Wyoming's coal-fired economy is coming to an end

As I approached Gillette, Wyoming, on a cold and grungy March day in 2011, I expected to find the stereotypical Western extraction-reliant town, stuck in the boom-bust cycle, a place where transient workers lived in trailer parks and man camps, the schools were overflowing, and the social fabric and infrastructure were stretched to the breaking point.
So I was rather surprised to roll into a town that felt more suburban Denver than high-plains boomtown. Instead of rowdy bars, there were strip malls and chain restaurants and a spanking-new recreation center. Instead of man camps, I found a residential neighborhood with well-tended homes, boats and RVs in the driveways, and, as the census data would later tell me, a median household income of $101,000. I saw so many Hummers that it was as if the ungainly SUVs had all migrated to this one county to sit out the financial crisis that was still bedeviling the rest of America.

Over the years, Gillette has been an oil town, a natural gas town and even a uranium town, but somehow it had managed to smooth out the wild ups and downs that usually plague boom-bust communities. Ironically, it was yet another fossil fuel that provided the economic padding: coal. Gillette sits in the heart of the Powder River Basin, where massive mines furnish nearly half of all the coal burned for electricity in the United States. Coal-fired power plants are often touted for their ability to churn out electricity at a steady rate rather than erratically and unpredictably. The data show that coal can behave similarly on an economic level, providing a stable financial foundation upon which a community can grow.

But now that foundation is eroding. The coal industry is fading, giant corporations, from Peabody to Westmoreland, are going bankrupt, and hundreds of Wyoming miners have lost their jobs. After a half-century of coal-fired stability, Gillette — and Wyoming at large — are facing a future without the industry that’s been so good to them.

Read more: https://www.hcn.org/issues/51.21-22/coal-wyomings-coal-fired-economy-is-coming-to-an-end
(High Country News)