Thousands of Rocky Mountain Power residential customers will see their monthly electric bills jump by about $14 beginning in June. 

The Wyoming Public Service Commission approved the rate hike Tuesday, the latest in a series of increases by a company that has pointed to fossil fuel market volatility, skyrocketing insurance for wildfire liability and major investments in renewable energy for the rising costs.

The three-member commission voted unanimously to accept a settlement agreement struck between Rocky Mountain Power, its largest industrial customers in the state and the Wyoming Office of Consumer Advocate. The deal reduced the utility’s original request for a $123.5 million increase, or 14.7%, to an increase of about $85.5 million, or 10.2%.

Those figures could change slightly, based on a handful of minor stipulations to the agreement. The commission’s final order will be issued in a few weeks, potentially changing some calculations.

Commissioners acknowledged that, although they don’t like to see continuing rate hikes, the company is essentially responding to rapidly changing market forces, as well as diverging federal and regional policies that drive up the utility’s costs and ultimately impact customer rates.

Affordability, Commissioner Mary Throne said, “is a challenge — and it’s a challenge across the [electric utility] sector. I think it’s time we have sort of a global discussion about affordability and bring in the relevant stakeholders.”

Because Rocky Mountain Power is part of PacifiCorp’s larger, six-state service region, the utility must comply with renewable energy requirements that many in Wyoming regard as “unwise,” according to Commission Deputy Chairman Chris Petrie.

“I think many of those [Rocky Mountain Power and PacifiCorp] decisions represent the utility’s best effort to continue to provide the required service and to control their costs, as best they can, while complying with other pressures exerted on them,” Petrie said. “We certainly have to acknowledge that there have been significant rate increases that are welcomed by nobody.”

The utility’s customers also experienced a 5.5% general rate increase in January 2024, as well as a pair of temporary upward fuel cost adjustments over the past two years. 

Unresolved issues

Commissioners agreed that the approved rate hike settlement, even with their added stipulations, likely won’t forestall the utility asking for yet another rate increase in the near future.

Before the company makes another request, however, the panel encouraged it to make good on a promise to “workshop” those issues with stakeholders, including the Wyoming Office of Consumer Advocate and the Wyoming Industrial Energy Consumers group — the intervening parties that hashed out the settlement agreement with Rocky Mountain Power.

For example, Rocky Mountain Power and its parent company PacifiCorp have relied for years on a “multi-state protocol” group of stakeholders to hash out how to divide systemwide expenses and infrastructure investments among the six states where PacifiCorp operates. But under pressure from some states, PacifiCorp has signaled its intent to possibly dump the multi-state protocol process and replace it with a more piecemeal approach.

In fact, PacifiCorp has contemplated a “corporate realignment,” or breakup, in an effort to better respond to pro-fossil fuel policies favored in states like Wyoming and Utah and cleaner energy policy demands in states like California, Oregon and Washington.

Another matter to “workshop” is increasingly expensive wildfire liability insurance and litigation costs and how to fairly plan for those expenses, according to the commission.

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The Trump administration will forgo an environmental review for thousands of federal oil and natural gas leases, including some in Wyoming, at the center of a 10-year legal and political battle.

The Interior Department announced Thursday it will rescind a last-minute Biden-era notification to conduct a full environmental impact statement review for 3,244 oil and gas leases issued between 2015 and 2020 in seven western states. There are other review processes, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, to legally satisfy the cumulative court orders and settlement agreements stemming from the years-long battle.

BLM published its official notice to ditch the review in the Federal Register on Friday. The BLM “is evaluating options for compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act for these oil and gas leasing decisions,” according to the agency. 

One group involved in the decade-long legal battle questioned that approach. 

“We don’t know what that’s going to look like or, honestly, if it will even happen,” WildEarth Guardians Climate and Health Advocate Melissa Troutman told WyoFile on Thursday.

WildEarth Guardians initially sued the BLM in 2016, pressuring the agency to more fully analyze the cumulative climate and health implications of its oil and gas leasing actions. The conservation group is particularly “dialed into” BLM’s environmental role in the prolific Permian Basin oil and gas field that spans New Mexico and western Texas — one of the most intense drilling plays in the nation, Troutman said. But WildEarth Guardians and other groups have condemned the federal agency for what they see as its capitulation — via piecemeal environmental reviews — to the industry’s larger pollution from activities on federal lands throughout the West.

As multiple lawsuits and differing court rulings ensued over the years, the BLM has been whipsawed by changing presidential administrations with vastly differing directives over the issues.

“Meanwhile, more climate pollution, more families in these frontline communities [face health implications], more spills contaminating land and water are occurring every day,” Troutman said. “This is not the time to delay a further assessment of what’s already happening.”

She added: “This whole plan to ‘unleash American energy’ is really just unleashing even more oil and gas pollution on top of it.”

Industry officials contend the leases in question, and their environmental impacts, have been analyzed ad nauseam. 

“The court[s], in these cases, are requiring some level of review. The BLM must follow the law,” Petroleum Association of Wyoming President Pete Obermueller told WyoFile via email. 

But he stressed, the Biden administration’s approach wasn’t the best route.

“A multi-state [environmental impact statement] is not the only way to undertake environmental analysis,” he wrote 

The Interior Department, which oversees the BLM, noted the action to rescind the Biden administration’s promise for a full environmental review — which would have included cumulative climate and health impacts — is in line with President Donald Trump’s January executive order, “Unleashing American Energy.” The order directs the Interior and other federal agencies to, among other things, reduce “regulatory barriers for oil and gas companies and [expedite] domestic energy development.”

Meantime, the BLM is moving forward with quarterly oil and gas lease sales. The agency this month initiated a 30-day “public scoping period” seeking input on 99 oil and gas lease parcels in Wyoming that it may include in a December lease sale. The comment period ends May 9. 

For information, maps and instructions for how to comment, go to this BLM webpage.

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To the delight of Wyoming’s top elected officials, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders Tuesday to “reinvigorate” U.S. coal, but whether deregulation can change the tide of market forces remains to be seen. During Trump’s first term in office, the coal industry continued to lose most of its electric utility market share to natural gas and spiraled into a series of bankruptcies.

The orders will restore “beautiful, clean coal,” according to the White House, by “removing federal regulatory barriers that undermine coal production, encouraging the utilization of coal to meet growing domestic energy demands, increasing American coal exports, and ensuring that federal policy does not discriminate against coal production or coal-fired electricity generation.”

At Trump’s invitation, Gov. Mark Gordon was on hand at the White House to celebrate the signing. 

“This is a great day for Wyoming coal,” Gordon said Tuesday in a prepared statement. “We produce more coal than any other state in the nation. These executive orders will be impactful for our state’s coal industry and will help ensure Wyoming coal is available to help meet our nation’s growing energy demand.”

Likewise, Sen. Cynthia Lummis attended the event and lauded the president’s embrace of coal.

“Wyoming stands ready and able to support President Trump’s initiative,” Lummis said in a prepared statement. “The previous administration’s anti-science, anti-energy, anti-Wyoming policies cost good paying jobs, increased energy costs and played into the hands of America’s adversaries.”

The orders direct federal agencies to lift perceived regulatory barriers to coal mining and direct the Bureau of Land Management to “prioritize coal leasing and related activities, consistent with applicable law, as the primary land use for the public lands with coal resources.” Trump will also use his presidential emergency authority to allow utilities to continue operating coal-burning electric generation facilities previously scheduled for retirement. The president’s orders also exempt, for two years, coal plants from previous federal requirements to reduce toxic emissions, including for arsenic, mercury and benzene.

The actions, according to the Trump administration, are necessary to assert “American energy independence” and to ensure U.S. coal will help meet “the rise in electricity demand due to the resurgence of domestic manufacturing and the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”

How quickly the sweeping actions might slow or reverse more than 15 years of policy and market shifts away from coal and toward natural gas, wind and solar energy remains to be seen, according to some industry analysts. Regardless, many coal-reliant utilities have already delayed or erased coal plant retirement dates in recent months, including PacifiCorp, which operates several coal-fired units in Wyoming.

Conservation groups were quick to condemn Trump’s actions.

“Like his recent tariffs, the executive order that President Trump signed [Tuesday] presumes Americans are living in the distant past,” Western Organization of Resource Councils Board Chair Barbara Vasquez said. “It makes no economic, financial, or market sense and is simply a gift to corporate polluters that rural communities will have to pay for through higher electric bills, worsened air quality and toxic pollution of public lands and waters.”

Conservation groups also note that last year was the hottest on human record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and that Trump’s actions threaten to throw a wrench into efforts to reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

“Donald Trump is hell-bent on dragging the United States back to the 19th century, complete with robber barons, smokestacks, crippling tariffs and measles,” Center for Western Priorities Policy Director Rachael Hamby said. “The free market has already made it clear that renewable energy sources are a cheaper and healthier path to meet America’s energy needs.”

Climbing out of the pit

The Interior Department responded immediately, directing its Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday to resume leasing federal coal in the Powder River Basin — the nation’s largest coal-producing region overlying northeast Wyoming and parts of Montana.

“The Golden Age is here, and we are starting to ‘Mine, Baby, Mine’ for clean American coal,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said. “Interior is unlocking America’s full potential in energy dominance and economic development to make life more affordable for every American family while showing the world the power of America’s natural resources and innovation.” 

The BLM, under the Biden administration in 2024, issued its final supplemental environmental impact statement and proposed amendment to land use plans directing its Buffalo and Miles City, Montana, field offices, to select a “no future coal leasing alternative.” It justified the move, in part, by noting that coal companies had not nominated a major new federal coal lease in the region in more than 10 years and that existing leases would allow mining to continue through 2041.

Wyoming and Montana sued the BLM in December, seeking to overturn the leasing ban. Now that the agency appears to be rolling back the ban under Trump’s directive — while the matter is still before the courts — it remains unclear whether mining companies in the region will produce more coal or nominate federal coal for new leases.

For now, U.S. coal remains in decline, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The production decline, at least for the next year or so, will remain most prominent in the Powder River Basin, according to industry analyst group McCloskey. 

At the same time, however, forecasts for skyrocketing electricity demand in the U.S. provide hope for Powder River Basin producers, who rely almost entirely on the nation’s fleet of coal plants.

“The electricity demand that these data centers require — right now it represents roughly about 4% of the electricity produced in the United States,” McCloskey Data Analytics Director Andrew Blumenfeld said during a webinar in March. “That is expected to grow to 12% of the electricity demand in the United States by 2028 — a mere three years from now.”

In a recent quarterly report call with investors, Peabody Energy — Wyoming’s largest coal producer — said that it is being approached by data center developers to explore deals for coal contracts, in some cases, to potentially build their own dedicated coal-fired power generation.

Is coal the future of American energy?

Gordon has long touted using coal as a stepping stone to prove carbon capture technologies at commercial scale — an essential strategy, he says, to keep Wyoming coal in the nation’s energy mix while minimizing the coal-fired electric utility industry’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“While the [executive orders] are a great first step, the real focus must not only be extending the life of coal-fired generating plants nearing retirement, but to actually pave the way to building new power plants,” Gordon said. “These are essential to our future. Wyoming is ready to lead the way and be a partner in that process.

“I encourage all Wyoming utility companies to carefully examine the possibilities provided in these [executive orders],” Gordon added, “in order to increase the use of coal and other sources of electricity to see that Wyomingites and other consumers have affordable, reliable and dependable energy.”

Meanwhile, conservation groups argue that fast-tracking fossil fuel production and consumption by eliminating regulatory checks is unnecessary in light of continually more efficient and affordable renewable energy. 

“We can meet that [increasing electricity] demand through a combination of renewable energy and [power] storage resources — that’s where we should be making our investments,” Earthjustice Managing Attorney for the Northern Rockies Regional Office Jenny Harbine told WyoFile. “This false narrative that coal is the fuel of the future is as deceitful as it is harmful.”

The U.S. coal industry’s decline, Harbine added, is not due to federal policies. “It’s because it’s dirty, increasingly unreliable, and it cannot compete on a level playing field with renewable energy resources.”

If coal is indeed “clean,” as Trump asserts, then why do his executive orders include an allowance for coal plant operators to forego reductions of mercury, arsenic and benzene, she added. In fact, the U.S. fleet of coal-fired power plants is aging, with many plants that are beyond 50 and 60 years old. Utilities continually cite aging coal plants as a significant factor in rising costs, Harbine said.

Trump’s approach, according to Harbine, lacks evidence of actual, proven health and economic benefits.

“At some point, communities are going to say, ‘No. We deserve clean air. We deserve clean water. We deserve a future that is brighter and that invests in the new technologies that are available to us,'” Harbine said.

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Soda ash giant WE Soda has cut 48 jobs from its southwest Wyoming trona operations, including 32 salaried management positions and 16 contract positions, the company said Monday. The move follows the trona operator’s purchase of competitor Genesis Alkali on Feb. 28.

“Post-acquisition, consolidations were needed for some salaried management positions to achieve efficiency, reduce redundancy and to strengthen the existing hourly workforce,” WE Soda Vice President of Human Relations JoAnna DeWald told WyoFile via email.

The layoffs do not include hourly union workers, a company spokesman said.

The terminations follow 30 layoffs by the previous owner late last year — a move that irked union representatives because Genesis Alkali pink-slipped several new hires, including some who had just relocated to Wyoming to build careers. Reached Monday by WyoFile, United Steel Workers Local 13214 President Marshal Cummings said he didn’t know all the details about the recent layoffs, but said he was happy the cuts did not include union workers.

In fact, according to Cummings, WE Soda has been hiring back some of the union workers that were laid off last year. The union’s relationship with WE Soda, Cummings said, “has been extremely positive.

“They want to fix the things that are broken: management, projects, our relationship, the equipment,” he continued. “All those times I said, ‘We want to be the safest, most efficient, most productive mine in the world,’ is going to come true with this management team, it sounds like.”

WE Soda now employs about 900 workers in the region, according to Cummings.

The job cuts come only weeks after another southwest Wyoming mining company laid off 28 workers in nearby Kemmerer.

World’s largest soda ash producer

London-based WE Soda paid $1.4 billion to acquire Genesis Alkali and its operations, which include the Westvaco underground trona mine and related processing facilities, as well as the Granger solution mining facility — both located in western Sweetwater County.

“We are now the largest producer of soda ash globally and the only producer that is 100% natural, further underscoring our sustainability leadership,” WE Soda CEO Alasdair Warren said in a prepared statement on March 3. “As we welcome our new Alkali colleagues into the WE Soda family, we will bring together an extraordinary combination of experience and expertise that will create a truly world class industrial minerals company focussed on maintaining the highest standards of safety, operational excellence and sustainability.”

Integrated into the former Genesis operations is WE Soda’s Project West, a multi-billion dollar trona solution-mine expansion project now under construction near Granger.

“By integrating the [Genesis] Alkali facilities with our own Project West development, we plan to utilise the combined engineering expertise of Alkali and WE Soda, and to access existing Alkali infrastructure to significantly reduce the cost and development risk of Project West,” according to WE Soda.

Southwest Wyoming holds the world’s largest known deposit of trona, which is processed into “natural” soda ash — a key commodity in the production of glass, baking soda and myriad other products. Wyoming’s trona and soda ash industries — which employ more than 2,000 workers compared to about 4,100 direct jobs in Wyoming coal mining, according to the Wyoming Mining Association — have been in “expansion” mode in recent years.

In 2022, Genesis Alkali received $665,000 from the state — via the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services — to help train more than 300 workers as part of its efforts to revive the Granger production facility, ultimately adding about 100 workers, according to the state.

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Wyoming’s largest electric utility has thrown a temporary lifeline to the Dave Johnston coal-fired power plant near Glenrock while solidifying plans to stop burning coal at the Naughton power plant near Kemmerer by the end of this year.

The move is welcomed news in Converse County, according to Commission Chairman Jim Willox, noting the Dave Johnston plant employs hundreds of locals. It’s a “scary” proposition in Kemmerer, where the fate of the Naughton plant may foreshadow the viability of the Naughton coal mine, which employs nearly 200 people.

Overall, PacifiCorp, parent company of Rocky Mountain Power, has made a dramatic shift from previous plans to vastly dial back its reliance on coal while fast-tracking investments in renewable energy, according to its final 2025 Integrated Resource Plan — an expansive two-volume document — published earlier this week. The changes, according to PacifiCorp and many observers, come as a response to President Donald Trump’s sweeping rollbacks of fossil fuel regulations and Biden-era climate and renewable energy initiatives.

PacifiCorp, which operates in six western states, including Wyoming, admits that its revised plans will increase reliance on natural gas — a commodity prone to volatile price swings — and more emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. 

Ultimately, the plan reflects the Trump administration shifting say over industrial emissions from the federal government to the states, according to some utility industry analysts. In fact, one major change with the plan — which is a nonbinding “roadmap” for how it will generate and acquire electrical power for the next 20 years and is updated every two years — is PacifiCorp’s move to dedicate specific power sources to specific states.

For example, the company is directing more renewable power sources to its Washington and Oregon service territories because those states have enforceable renewable energy portfolios.

In fact, PacifiCorp — prompted by Utah lawmakers — has mulled a breakup to serve individual states in its service territory specific to their preferred sources of power generation.

It’s a move that Wyoming leaders have championed for years, though many conservation and ratepayer advocacy groups warn it will lead to higher electric bills here, and a dirtier environment beyond. PacifiCorp, part of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, operates some of the dirtiest coal plants in America, according to a recent Reuters analysis.

“Instead of prioritizing cost-effective, job-creating renewable energy, the utility is doubling down on expensive fossil fuels, speculative carbon capture technology and a nuclear plant — all while ratepayers foot the bill,” Sierra Club of Wyoming Energy Organizer Emma Jones said.

What’s in the plan for Wyoming

Rather than fully retiring two of four coal-burning units at the Dave Johnston power plant in 2028, the utility now plans to convert those units to natural gas in 2029 and continue their operation. A third coal unit at Dave Johnston will be shut down in 2027, as previously planned, and the fourth, which had no retirement date, will now be converted to natural gas in 2030.

The company’s plans for the Jim Bridger power plant east of Rock Springs and the Naughton plant near Kemmerer didn’t change. 

Two of four coal units at Jim Bridger were converted to natural gas last year, and the company still plans to retrofit the other two units there with carbon capture technology by 2030 or 2032, to comply with a Wyoming mandate.

At Naughton, the first of three coal units was converted to natural gas in 2020. PacifiCorp confirmed this week it still plans to take the two remaining coal units offline by the end of this year and resume operating them on natural gas in 2026 — a commitment also reflected in a November filing with the Wyoming Public Service Commission.

The switch away from coal there, according to PacifiCorp, is due to a determination that “natural gas conversion of Naughton units 1 and 2 was the least-cost, least-risk option for the company and its customers” and worth the estimated $12.1 million cost to do it, according to previous planning documents.

The future of the Wyodak plant outside Gillette is less clear. The company previously planned to retire the coal plant in 2039. Now, there’s no official retirement date for the plant, PacifiCorp told WyoFile. However, if previous iterations of the Clean Air Act under the Biden administration remain, it would be retired in 2032. 

Local officials welcomed the news of a reprieve for some coal plants in the state, even though many will eventually be converted to natural gas. The power plant is responsible for hundreds of jobs, directly and indirectly, according to local officials.

In Converse County, the Dave Johnston power plant has been critical to the local economy, Commission Chairman Jim Willox told WyoFile. “It provides regular, good-paying employment and, even more importantly, baseline power for the western United States,” Wilcox said.

Shifting coal markets

Before Trump’s tariff initiatives this week, there was growing optimism among coal proponents that the U.S. coal market might rebound from recent declines.

Although U.S. coal production is still projected to decline again this year, particularly in the Powder River Basin, the rate of decline is slowing due to increasing electrical demand. Six months ago, the U.S. utility industry planned to retire some 15,600 megawatts of coal-fired power within the next year, according to the coal industry analyst company McCloskey. By March, however, planned coal plant retirements shrank to 12,300 megawatts.

One megawatt is enough electricity to power about 750 homes.

