Two energy-related bills that would otherwise be regarded as foolproof in the Wyoming Legislature — even during a budget session — faced an inordinate amount of opposition from an unlikely foe: the most far-right faction of lawmakers. The opposition was mounted months before the session began when Sen. Cheri Steinmetz (R-Lingle) circulated a letter signed by 30 legislators issuing a challenge to Gov. Mark Gordon’s stated “net-zero” energy and climate goals that include encouraging, and in some cases backing with state resources, efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
The hard-line Freedom Caucus in the House, and their counterparts in the Senate, don’t object to the ultimate goal of helping to preserve Wyoming’s fossil fuel industries or expanding the potential for jobs and revenue from new energy investments. Instead, their objection, according to Steinmetz, is rooted in the falsehood that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions do not present a global climate emergency.
Over objections, Steinmetz, as chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture, State and Public Lands and Water Resources Committee, convened a February hearing during the budget session that featured speakers from the CO2 Coalition, which peddles climate misinformation.
The coalition speakers took direct aim at one of Gordon’s signature initiatives, House Bill 200 – Reliable and dispatchable low-carbon energy standards. Signed into law in 2020, the law requires regulated utilities to retrofit their coal-fueled power plants in the state with carbon capture technology. Conservation and ratepayer advocacy groups have long criticized the mandate for its estimated cost to Wyoming ratepayers — potentially $500 million to more than $1 billion for each of the five coal units subject to the law.
Steinmetz and many other lawmakers joined the chorus of critics regarding the estimated cost, but added that Wyoming shouldn’t care about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their opposition jeopardized an effort to modify the 2020 mandate through Senate File 42 – Low-carbon reliable energy standards-amendments, which ultimately passed.
Steinmetz took aim at another key energy initiative at Gordon’s disposal. She proposed a budget amendment to sweep away an existing $155 million Energy Matching Funds program, as well as $75 million in infrastructure matching funds and a Joint Appropriations Committee proposal for a new $200 million Large Energy Projects matching funds initiative.
The programs are intended to leverage potentially billions in private and federal dollars to support energy innovation projects such as “direct air capture,” carbon sequestration, hydrogen energy and other low-emission initiatives. But giving the governor authority to spend those dollars threatens to diminish the Legislature’s spending authority, Steinmetz said.
“Do we want to be legislating and appropriating these funds or do we want the sole discretion of the governor to make these decisions for us?” Steinmetz said in support of the amendment. “I would like us to be involved in these decisions when we’re dealing with this amount of funding.”
Though the Senate narrowly adopted the amendment, House members successfully added the appropriations back into the final budget, except for funding the Large Energy Projects at half the proposed $200 million.
Despite the climate denial rhetoric, several advocacy groups welcomed skepticism of both the coal carbon capture mandate and the matching funds programs bestowed to the governor. The episode should be a “wake-up call” for Gordon and the Wyoming Energy Authority, which manages the Energy Matching Funds program, said Shannon Anderson, attorney for the Sheridan-based landowner advocacy group Powder River Basin Resource Council.
Both offices should “provide additional transparency and offer more robust public review and comment opportunities before awarding millions of taxpayer dollars,” Anderson told WyoFile via email. “Unfortunately, Wyoming does not have a great track record of supporting successful energy projects, and we need safeguards put in place to deal with company and technology failures, as well as to more judiciously decide where we are going to invest as a state.”
New goalposts for coal carbon capture
With the passage of SF 42, utilities now have three extra years to either retrofit their coal-fueled power plants with carbon capture or demonstrate to state regulatory authorities that doing so would be cost prohibitive for their captive Wyoming ratepayers.
The bill moves the implementation date from 2030 to 2033. It also lowers the minimum carbon dioxide capture standard from 90% to 75% of annual baseline emissions.
“It’s probably conceptually cheaper to do nothing. But I can also say, and it is my opinion, to do nothing will have a tremendous cost for Wyoming.”
Randall Luthi, energy policy advisor to Gov. Mark Gordon
Amendments to the 2020 mandate came largely in response to initial reports by utilities suggesting carbon capture for existing coal-fueled power plants isn’t quite ready for commercial deployment — at least in a regulated, monopolistic setting where state regulators must determine that costs passed on to customers are “just and reasonable.”
As for the astronomical cost estimates — billions of dollars — proponents of the mandate, and SF 42 to modify it, claimed that utility companies have not fully taken into account recently expanded federal tax credits for capturing carbon dioxide, nor the potential revenue from selling the greenhouse gas for “enhanced oil recovery” and the revenues from that oil production.
