their land in return for a one-time payment, they were told the power of eminent domain would be invoked to impose it on them anyway. Congress granted this power to gas pipelines in 1947.

Over a seven-year period, the unlikely coalition that grew in strength turned out thousands of residents to public hearings and spurred more than 50,000 people to submit written comments to regulatory agencies. A delegation representing all parts of the coalition even held a sit-in in the governor’s office.

Seven rural landowners from across the political spectrum also published a column in the state’s largest newspaper, the Oregonian. It was blunt: “We are sick and tired of the pie-in-the-sky speculation by these for-profit corporations. We can’t build, we can’t plan, and we can’t sell if we choose because of the threat of eminent domain.” 

Don Gentry, chair of the Klamath Tribes, said that the pipeline would “unearth long-buried ancestors and pulverize sites of cultural importance,” also “strip “shade from streams and pollute them with sediment, harming fish central to the Klamath’s traditions and way of life.”

Bill McCaffree, a lifelong Republican and longtime president of the local electrical workers union in Coos Bay, publicly disagreed with construction union leaders who wanted the short-term work for their members. He also said that most workers would come from outside the area.

“Everyone who works in the building and construction trades wants to build things that benefit communities and don’t cause harm,” McCaffree said. “Since I was a kid, there have been jobs here in Coos County from fishing, clamming and oyster farming. What would happen to those jobs when the bay is disturbed by construction and operation of this export terminal?”

A better strategy for creating good, stable jobs, McCaffree said, would be investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy development. That is “creating jobs at a rate 12 times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy,” he said.

In the wake of this broad and organized resistance, state agencies finally announced that the project failed to qualify for necessary permits. That led Pembina to tell federal regulators it was dropping the project.

The coalition didn’t stop with its victory. Members of the coalition convinced the Oregon legislature last year to pass bills to transition Oregon to 100 percent clean energy by 2040, provide $50 million for community-based resilience and renewable energy projects outside of Portland, reduce energy rates, and appropriate $10 million for energy-efficient home repairs for low-income households. The Legislature also banned any new fracked gas power plants in Oregon.

“Most of us who live in small towns and rural areas all want the same things,” said Rogue Climate’s Executive Director Hannah Sohl. “Good jobs, a healthy climate, communities that work for everyone. Even when big corporations have other plans, we can accomplish a lot when we talk to each other and organize.”

Matt Witt is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively communication about the West. He is a writer and photographer in Talent, Oregon.

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In early March, Delta County commissioners voted 2-1 to deny a 472-acre solar array built by Guzman Energy, a move that would help shift the local rural electric cooperative, Delta-Montrose Electric Association, (DMEA) to clean energy. Many locals found the no vote not only mystifying but also infuriating.

Unlike Guzman Energy, which financed DMEA’s exit from its former power supplier, Tri State Generation and Transmission, the business called Co Mine 1 Landco LLC in Montrose is secretive, though crypto mining, aka validating cryptocurrency transactions, is the likely use, according to the Colorado Sun. The Sun points out that the company’s vagueness failed to trouble the Montrose County Planning Commission, which recently approved CO Mine 1 Landco LLC’s land-use change.

As for Guzman’s failure in Delta County, “The problem is some (people) got political, just because it was solar,” says Delta County Commissioner Don Suppes, the sole yes vote. “We’re sending the wrong message that we don’t want people investing in Delta County,” he says. 

Delta County is culturally split. Up valley, in the North Fork of the Gunnison Valley, residents support solar power and there is a thriving solar installation school, Solar Energy International, in the town of Paonia. Down valley is a more conservative, row-cropping, and family-values community. The County votes 70 percent Republican. 

But the consensus, at least until now, was that the electrical co-op was a local champion, serving both Delta and Montrose with electrical power and fast Internet. 

Producing electrical power from home is the holy grail of the energy transition, so Guzman’s plans seemed tailored to Delta County, a right to farm community. Sheep could graze among the solar panels, says Suppes, and “it was still grazing — just as critical as row crops.”

How did these two counties, neighbors with similar geography, come to hold such starkly different worldviews?

You could say that Montrose County started with a deprived childhood. When white families forced out the Indigenous tribes and moved into Western Colorado in the late 1800s, Delta County prospered. Some came equipped, backed by Eastern money, with nothing more than pick, shovel, or if lucky — mule scrapers. They dug miles of ditches below the West Elk Mountain range that brought water down for imported fruit trees. Coal in those same mountains was found early and mined.

Meanwhile, Montrose was left in their dust. No pick or shovel could divert water that simply did not exist in the barren Uncompahgre Valley.

Montrose land speculators’ lobbying efforts paid off in 1909, when the Bureau of Reclamation finished the Gunnison Tunnel, sending 500,000 acre-feet of Gunnison River water annually to Montrose County, turning the valley into an agricultural force.

Right now, the two counties are neck and neck based on household income, though Montrose County is better at creating jobs. Its major town, Montrose, bustles with outdoor equipment businesses and an airport favored by the resort town of Telluride. 

Delta County, in its North Fork, boasts vineyards and organic agriculture, a sizable number of internet workers, and a growing summer tourist trade. But Delta County still chases Montrose when it comes to economic growth. 

“Delta has a long history of turning stuff away that ends up in Montrose,” says Suppes, pointing out that in 1973, Russell Stover Candies wanted to build its factory (closed in 2020), in Delta but was turned down, so chose Montrose.

In the early 1980s, Louisiana-Pacific looked in the Delta-Montrose area for an Oriented Strand Board Plant (OSB). Manufacturing OSB — a substitute for plywood — involves brewing toxic resins with wood chips.

LP as it was called, chose Montrose County, which agreed with the caveat, legend has it, that it locate the glue factory far from downtown Montrose. The Delta-Montrose County line is just seven miles from the town of Delta compared to 14 miles from Montrose. Like it or not, Delta got the criminally polluting factory, now closed. 

The former plant is now the crypto mine.

In Delta County, Guzman is certain to keep looking for a home for its solar farm, and Commissioner Suppes is convinced that now, Delta will say yes. Perhaps this time Delta County can get both the solar plant and the tax revenue. 

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He grew up in Delta County.

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If you visit the area you will immediately see the blight that comes from all-out oil and gas production: More than 30,000 wells have been drilled throughout the region, yet 10,000 of those are inactive and many will never be plugged and reclaimed. Sacred landscapes have been transformed into an industrial wasteland littered with rusting tanks and drill pads and connected by now-abandoned roads and pipelines. 

Almost as troubling is that in 2014, NASA satellites detected clouds of methane gas from thousands of leaking wells and pipelines. The party responsible for the ongoing destruction is a federal agency — the Bureau of Land Management. It administers public lands extending for many miles around Chaco.

The BLM has a long history of deferring to industry and handing out concessions to oil and gas companies. But left out from these deals with private companies are the tribes and their desires to protect ancestral sites from harm.

With the arrival of the more open Biden administration, newly invigorated tribal governments — including the All-Pueblo Council of Governors, the Navajo Nation and the Hopi tribe — are calling for a thorough reform of BLM oil and gas leasing and sales.

The demands of the tribes are basic: to be consulted in advance of leasing proposals, and to participate as active partners in the management of their ancestral lands.

E. Paul Torres, former governor of Isleta Pueblo, calls Chaco “a vital part of our present identity through active pilgrimage, story, song and prayer passed to us from ancestors whose footsteps we follow today.” And Brian Vallo, the governor of Acoma Pueblo, adds, “If the department brings the tribes into planning and decision making about oil and gas leasing early and often, our irreplaceable ancestral resources will be better protected.” 

In a report just released by Archaeology Southwest, a nonprofit based in Tucson, Arizona, archaeologist Paul Reed describes in detail the failure of the BLM to meet its trust responsibility to Native Americans. Tribal governments are generally ignored or consulted only at the last moment, Reed found, and when it occurs, “key decisions have been made, leaving the tribes to suffer the consequences of prior agency decisions.”

The Reed report recommends including tribal governments at every step of the leasing process. In addition, he recommends that tribal members and their cultural experts should be empowered to conduct field surveys to identify cultural sites, to look at alternatives to proposed oil and gas development, and to recommend any mitigation measures.

A final recommendation goes to the essence of what meaningful regulation and enforcement requires: Oil-gas operators should be prohibited from disturbing the land in any way “until all tribal concerns are identified and successfully addressed.” So far, however, tribal proposals along these lines have fallen on deaf ears.

For example, in 2019, the New Mexico congressional delegation sponsored legislation to establish a cultural protection zone within a 10-mile radius around Chaco. There, oil and gas leasing on federal public lands would be banned.

The legislation passed the House by a vote of 245 to 174, only to die in the Senate. Prospects for action in the present Congress remain uncertain. Meanwhile, a new pathway to reform has opened up.  President Biden’s appointment of Native American Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary is a first in the Department’s history. She is an enrolled member of Laguna Pueblo, and as a former New Mexico Congresswoman, co-sponsored the failed 2019 Chaco protection legislation.

Secretary Haaland has powerful management tools granted by the 1976 Federal Land Planning and Management Act. That act authorizes the Secretary to close tracts of public lands from all forms of mineral leasing for up to 20 years. That sets the stage for Secretary Haaland to protect Chaco by doing what Congress has failed to do — establishing a 10-mile buffer zone around the magnificence that is Chaco. 

All she needs is an affirmative “let’s go” from the President. The tribes have been waiting for a very long time. Bruce Babbitt is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a former Secretary of the Interior Department and also served as governor of Arizona.

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