“This is driven by the huge requirements for cloud computing, AI computing, bitcoin mining, cryptocurrency and the ongoing movement to e-commerce and online sales,” McCloskey Associate Director and Research Analyst Dianna Ridgway said in March. “All of this is driving an increase in future [electrical] load growth. As a result, power generators are turning back their previous decisions to retire coal plants.”

However, McCloskey analysts noted, the extension of coal plants is likely to be short-lived simply because the U.S. fleet is already beyond its life expectancy and there are no new coal plants in queue for construction.

“I do believe we’ll see some of these [coal plant] retirements get delayed further,” McCloskey Data Analytics Director Andrew Blumefeld told attendees of a March webinar. “But, ultimately, time is not on the side of the coal units.”

Although PacifiCorp is pushing back coal plant retirement dates, it noted that due to the increasing cost to operate the facilities — many of which are more than 50 years old — it will continue the practice of operating coal plants at less than their rated capacity.

PacifiCorp also still plans to finalize an agreement — perhaps this year, it said — to buy electricity from TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear power plant near Kemmerer. The utility, however, still has not disclosed the potential cost, which would be passed on to ratepayers across multiple states. Natrium’s anticipated construction cost is $4 billion.

Renewable energy

Although PacifiCorp will use slightly more solar energy than called for in its 2023 plan, that power is mostly dedicated to its customers in Oregon and Washington, according to the company.

“Wind is way down across the board,” Sierra Club staff attorney Rose Monahan told WyoFile. 

Though the latest plan calls for more than 3,700 megawatts of new wind power generation throughout its six-state service region by 2045, that’s a 59% reduction compared to the company’s previous plan. 

PacifiCorp is still moving forward with construction of its $8 billion Gateway interstate electric transmission lines — touted as key to providing “long-term affordability and reliability and helping build a more resilient grid,” according to the company, and essential to meet “significant new data center loads.” That means Wyoming is likely to see the continued expansion of wind energy construction in Wyoming, Monahan said, without reaping all the benefits of that energy.

“This means that Wyoming’s electric rates are still going to be closely tied to fossil fuels,” Monahan said.

She noted that in recent rate hike requests in Wyoming — both for permanent increases and annual fuel cost adjustments — the company has pointed to the increasing costs of operating coal-fired facilities and the volatility of coal and natural gas commodity markets. “Wyoming’s electric rates are still going to be closely tied to fossil fuels, which PacifiCorp acknowledged in the last rate case were far and away the biggest driver of rate increases,” Monahan said.

PacifiCorp’s Rocky Mountain Power recently agreed to trim its most recent Wyoming rate hike request from 14.7% to 10.2%. The Wyoming Public Service Commission is expected to rule on the settlement agreement on April 15.

Why the changes?

Observers, and even PacifiCorp, have noted that the company’s 2025 planning document represents a significant departure from past plans. 

“These changes are in response to variables in future customer demand, technology developments, state and federal policy changes and projections of future economics,” PacifiCorp spokesman David Eskelsen told WyoFile via email.

He noted that the planning documents, looking 20 years into the future, continually change and are updated every two years. “Each IRP is a roadmap for the future, based on the most current information we have for modeling and projection.”

In the opening of PacifiCorp’s 2025 plan, it states, “The preferred portfolio is responsive to the rapidly expanding arena of new state and federal regulatory requirements.”

Though prudent to account for those continual changes — or at least try to account for them — Monahan said she believes PacifiCorp’s updated long-term plan relies too heavily on the Trump administration’s influence over the utility industry.

“This administration will not last forever,” Monahan said. “This is a 20-year portfolio. To just assume no changes in environmental policy — it’s just building risk into the portfolio, unnecessarily.”

Further complicating the outlook for electrical utilities — and just about every sector of the nation’s economy — are Trump’s tariffs and global responses to them, which include retaliatory tariffs.

Willox, of Converse County, said industrial businesses in his region — PacifiCorp as well as manufacturers and the oil and natural gas industry — purchase a lot of steel, aluminum and other industrial supplies from “all over.”

“[Tariffs] will have an impact on the energy industry in Converse County,” Willox said. “What that impact is, we don’t know yet.”

Correction: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Converse County Commission Chairman Jim Willox’s name.

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KEMMERER—Linda Slovernick’s husband works at the Kemmerer coal mine that recently laid off 28 workers. Though he survived the cut, her husband is “the breadwinner of the household,” Slovernick told WyoFile, leaving her worried about the possibility of more layoffs.

After living in Kemmerer for decades, the couple’s home is almost paid off — a luxury in a skyrocketing housing market — and they don’t want to have to move. Kemmerer is their home. It’s where they plan to retire. If her husband does get laid off, it’s doubtful he will find another job that pays as well as the mine, said Slovernick, who manages the JCPenney store in downtown Kemmerer.

“You always worry about it,” she said on a sunny day as customers trickled in asking about special deals. “When there’s one round of layoffs, you worry there’s going to be another.

“This coal mine has been the life of this town for decades,” Slovernick continued, adding that it has helped sustain the local economy even when oil and gas go bust. “It would be a devastating blow. The power plant and coal mine provide steady work.”

Nobody knows the fate of the Kemmerer coal mine, which has shed 92 jobs since the fourth quarter of 2017, according to federal data, and nearly half its annual coal production. The company, Kemmerer Operations LLC, isn’t offering details, and local officials say management has kept them in the dark.

One thing is certain, however. The mine’s biggest customer — the nearby Naughton power plant, which accounts for about 42% of the mine’s coal production, according to federal documents — will stop burning coal by the end of the year as its owner, PacifiCorp, converts the plant to natural gas fuel. One Kemmerer coal miner who spoke with WyoFile indicated the mine might also lose a coal contract with a power plant in Utah. Unless the mine can secure sizable new contracts, and soon, the mine’s future may be in jeopardy. 

“Those layoffs are scary,” Kemmerer Mayor Robert Bowen said. “I don’t know how much [Kemmerer coal miners] make, but say they make $50,000 a year — that’s a $1.4 million loss to our local economy. That’s huge for a town this size.”

These are strange times for the 3,000 residents of Kemmerer and neighboring Diamondville — beyond the dread over recent layoffs and uncertainty around the mine.

Five years ago, after talk of closing the Naughton plant first emerged, many locals were resigned to the impending economic disaster without two major economic engines — the power plant and the mine that fuels it.

That all changed — sort of — when, in the fall of 2021, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and the nuclear power company he co-founded, TerraPower, announced it would build the $4 billion Natrium nuclear power plant here. The company chose the community for the demonstration project because Naughton’s owner, PacifiCorp, tentatively planned to close the power plant. Natrium, a beacon of a new age of nuclear power generation, according to its promoters, will “plug into” Naughton’s existing electric utility infrastructure as well as the workforce at the power plant and coal mine.