Senate File 42 attempts to take all of those considerations into account, said Gordon’s energy policy advisor Randall Luthi.
“It’s probably conceptually cheaper to do nothing,” Luthi told members of the House Minerals Committee earlier this month. “But I can also say, and it is my opinion, to do nothing will have a tremendous cost for Wyoming, because [doing] ‘nothing’ means we’re going to continue to shift from our fossil fuel units to renewables” that employ fewer people and only provide intermittent power.
Luthi also championed language in both the 2020 and 2024 bills noting that utilities subject to the mandate may offload the carbon capture side of the business at a coal power plant to a third party, which would remove the financial pros and cons from the utility and its ratepayers.
But there’s no guarantee that will happen. For now, and underscored by new language in SF 42, captive ratepayers in Wyoming are on the hook for not only the billions of dollars of retrofitting the coal-power units, but also the cost of mandated studies to analyze the potential. The only limiting factor for Wyoming ratepayers to date is a 2% cap “of each customer’s total electric bill” for costs incurred to meet the state’s mandate to study and potentially implement carbon capture retrofits.
In other words, it’s not a 2% cap on total costs; utilities may only recover 2% at a time from its Wyoming ratepayers, whether that’s a pass-on cost for a few years, or possibly decades.
The Office of Consumer Advocate has been skeptical of the mandate, but liked some of the reforms in SF 42, such as an exemption for utilities with fewer than 10,000 customers — that reduces the number of coal-fired units subject to the law from five to four.
More oversight of utility investments
The Legislature also passed five of six committee-sponsored bills that add authorities and directives to the Public Service Commission to more closely scrutinize electric utility investments that can be passed on to their Wyoming ratepayers.
The measures, which mostly had broad political support, were crafted by the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee last fall in response to Rocky Mountain Power’s proposal for a historic rate increase.
However, several aspects of the legislation received pushback for duplicating existing authorities and protocols and because they generally assume that shifting from coal-based power generation to renewables is a threat to both electric reliability and ratepayers’ pocketbooks.
Nonetheless, measures that made it across the finish line, such as Senate File 20 – Electricity rates for costs that do not benefit Wyoming and Senate File 24 – Public service commission-integrated resource plans, should provide more analysis to help state regulatory officials determine whether utility investments are “just and reasonable” to pass on to ratepayers — whether they are renewables or fossil fuel-based costs.
I find this term “Climate Denier” incredibly offensive and also inaccurate. The only other context in which this is used is “Holocaust Denier” and the reasons for the use of this term are obvious. First to conflate the Holocaust with anything, much less this mania to try to reduce carbon emissions is grotesque. The second is, while people who take this position like to say things like “The Science is Settled” its literally the exact opposite of what science is. This is a dogma, not science. Its based on selective use of data, both ignoring and ignorance of history, use of “models” to try to predict what is going to happen going forward; much of which have already failed to materialize. There is has been an intense effort to silence, fire, “Cancel” anyone who disagrees, and many do, but they have been dogmatically censored. I live in Wyoming and in the United States, and to be told I don’t have the right to my own opinions and equate that with Nazism is beyond the pale. I have only recently begun to follow this news information, but this inclines me to discontinue.
The term is used all the time in the context of people who refuse to recognize significant scientific data. HIV, Covid, evolution, etc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism
I find common cause between climate science deniers and concerned citizens like myself, on carbon capture and sequestration. It is a waste of money. It will cost far more and be less effective than simply building more renewable energy capacity.
While carbon capture can work (amine-based absorption systems do “OK” in the task), several trials on this continent have struggled (google the Boundary Dam plant up in Saskatchewan). The systems work, but there are several drawbacks.
Have a look, what it takes for a relatively small generating unit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyJOIL4SuaU&t=521s
1. You gotta have a customer, or a deep well, to dispose of the CO₂.
2. The energy used by such systems (additional fan loads, heat required to liberate the absorbed CO₂, the energy used to compress the gas, and any power to operate the system), can consume a significant portion of the generating unit’s OUTPUT, on the order of 10% of the units original net output prior to any capture system. That “derate” due to the increase in a unit’s internal “house power”, increases the cost of power to the extent that any modified unit is called on less frequently by the market, and is dispatched later in the “pecking order”. Think about it. A 200 MW net power rated unit now delivers only 180 MW. The plant becomes “it’s own best customer”!
I hope that there is some other system of CC&S that might do better. Until some other system arises, I feel this direction is a temporary band-aid on the goal of eliminating emissions.
It may be time for Wyoming to stop deifying “Cowboy”. Let’s try “Citizen” for a while and see what happens.
