energy

Add this news to the numerous reasons oil exploration and production are down on the Western Slope. From Slate.com’s The Big Money:

“A welcome-back party for Big Oil” is how the Wall Street Journal today sums up the Iraqi government plan to open up its oil fields to the highest bidders after three decades of tight control under Saddam Hussein. Starting next week, the Iraqi government will begin auctioning off contracts to foreign countries, opening up a market with 115 billion barrels in “proven reserves.” “If all goes according to plan in the first round, foreign oil companies will move in to help Iraq revive production at six developed fields that have suffered from years of war and neglect,” the newspaper writes.

House lawmakers announced a deal last night on their sweeping proposal to tackle climate change, but not before the bill’s sponsors were forced to bow once more to a polluting industry that would be affected by the proposal.

Two Democrats who lost out in a nasty election for the Garfield County board of commissioners last year say the main reason they were targeted by the oil and gas industry was something that happened earlier in 2008 in neighboring Rio Blanco County.

It’s been nearly eight months since former Garfield County Judge Steve Carter says he was ambushed by oil and gas money in his unsuccessful bid for county commissioner, but the Democrat is clearly still seething about what he considers a “stolen election.”

The wave of green advocacy sweeping Colorado’s rural electric associations (REAs), especially in more progressive mountain resort areas like Aspen, Vail and Telluride, didn’t quite make it to Steamboat Springs.

Colorado’s environmental community wasn’t exactly singing the praises of the Senate version of clean-energy legislation passed by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee Wednesday.

Environment Colorado issued a release saying the American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009 “does little or nothing to spur renewable energy in this country. The proposal risks sensitive coastal ecosystems [in Florida] to pollution and spills from off-shore drilling, while worsening global warming by opening the door to high-carbon fuels such as liquid coal, tar sands and oil shale.”

The director of sustainability for one of the state’s largest ski companies says there is a quiet revolution going at the state’s rural electric co-ops, where previously ignored and under-publicized board elections are seeing some real upheaval.

A mineral royalty rights meeting that turned ugly in Grand Junction earlier this month is just a small taste of what’s coming for local and state Democrats running for re-election in 2010 on Colorado’s Western Slope, according to one lawmaker.

Clean-burning fuel made from corn! Ethanol, a once-sparkly futuristic product, now conjures visions of doomed dot-matrix printers, music cds and newspapers! Which is why nearly 2000 members of the ethanol industry have assembled this week in Denver.

Four Colorado projects that convert wood waste, or biomass, into energy received a total of $1 million in federal stimulus funds Thursday, but a state with more than two million acres of dead and dying lodgepole pine forests could use a lot more.