“It’s given us all hope. A lot of hope,” Rosie’s Pizzeria and Sports Bar owner Phillip Viviano said. “You saw the community go from yellow lawns to green lawns, to people painting houses and putting new roofs on. It meant everything to us, because we love it here. We’re invested here.”

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil embarked on a $400 million “carbon capture” expansion at its Shute Creek natural gas plant 50 miles north near the tiny town of LaBarge. There’s talk of new commercial wind and solar energy projects, a major electric transmission construction project and, in recent years, two different companies have pitched coal-to-products proposals that would make up for the Kemmerer coal mine’s pending contract loss with PacifiCorp’s Naughton power plant.

Yet, for all the promises and a sense of economic jubilation, doubts linger alongside a thick veneer of skepticism that, perhaps, is part of a boom-and-bust town’s DNA. 

The coal-to-products projects, for example, do not appear to be on track to consume coal from the mine before PacifiCorp shuts down the two remaining coal-burning units at Naughton later this year.

Construction jobs related to Natrium and other industrial developments are temporary, many locals note, while others worry that coal miners’ earth-moving skills won’t qualify them to land a permanent job at the nuclear power plant, which is slated to begin operating in 2030.

“They’re going to bring their own people — I mean, it’s a nuclear plant,” said a Kemmerer coal miner while enjoying dinner at Rosie’s Pizzeria. “You don’t just go from running [earth-moving] machinery to running a nuclear plant.”

The miner, who survived the recent round of layoffs, asked WyoFile not to use his name to avoid jeopardizing what already feels like tenuous employment at the mine.

Now in his 50’s, he has worked at natural gas processing plants and says he’s no longer interested in that type of work. “It’s more of a young man’s game,” he said. 

Like others at the mine who see retirement within reach, he’s determined to ride it out at the mine where the pay and benefits promise a decent retirement — if only the mine’s owners can replace the Naughton contract.

To shutter coal-fired power plants — Naughton or otherwise — is a fool’s errand, he said, that will not only make electricity more expensive but snuff out good-paying coal mining jobs that have supported communities for decades. There’s no reason, the miner said, why electric power brokers shouldn’t maintain the coal-fired power plant, the Kemmerer coal mine and the Natrium nuclear plant.

“I don’t see why you can’t have more than one power source,” he said. “We’re living in a time when our government says we want to be energy independent. Well, how are you going to be energy independent if you’re going to start shutting down coal plants and coal mines?”

Tempered optimism

As the coal miner enjoyed his meal, a pair of other miners talked shop over beers, while other men jawed about guns and favorite hunting spots while a group of construction workers huddled around a table chatting in Spanish.

“On Friday and Saturday night, this place will be shoulder-to-shoulder because people come out,” said Viviano, Rosie’s owner. “As soon as this boom really starts, it will be every night.”

Originally from southern California, Viviano first made his way to western Wyoming working rigs on the Pinedale Anticline. He fell in love with the wide-open spaces and small, neighborly communities. A jack-of-all-trades, Viviano is a small business entrepreneur at heart who regards empty storefronts and vacant homes as opportunity.

When he first stepped into Rosie’s, he was immediately overcome with its charm. The union watering hole — long a “second home” to workers from the power plant and coal mine — was in disrepair. Locals lamented to him that it was only open for one hour a day. Somebody, perhaps Viviano, the previous owners suggested, should revive the place. 

Even while many in the community seemed to accept the fate of another bust — coal mine bankruptcies were ravaging rural communities across the nation during President Donald Trump’s first term — Viviano believed Kemmerer “couldn’t fail.” He spiffied up the place, decorated it with baseball memorabilia, installed pinball machines and classic arcade games, and built a kitchen.

“I brought it back online seven days a week to let people enjoy it,” Viviano said. “People come in here and they go, ‘This was always a union bar. We weren’t allowed in here.’ Now it’s open for everybody. ‘We’re still a union bar,’ I tell the boys out there. We support them boys.”

Viviano’s leap of faith on Rosie’s, and the community itself, has paid off — particularly since 2021 when TerraPower announced it had chosen Kemmerer as the location for its Natrium power plant. In fact, the Natrium project — which garnered national attention — has brought a sort of “heat” to the region, attracting businesses and entrepreneurs of all stripes and ambitions.

Beating the rush — in fact, arriving in town just one month before the Natrium announcement — was Seth Snyder, who grew up in the Bighorn Basin. Also an entrepreneur, Snyder, 27, owns a car wash/laundry mat, does freelance management for several businesses in town, and manages Airbnbs and flips homes.

“When I got here, it was a pretty big worry that we were going into a big bust,” Snyder told WyoFile. “This town had to make some changes or else we were going to see, you know, that ghost-town ideology start to come in.”

Even after the Natrium announcement — which comes with promises to offset job losses at the coal plant and coal mine while revitalizing the local economy — probably half the town remained skeptical, he said. Now that construction is underway, many wonder if the growing pains that come with an industrial construction boom will be worth it.

“If it does happen, it’s going to be a great economy-booster,” Snyder said. “But then we go, ‘What happens to the coal plant?'”

Boomtown pains

Growing pains in Kemmerer and Diamondville are already evident, even though Natrium’s estimated “peak” construction workforce of about 1,600 isn’t expected until 2028. Homes and storefronts have been snatched up by outside buyers sight-unseen, Snyder said, and housing prices have skyrocketed. 

“Even bringing 1,000 people in, we can’t handle that. Not in our current situation,” he said. “How do we deal with housing? Do we do temporary housing?”

Snyder says he has faith in local leadership, but an industrial boom brings challenges — a phenomenon that can overwhelm small communities.

“We know we’re going to see a large amount of people come in,” he said. “We have to hire more cops — you have to be able to patrol your streets. Then we’re going to plateau and people are going to leave once the [construction is] done. Now we have to fire cops. So it’s a really difficult situation to be in.”

Kemmerer Mayor Bowen confirmed Snyder’s suspicions. 

Local leaders are scouring for grant dollars to make long overdue road improvements — the pothole situation is so bad in parts of town that entire streets will have to be reconstructed. Though the freshwater system has plenty of capacity to serve a large influx of people, the sewer system is failing. The entire system needs to be replaced, according to Bowen, and the town still owes money on the failing system.

“We’re already at a point where we’re turning away industry, turning away business, because we don’t have the sewer capacity for them,” Bowen told WyoFile. “We don’t want to be turning businesses anyway. We want to invite everybody in. We want to grow. We need more permanent jobs.”

Making matters worse, according to Bowen, is the Wyoming Legislature’s recent 25% property tax cut. That saps desperately needed revenue for just about every public service in the community.

Back at Rosie’s, Viviano admits that for all of his optimism and hope for a new, flourishing economy, the boom presents a lot of hardships and challenges, especially for senior citizens and young families on limited incomes.

“It’s amazing. It’s exciting. It’s good to see what’s happening,” Viviano said. “I feel like we’re on the front lines of getting America back on its feet.

“At the same time, I think we’re all a little fearful,” he continued. “The crime rate is going to trickle up. We’re going to have some guys here that are away from their families, their hearts are bleeding because they have to live on the road. They might come in here and get drunk one night and we might get a hole in the wall.”

Still, Viviano is an eternal optimist. For all the challenges facing the community, he sees opportunity.

“Kemmerer is a beautiful place. It’s got a river running through it. Does anybody know it’s got a river running through it!?” Viviano said. “When there’s a bike path down that river, you watch how the community will flourish — just like the flowers along the river banks. That’s what’s going to happen.”

After decades putting down roots in Kemmerer, Slovernick hopes her husband keeps his job in the coal mine long enough for her family to see that happen.

The post Coal layoffs leave Wyoming community grappling with good, bad of energy transition appeared first on WyoFile .

This story was originally published March 27, 2025 by High Country News.

The billions of dollars approved by Congress to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells have been frozen as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to government spending, creating concerns that the cleanup will be halted just as it’s getting started.

President Trump’s barrage of executive orders included a January directive called “Unleashing American Energy,” which, among other provisions, ordered that federal agencies stop distributing money appropriated by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The Trump administration titled this section of the order “Terminating the Green New Deal.” But in freezing this congressionally approved spending, the administration halted a program that paid for plugging and reclaiming so-called “orphaned” or abandoned oil and gas wells. The order stated that agencies should “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from those two Biden laws. It set a 90-day deadline, upcoming in April, for agencies to review their spending programs and make sure that they align with the Trump administration’s goal of increasing U.S. energy production.

The orphaned well program, which was modeled on a North Dakota initiative, had been widely used by oil states, including several in the West.

The program — which set aside $4.7 billion, a historically large sum, for plugging wells — was meant to supplement state-level plugging efforts. The grants were distributed by the Department of the Interior. In January, days before Trump took office, New Mexico announced that it would be receiving $5.5 million to clean up abandoned wells in the state. California also received a $9 million grant.

California, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico had each plugged over 100 orphaned wells using the Biden funds, according to an Interior Department report in 2024. Wyoming alone plugged 1,021 wells in just one year using federal grants.

As of last fall, the U.S. government had released over half a billion dollars in grants. Wells have been plugged in people’s front yards, in national park areas and deep in the remote Alaskan wilderness. More than $3 billion are still left to be distributed, but previously available information about the grants appears to have been removed from the Interior Department’s website.

In response to questions from High Country News, an Interior Department spokesperson said that the grant program is “under review.”

“President Trump’s decisive actions are necessary steps to eliminate bureaucratic waste and refocus our agency on its core mission: serving the American people and managing our nation’s natural resources with integrity and efficiency,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Orphaned wells negatively impact current and future oil and gas development activities and pose significant risk to national energy security and public safety.”

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

Now, the future of that work is uncertain, in legal limbo alongside many of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting policies. The funding in question had already been appropriated by Congress, making it unclear that the Trump administration can indefinitely cancel it.

On March 20, more than 30 House Democrats sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking him to clear up the lingering confusion surrounding orphaned-well funding and restart the grant program.

“We have already begun to hear from IIJA funding recipients impacted by this pause who now face an uncertain future after DOI issued a stop work order on their orphaned well remediation projects,” the letter states.

The letter goes on to say that the Interior Department has issued no guidance on the funds’ status.

“We urge you to resume distribution of this Congressionally directed funding immediately,” the letter stated. “It protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

Orphaned wells represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

The Biden administration’s infrastructure law was the first significant federal attempt to address the growing problem of orphaned wells across the United States, although the funding it provided paled in comparison to the scale of the problem.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Many state regulators are aware of this pattern and struggle to prevent it.

Several state oil regulators stated this explicitly in a 2024 survey conducted by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, a quasi-governmental body that represents dozens of oil states. The documents were obtained via a records request by Fieldnotes, an industry watchdog, and shared with High Country News.

“Yes, this is the common life of a well,” regulators from Louisiana said, referring to the pattern of marginal wells being passed along to smaller companies.

Utah regulators agreed: “It is definitely a problem when wells are transferred to ‘poor’ operators.”

The plugging program was supposed to address these dysfunctional state programs, primarily by providing money. The Interior Department released its first round of grants in 2023, offering up $658 million to 26 states, including most of the oil states in the West.

The subsequent grants were intended to actually push states to fix their well-plugging programs and require that operators submit more money up front — enough to ensure that the industry and not the public ends up paying for the cost of plugging.

Known as regulatory improvement grants, these pools of funding required that states demonstrate higher financial assurance standards, increase scrutiny on well transfers, improve their plugging standards or show other reforms to their orphaned well regulatory regimes.

These grants essentially became the sole tool for the federal government to incentivize tougher state regulations. But the attempt immediately ran into headwinds: Oil states pushed back on these conditions. Some of this occurred via the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, which collaborated with the federal government on the rollout of the infrastructure law. This included initiatives to reduce orphaned well numbers, program implementation and data collection. Public documents show the inter-state commission lobbied to keep the federal guidelines as weak as possible. 

In a meeting of the Texas Railroad Commission in May 2022, Commissioner Wayne Christian — also an appointee to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission — said that he was working to remove the requirements from the federal grants.

“I’m part of the negotiation with IOGCC on the dollars coming down,” Christian said. “The Interior Department kind of have slowed things down, because all of a sudden, surprise, surprise, they decided they wanted to tell us how to do our work. And so we’re kind of fighting back on that.”

Regulatory improvement grants would have made available an additional $40 million per state. Now, the future of those grants and the improvement incentives are in jeopardy, though some groups are challenging the legality of Trump’s decision to freeze funds that had already been appropriated by Congress and passed into law.

Several environmental groups and many Democratic states have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, seeking to release the unspent funds from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts, the Biden administration’s landmark spending bills.

“The Trump Administration has continued to block funds needed for our domestic energy security, transportation, and infrastructure provided under the IRA and IIJA,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement in February, after filing an injunction alongside 23 Democratic attorney generals, attempting to halt the administration’s funding cuts.

Bonta’s statement noted that the administration was blocking funding that “creates well-paying jobs while simultaneously reducing harmful pollution.”

High Country News is an independent magazine dedicated to coverage of the Western U.S. Subscribe, get the newsletter, and follow HCN on Facebook and Twitter.

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BAR NUNN—A crowd, both uneasy and excited, packed the town of Bar Nunn’s community center Tuesday night to learn about a company’s plans to build portable nuclear microreactors in Natrona County.

Bar Nunn City Councilman Tim Ficken called the project a good opportunity for the area, which has long been economically reliant on the fossil fuel industry. He represents a community of roughly 3,000 people that sits just north of Casper.

“It’s a different type of manufacturing for our county,” he said.

Likewise, Natrona County resident Chastidy Cockrum offered enthusiastic support.