The point is that these changes are very significant in terms of the climate to which our civilization has adapted. The website that *you* posted explains all of this in detail
*climate skeptics…
God-forbid anyone questions the holy trinity of “The Science”, else we’re labeled heretics…
As Sgt. Friday used to say in the old TV show, “Dragnet, ” “‘Just the facts, ma’am.” A record of 400,000 years of Earth’s atmosphere is preserved in ice cores at the National Core Facility in Denver. These cores directly show that atmospheric carbon dioxide, before the Industrial Revolution, was steady at approximately 280 parts per million (That’s 280 thousandths of one percent!). Carbon levels began to rise during the Industrial Revolution. So now our atmosphere contains around 400 parts per million, or 400 thousandths of one percent. If one totally ignores the most recent natural warming of the planet that has occurred over the past 14,000 years, the maximum increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere that can possibly be attributed to human activity comes to 130 parts per million, or 130 thousandths of one percent!!!! I wish the media at large would report this FACT instead of shilling for the “Climate Crisis” crowd and using the label “climate deniers.” Studies of ocean cores are hardly as precise as data directly derived from ice cores, but current methodology tells us that present atmospheric carbon levels were once realized about 3.5 million years ago (during the Pliocene Era) and came down from 650 part per million during the Miocene Era, about 20.5 million years ago. That’s attributed to the increase in earth’s plant life (on land and in the oceans) over that period of time; plants absorb CO2 and produce O2. Earth’s atmospheric carbon content was far higher before those times many millions of years ago. So, we are still experiencing an almost all-time planetary carbon low! “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Let’s use some actual scientific data: https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
OK, Shawn…..Please take a look at this:
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/node/1018
I used to work in Building 810 on the Denver Federal Center, where the Ice Core Laboratory is located and subsequently became the co-manager of the Public Lands Information Center at the BLM Colorado State Office. As I mentioned above, we are now experiencing an almost all-time planetary carbon low….human activity or not!
This is incredibly silly. Climate change poses a problem for how human civilization has adapted to existing climate. Whether there was more CO2 hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago, long before the development of modern agriculture, is a red herring. You would know that if you looked at any of the other pages on the website you posted.
I don’t understand your point, Mr. Goggins. Climate change, as a phenomenon, is presently being used as a political weapon wielded by those who’s lifestyles will remain unchanged by energy shortages, unlike the lives of those whom they wish to control. My point regarding CO2 and global warming is simple: human activity, at the extreme, is only responsible for elevating atmospheric carbon levels from thousands of years past by 120 thousandths of one percent! That’s almost imperceptible. Climate change is a complex phenomenon we will not control regardless of what we do or do not do as a specie. We are currently living in an inter-glacial period that will last tens of thousands of years and another glacial period will, most likely, follow. Historically, glacial periods last millions of years.
Mr. Koller,
The data you are providing is not a correlation study. There is no cause and effect demonstrated in it. The overwhelming scientific consensus has proven that human produced carbon emission is the major cause of the rapid warming of the earth’s atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
I can appreciate the attempts to educate Mr. Koller by you and Mr. Goggins, but Mr. Koller has posted the same copy paste drivel on every article related to climate change.
I have an Australian shepherd that is 11 years old. I installed a new dog door in my garage for him. It didn’t take him long to figure it out. Old dogs CAN learn new tricks if they are willing. Mr. Koller is far from willing.
Mr. Smith,
I do not disagree that human produced carbon emissions have ADDED to the increase in temperatures around our planet. I disagree that rising temperatures have been “rapid” since factors we don’t completely understand began the inter-glacial warming period approximately 14,000 years ago! I also agree the data “is not a correlation study.” In fact, that’s the heart of my argument against the anthropomorphic-caused warming claim!! The planet is warming now no matter what humans do!!!!! It’s not CAUSED by humans!!!! As a note aside, I began to become interested in this science in the ’70’s when we studied both “nuclear winter” as a potential human-generated catastrophe and personally became involved in counting the variety and specie of sub-tropical plant pollen in the mud rock of Dinosaur Ridge in Colorado. I’d also like to mention that actual temperature measurements only began to be observed with the invention of the thermometer in the early 1700’s…..and they were hardly globally distributed. I’m trying to say our record of actual temperature redecoration is a very recent phenomenon and exactly where we measure grossly affects “averages.”
Here’s a fact: modern human civilization and its reliance on agriculture did not exist millions of years ago.
The lead picture of the article is an embarrassing reminder of the clowns that are in “charge” of Wyoming.
And now these clowns will be carrying guns