Tag: energy

Rifle Mayor Keith Lambert, in an effort to offset the ups and downs of the fossil fuel industry, is offering free or very cheap city-owned land to renewable energy companies interested in relocating to the Western Slope natural-gas capital.

Wednesday was dress-up day on Capitol Hill in Washington, with President Ulysses S. Grant impersonators calling on lawmakers to reform the 1872 mining law the Civil War hero enacted to encourage prospectors to, in the immortal words of Horace Greeley, “Go west, young man.”

The volatility of natural gas prices causing a major production downturn on Colorado’s Western Slope is exactly why William Schroeder Jr. of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association says the state’s largest co-op spent $366 million on a new coal-fired power plant.

Winds of change may be blowing through Golden today — underscoring just how critical Colorado has become on the national clean-energy front — but the real test of the Obama administration’s legacy is unfolding in Washington.

Government officials on the Western Slope are bracing for a drop-off in natural gas drilling of up to 80 percent this summer — and a corresponding plunge in tax revenues. While some politicians attribute the slowdown to the drop in energy prices and the global recession, others blame Colorado's stricter drilling regulations.

With one week to go to pass six green-energy bills in the current legislative session, eight Democratic state lawmakers are holding a rally on the west steps of the State Capitol Wednesday at 1 p.m. – a sort of Renewabollapalooza for the New Energy Economy.

The CBS news mag “60 Minutes” aired an interesting primer on the debate over so-called "clean-coal technology" Sunday night, interviewing some of the heavy hitters in the industry and scientists calling for a moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants.

Recent talk of using nuclear energy to power the oil shale industry on Colorado’s Western Slope has elicited a wide range of reactions from government officials at what would be the epicenter of such a move — from serious doubt to matter-of-fact support.

Incumbents made it a clean sweep Thursday in the prickly battle for seats on the board of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, the state’s largest rural electric co-op with nearly 138,000 members.

Everyone agrees that tapping into the massive oil shale reserves of Northwest Colorado would be a huge power drain and that bringing enough coal-fired power plants online to handle production could be a virtual impossibility. But now there’s talk of using nuclear power to provide enough juice to heat up and squeeze oil from the rocks and sand of the Western Slope. With some studies showing upwards of 10 coal-fired power plants would be necessary to power the oil-shale industry at peak production, going nuclear may be the next best option, according to Aaron Diaz, executive director of Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado.