Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
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Company founded by lawmaker expects new sites in four cities CASPER - Electric vehicle drivers are about to have a lot more charging options in Wyoming. OtterSpace, a company founded in 2021 by state Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, announced Monday that it plans to install fast charging stations - also known as level 3 chargers - in Lander, Dubois and Pinedale this year, along with a number of slower level 2 chargers in downtown Laramie. The first of the three fast chargers OtterSpace is building, a...
Via Wyoming News Exchange CASPER — Rocky Mountain Power, Wyoming’s largest electric utility, wants to increase ratepayers’ bills by an average of 7.6% in response to higher-than-expected fuel and transmission costs during 2022. The rate adjustment would translate to an extra $50.3 million for the utility. The utility sources the vast majority of its electricity from its own power plants and through long-term contracts. But about 5% comes from the more volatile wholesale market. “Sharply higher prices in the wholesale power market during...
CASPER — Members of a major railroad union voted to reject a tentative contract deal, union leaders announced Monday, renewing the possibility of a strike that could shut down the country’s railroads — and several key Wyoming industries — early next month. The deal resulted from last-minute negotiations convened by the Biden administration in mid-September, when tens of thousands of unionized rail workers were readying to strike over working conditions. The agreement added a pay raise, an extra day off, protected benefits and guarant...
CASPER — Amid reports that a billion-barrel oil reserve had been discovered in central Wyoming, the company behind the find was quick to explain that it has not, in fact, doubled the known volume of recoverable oil in the state. Canadian Overseas Petroleum Limited (COPL), an oil and gas company based in Alberta, estimated in January that federal leases it holds in Natrona and Converse counties overlie most of a reservoir containing 1.5 to 1.9 billion barrels of oil. The company announced Friday that a report it commissioned from an independent...
CASPER — The price at the pump has started to decline after rising sharply through the end of spring. Since that increase accelerated, Wyoming’s numbers have followed a couple of weeks behind the national trend. The average price of regular gasoline across the U.S. briefly surpassed $5 per gallon in mid-June, according to AAA. In Wyoming, it stopped just short, peaking at about $4.90 on July 1. Regular gasoline has since fallen, nationally, by nearly 34 cents. Wyoming has seen its averages drop, more recently, by a little over four cents for...
CASPER — A dozen environmental groups filed two separate lawsuits on Wednesday challenging the federal oil and gas lease sale underway in Wyoming. The sale is the state’s first under President Joe Biden. Both lawsuits were filed less than a day after the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finalized its offerings: roughly 170 parcels spanning about 144,000 acres across the West, with the bulk of the prospective leases — 123 parcels and close to 120,000 acres — located in Wyoming. The BLM removed a handful of tracts from the sale, including the onl...
CASPER — Outdoor recreation is poised to become more accessible. A bill to modernize mapping of federal lands that was championed by Wyoming’s U.S. senators cleared Congress last week and headed to the president’s desk. The Modernizing Access to Our Public Land, or MAPLand, Act allocates $47 million to federal land management agencies for the digitization and online publication of maps detailing how public lands can be accessed, when roads and trails are open or closed, what types of vehicles are permitted on those roads and where certa...
CASPER —Wyoming’s oil and gas industry appears to be in for another tumultuous year. It looked, until recently, like the market would stabilize at last. Prices, though still high, would start to fall, and supply would eventually catch up with demand. Then the world learned that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine. A number of countries rely on Russia, one of the world’s top exporters of both oil and natural gas, for fuel. If countries stop accepting that fuel, or Russia cuts them off, the cost of the remaining supply will go up. “I think t...
CASPER — On unit 2 of the Jim Bridger power plant, Wyoming isn’t taking no for an answer. State leaders and operating utility Rocky Mountain Power have doubled down on their commitment to resolving a dispute over pollution controls, and keeping the unit open past its impending April compliance deadline, after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced this past week that it would propose disapproving the state’s alternative plan. The rejection wasn’t exactly surprising, according to Randall Luthi, Gov. Mark Gordon’s chief energy ad...
CASPER — Sen. Cale Case on Thursday proposed a new energy tax structure that would be shared across all electricity producers. But a motion to have a bill drafted for the plan failed by a vote of 4–9 in the Joint Revenue Committee. Case, R-Lander, outlined a gross receipts tax that would be levied on producers’ total sales, but would allocate credits for existing generation fees, including the severance taxes paid by coal, oil and gas companies. “The world is changing, and we’re going to have to leave a lot of those minerals in the ground,...
CASPER — The Biden administration’s pause on federal drilling leases alarmed the oil and gas industry. But a new report argues that its economic impacts will be negligible — even for Wyoming. Decades of stockpiled leases will enable the industry to continue operating normally through the duration of the freeze, according to an analysis published this week by the Conservation Economics Institute. During a Zoom call introducing the report on Wednesday, institute director Evan Hjerpe described the pause as an opportunity to reform an uneco...
CASPER –– A year after the number of drilling rigs in Wyoming fell to zero for the first time in more than a century, the state’s rig count is inching back up. Oil prices have rebounded from their below-zero pandemic lows to more than $70 per barrel, outperforming expectations for this year. But new drilling in Wyoming has recovered more slowly than prices might suggest. The average monthly rig count varies widely by year: 54 in 2015, 27 in 2016, 11 in 2017, 22 in 2018, 33 in 2019 — and eight in 2020. That count hit zero twice, first in June...
CASPER — Six proposed wind farms could add more than 1,600 megawatts of electricity generation capacity to Wyoming’s grid by 2024, according to an announcement this week by utility Rocky Mountain Power’s parent company, PacifiCorp. If built, the 19 wind, solar, battery storage and transmission proposals that made PacifiCorp’s shortlist would span four states with a collective capacity of 3,200 megawatts. The proposals concentrate wind development in Wyoming and Idaho, and solar development, including battery storage, in Utah and Oregon....