“I think we should be thanking them for considering us,” Cockrum said. “For them to choose this state blows my mind. What they’re going to bring into this community is more than a lot of people understand.”

But others were more cautious. A question many posed was why the California-based company Radiant chose to relocate to the Equality State.

“How many states turned you down?” Natrona County resident Judy Jones asked during the Q&A.

According to Radiant Director of Operations Matt Wilson, the company identified the small Natrona County community as its ideal location for the commercial factory roughly six months ago. The clean energy startup plans on purchasing roughly 130 acres and developing a roughly 350,000-square-foot, campus-style facility.

“It’s more jobs, more capital, and you really get to be the future of advanced nuclear and reshape what that means for the United States,” Wilson told attendees.

One of the main draws, he said, is the existing workforce with experience in the energy field.

“A lot of the types of jobs that we’ll need to fill, we see the skills already in the local market,” he said. “The only gaps we really see are on the nuclear engineering side, and that’ll be fairly easy to fill.”

“We had dozens of criteria that we looked at, and the simplest way to put it is you scored the highest,” Wilson said. “This is our preferred site.”

The company, which is based just outside of Los Angeles, expects the plant to have 70 to 80 employees immediately upon opening, eventually growing to approximately 230 jobs.

“At least half of those are going to be technician-oriented,” Wilson said. “So that could be assemblers, welders… and then the other half I’d say would be business operations, such as finance, accounting [and] a lot of the logistics around moving these.”

Radiant’s facility will build container units with a reactor and all of the equipment needed to convert heat into electricity, Wilson said. The units will have a life expectancy of 20 years, though they will need to be refueled every five years. 

“We’ll build the units here, and we’ll ship them to our customer locations,” he said. “The entire nuclear life cycle will be managed at the Bar Nunn facility. When we refuel them, we’ll ship the units back to our facility, we’ll take out the used core, put in a new core and ship it back out to either the same customer or a different customer.”

The used cores, referred to as spent fuel, will be put in a dry cask once fully expended.

“It’s a similar process to what the other nuclear reactors around the U.S. use today, but the biggest difference I’d say is one of scale,” Wilson said. “We’re one megawatt worth of power, where they’re at 1,000. It’s a very small amount of fuel that we’ll have to store over time.”

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, a single megawatt of electricity can power approximately 1,000 households. A standard nuclear power plant generates a gigawatt of electricity.

Many residents raised concerns about storing spent fuel. Radiant Chief Operating Officer Tori Shivanandan said the process would be conducted under strict control and in negative pressure. When asked to provide a percentage for how safe the process  would be, Shivanandan replied, “99.99%, because that’s how sure you need to be to receive the permits you need.”

Natrona County Commission Chair Dave North said he thinks the company did a good job alleviating people’s fears surrounding nuclear power.

“People hear the word ‘nuclear,’ they think of Chernobyl; they think of Hiroshima,” North said. “They don’t realize how many places in this country have nuclear power. They have one in California in the middle of a big city, and they have one in Boston at MIT.”

Some weren’t swayed. “I’m still neutral on it, but if this is as safe as they claim, that’s big,” said attendee Michael Newquist. “Of course, we’ve heard that before.”

Another common concern was the potential tax burden manufacturing microreactors could place on the community.

“No taxpayer dollars go to Radiant, or for cleanup,” Shivanandan assured. “The investment here is made in utilities for the community. Say our prototype doesn’t work and the project doesn’t happen. I’m having a very bad day, but you guys will keep the investment on the utilities which, again, are things that help improve and help you guys.”

Among those not ready to take a stance was Rep. Tony Locke, a Natrona County Republican. “This is not my forte, and so I’m learning,” he said with a chuckle. “My main goal was to get some information that I can bring back to my constituents, and I think [the company] did a good job of doing that.”

Several attendees said they’re still not convinced, though many added that Radiant’s answers helped put them more at ease.

“I could see it being good for our community, but I want to do some more research first,” area resident Kimberly Zahara said. 

Attendee Mike Schoolcraft called Radiant’s answers “informative” and “well presented.”

“I think the community got enlightened,” Schoolcraft said. “I think a lot of them are more receptive to the idea than when they got here.”

Despite Radiant’s optimism and a partially receptive crowd, the project still has legislative hurdles to clear.

House Bill 16, “Used nuclear fuel storage-amendments,” died during this year’s legislative session in the House Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee.

The bill was drafted in response to multiple companies, including Radiant, that expressed interest in setting up nuclear microreactor manufacturing in Wyoming.

Reacting to several claims that the storage of radioactive nuclear fuel waste poses no human health or environmental risks, Rep. Scott Heiner of Green River previously listed a litany of reported leaks from the same type of “dry cask” containers in other states that would come to Wyoming. Other legislators voiced concerns regarding the federal government’s ability to build and maintain a permanent repository.

At the time, Wilson assured lawmakers that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission would be the primary authority over the factory, and that the federal agency had deemed it to be safe. However, such a facility does not yet exist in the U.S.

Similarly, Senate File 186, “​​Advanced nuclear reactor manufacturers-fuel storage, failed. The bill was crafted in response to recent interest from a handful of companies, including Radiant and BWXT Advanced Technologies.

“The issue is one of verbiage,” Wilson said prior to the start of Tuesday’s meeting.

The company remains optimistic the legislative issues will be resolved, and is moving forward undeterred, Wilson said.

Radiant would like to start building its factory in Natrona County in late 2026 or early 2027 and be operational by 2028. Currently, the project is still in the pre-application stages, and Wilson said it is a multi-year process for the company to get the OK to build its units.

The post Why Wyoming? Bar Nunn crowd seeks info on plan to build portable nuclear microreactors appeared first on WyoFile .

Food Bank of Wyoming recently learned it will not receive $535,000 that was promised in a 2023 grant — one of the many casualties of President Donald Trump’s elimination and freeze of congressionally approved, Biden-era federal programs.

The elimination of the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement — a grant aimed at feeding the most vulnerable while connecting Wyoming ag producers with local eaters — comes at a time when “the food insecurity need in Wyoming is at its highest level in 10 years,” Food Bank of Wyoming Executive Director Jill Stillwagon told Oil City News.

Funding for Wyoming’s Home Energy Savings program, which the Wyoming Energy Authority recently established after navigating months of red tape and collecting input from Wyoming residents, is considered “frozen.” Administrators have received no indication of whether it will ultimately be axed or allowed to continue, according to state officials. That puts $69 million in hard-fought-for federal funds in limbo when skyrocketing electric bills are an increasing threat to low-income households.

The administration’s on-again, off-again whiplash of threats and exceptions to federal programs — further complicated by ongoing court battles and the Elon Musk-led purge of federal employees — throws into question perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars that could go to Wyoming communities and households.

Federal officials have mostly declined to answer questions or provide even basic information, making it hard, if not impossible to know how much money is at stake.

State officials say it’s extremely difficult to account for the status of hundreds of grant applications and awards because they are being managed by various state agencies, individual communities and other groups. When WyoFile asked Dru Palmer — manager of Wyoming’s State Grants Integration office, which was created to help reel in Biden-era federal dollars — for an accounting or estimate, the inquiry was forwarded to Gov. Mark Gordon’s office.

“Right now, a lot is still up in the air in this space,” Gordon’s Communications Director Michael Pearlman told WyoFile via email. “Our office is getting information program by program, if we receive any updates at all. Each federal agency is issuing its own guidance in terms of what programs can move forward, and which ones are still paused.”

‘Tip of the iceberg’

The Lander-based Wyoming Outdoor Council has identified more than $100 million that the state, Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes and other entities have applied for under the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that is now either terminated or “frozen,” according to the council’s Energy and Climate Associate Jonathan Williams. In addition to the Home Energy Savings program, there’s a freeze on Solar for All grant money totaling some $30 million, which includes a potential $8 million dedicated to the Wind River Indian Reservation.

Wyoming’s Solar for All grant award also dedicated money for workforce training to install solar infrastructure, specifically in low-income and tribal communities.

Some Wyoming ag producers — who are desperate to survive rising electric costs — have invested tens of thousands of dollars in solar installations, Williams added, with expectations to receive rebates via the long-standing Rural Energy for America Program. But those rebates also appear to be in question.

“We think this is the tip of the iceberg,” Williams said.

There could be as much as $2 billion at stake in Wyoming, according to a Grist report. But Williams says it’s nearly impossible to know for certain.

The council recently hosted a public webinar highlighting its concerns regarding programs “gone dark” as well as the potential benefits if the flow of federal grant dollars is allowed to move forward.

“A lot of these programs would just help residents save money — help communities save money,” Williams told dozens of webinar attendees on Thursday, adding that the vast majority of grants are one-time investments. “There’s certainly some other co-benefits, as well, worth acknowledging. I’m thinking specifically of human health impacts, the ability of communities and tribes to respond to natural emergencies like wildfire and drought and, certainly, just quality of life.”

Though Wyoming’s congressional delegation opposed the Biden-era initiatives, they eventually joined state leaders in efforts to train local municipalities and others in grant writing seminars and provided other resources to help Wyoming communities take advantage of the opportunities.

“These aren’t abstract government initiatives,” the outdoor council’s Tribal Engagement Coordinator Big Wind Carpenter said. “They really are helping benefit our communities here on the ground in Wyoming … We’re talking about weatherization, energy efficiency upgrades — these are fundamental building blocks to allow residents to access services that they otherwise couldn’t afford.”

What municipalities are saying

City officials in Cheyenne — where technology and manufacturing have been booming for years, and where city staff is deft at pulling in grant dollars — say there’s unanswered questions regarding supposedly settled federal grants as well as those in the pipeline.

“What I’m hearing from our federal partners is, ‘Just proceed as you have been until you hear otherwise’ and ‘Don’t do anything that could be used as a reason or an excuse to cancel your grant,'” Cheyenne’s Economic Resource Administrator Renee Smith told WyoFile. 

In some cases, she said, particularly with grants administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, city and state officials sometimes hear of grant status updates before the regional office is informed. Staff at the U.S. Forest Service, according to Smith, have said they’re worried about the ability to process grants due to personnel cuts made by the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.   

“We were going to go after a couple of Forest Service grants and, basically, everything just got shut down,” Smith said. One of the city’s in-the-pipe grants via the U.S. Department of Agriculture Urban and Community Forestry program was paused for a few weeks before federal officials resumed processing it, she said. 

The city is still pinning hopes on an EPA grant to conduct a greenhouse-gas inventory which, if one is completed, qualifies Cheyenne and Laramie County to “unlock” many more potential grants for community solar and other renewable energy projects, Smith said. But the Trump administration has indicated a massive budget cut for the agency.

“That’s going to have massive, massive repercussions in our state,” Smith said, adding that EPA-administered grants help fill a major funding need in Wyoming for municipal water infrastructure.

What worries Smith the most, however, is that federal agencies are not accepting new applications for grant programs.

“I honestly think that we will see the impacts, not this year, but next year,” Smith said. “There are no grants for me to apply for right now. There’s nothing. So if I’m not writing grants, we’re not getting grants next year to do infrastructure projects next year.

“I’m less worried about our existing programs because we have contracts in place,” she added. 

A contingent of Wyoming community advocates and town officials will sojourn to Washington D.C. this week, according to multiple sources who spoke to WyoFile, to plead for support of federal dollars already promised to Wyoming. Meantime, Gordon and Wyoming’s congressional delegation, they say, have been making the case for exceptions under the sweeping cuts.

“They are listening,” Smith said.

The post More than $100 million at stake for Wyoming in Trump’s fed grants freeze appeared first on WyoFile .

The owner of the Kemmerer coal mine laid off 28 workers on Friday, according to a Kemmerer Operations, LLC press statement. The job losses, which amount to roughly 13% of the mine’s workforce, followed months of rumors of possible cuts in the southwest Wyoming energy town.

“The workforce reduction is part of its ongoing efforts to align operations with current coal market conditions, including those caused by the pending natural gas conversions of several coal-fired power plants in the region,” according to the statement. “[Kemmerer Operations] appreciates the contributions and hard work of the impacted employees, and values its long-standing partnership with the United Mine Workers of America.”

In an email to WyoFile that included the press statement, Kemmerer Operations President and General Manager Don Crank said, “No further comments will be provided.”

Employees who received pink slips will work until sometime in April, according to Lincoln County Commission Chairman Kent Connelly, who said he received a call from Crank regarding the layoffs.

“Everybody’s been watching what they’re going to do, so I can’t say that it was a surprise,” Connelly told WyoFile by phone, noting that rumors of layoffs have been circulating in the community. “They finally admitted it,” he added.

The company also announced Friday it was moving from three shifts to two shifts, which means the mine will no longer be a 24-hour operation, according to Connelly.

The commissioner said he doesn’t know who in particular is being laid off. Though the job losses are sure to hit hard in the small towns of Kemmerer and Diamondville, many workers at the mine commute from all over the southwest region, including from Evanston, Mountain View, Lyman and even towns in Utah and Idaho.

Multiple new construction and industrial projects are planned or already underway in the region, Connelly noted, including TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear power plant and a major trona mine expansion outside Green River.

“I hope they will get on with these other new places that will be hiring staff,” Connelly said.

The mine produced 2.4 million tons of coal in 2024 and employed 215 workers, according to federal data. It produced more than 4.2 million tons in 2017 and employed 279 workers in the fourth quarter of that year.

News of the layoffs comes in the same week that President Donald Trump renewed promises to bring back “clean, beautiful coal.”

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