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"The purpose of this study was to get an objective view of our coal economy, and find its biggest threats for the state to be watching," Godby says.
When Godby began the state-funded study in spring of 2014, that economy had been on a 6-year-long decline, for several reasons. A rise in demand for cheaper natural gas and renewables coincided with increasing coal production costs, due to the fact that coal companies have had to scrape deeper into Wyoming's coal-rich Powder River Basin. Nationwide, electricity demand has slumped since the 2008 recession. Increased train congestion from the Bakken oil fields has slowed down coal transport. And finally, a trend of worldwide health and environmental regulations has curbed both international export and U.S. production.
The greatest threat of the bunch was the increasing cost of coal mining. That factor alone, Godby predicted, could cut Wyoming's coal production by 20 percent by 2030, resulting in lost jobs and fewer dollars in Wyoming's economy, but also resulting in increased revenues for Wyoming's schools and government thanks to higher coal prices.
Then in June 2014, a few months into the study, the EPA issued its Clean Power Plan proposal, which would require, by 2030, a 30 percent reduction in national carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels. Under the plan, each state would have a specific target. Wyoming, the highest CO2 emitter per-capita in the nation, would have to reduce its output by 19 percent from 2012 levels.
"Coal releases the most greenhouse gas, so the obvious way to reduce greenhouse gas is to reduce coal," Godby says. With utilities in the other 49 states buying 93 percent of Wyoming's coal, those nation-wide emissions cuts would have a major impact on the state, which produces over 40 percent of the country's coal. A lack of viable coal export terminals would curb Wyoming's ability to sell that coal further afield—not to mention that the trends in increased regulation and decreased demand for coal extend beyond U.S. borders.
The study predicts EPA's plan could cause Wyoming coal production to fall by 20-45 percent by 2030, resulting in up to 10 percent unemployment in some parts of the state.
The same regulations that knock coal could benefit another of Wyoming's powerhouse industries: natural gas. Even renewables like wind, of which Wyoming has plenty, might profit from increased demand. But these successes would not be enough to offset the massive losses to Wyoming's economy. Natural gas would make up for about 40 percent of the coal industry's dearth, and renewables would employ only a small fraction of the people. "A major wind farm employs maybe 250 people," Godby says. "Coal mines can employ 6,000 people."
The EPA's proposed rule allows for flexibility in how states approach the carbon reduction goals. While cutting coal use nation-wide seems like a no-brainer, Wyoming is hoping other states give coal a chance, instead looking to greater power efficiency.
Wyoming itself, where utilities are roughly 90 percent coal-powered, is looking to clean coal and carbon capture technology. "There have been tremendous steps in clean coal technology recently," says Loyd Drain, director of Wyoming Infrastructure Authority, which funded the study. "We think the federal government should partner with the industry and incentivize the development of (that) technology." But Godby's report did not evaluate the possible role of clean coal technology in mitigating the plan's effects. "(That technology) is not current enough," he says.
Hoping for an easier solution, a dozen states, including Wyoming and four other coal-producers, are suing the EPA over its new plan. Their case will appear in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals later this month.
Meanwhile, as coal declines, Wyoming looks to other components of its economy. The state has one of the largest agricultural economies in the country, raising much of the nation's beef and grain. But agricultural jobs and output are predicted to take a hit from climate change as Wyoming faces future drought. EPA's new plan, even as it dials back coal's contribution to the state's economy, could, to some extent, mitigate some of climate change's impacts on other sectors. "It's not just agriculture, but tourism, and more," Godby says. "We didn't even try to figure climate change into the study. We're still in the early stages of understanding climate change and what it will affect."
Kindra McQuillan is an editorial intern with High Country News.
Follow @KindraMcQuillan]]>
Miners and their supporters stood at microphones in a small auditorium in a public library and begged the federal officials in the room not to increase royalty rates and drive their companies out of business. Emotions were high because of fears that new regulations will cause a significant decline in coal mining over the next 15 years.Representatives from school systems, social services and businesses connected to the mines all painted a picture of community that thrives because of coal but could crumble without it.
Penny Russell, who drives a massive truck that hauls coal at one of the mines near Gillette, referred to a recent newspaper headline warning of 11,000 layoffs in the state in coming years.
"It's not 11,000 people losing jobs. It's 11,000 families losing their main source of income, along with that their dreams and hopes," said Russell, 46, a mother and grandmother, who works at Cordero Rojo, run by Cloud Peak Energy Resources.
Like many other miners, she talked about how the sizable income she gets at the mine makes her family much more stable than when she worked in retail earning a third as much. Coal miners on average made $84,000 in 2013 in Wyoming, nearly twice the state average.
The Gillette public meeting was the third of five listening sessions Interior is holding this summer, mostly in the West, to get input on whether royalties should be increased to give Americans a fair share for public coal resources. Forty percent of the coal used for electricity in the United States comes from resources owned by the federal government and most of that coal comes from massive surface mines within an hour's drive of Gillette.
Interior Secretary Jewell did not attend, but in an earlier listening session in Washington, DC, she said she also wanted public comment on: "How do we manage our coal program in a way that is consistent with our climate change objectives?"
As a sign of how up in arms state officials are about the Obama administration's coal policies, Wyoming's governor and whole delegation to the U.S. Congress showed up. All are Republicans.
U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis urged Jewell not to turn "the federal coal program into a global warming program."
"Secretary Jewell, let the people in Wyoming, the largest exporter of energy in America, keep their jobs, keep educating their children and keep the lights on," she said, referring to the $1.1 billion in revenue the state and communities in Wyoming received in 2014 from the coal industry.
Lummis added that the president doesn't need to increase royalties and taxes to attack the coal industry, because he's using the Environmental Protection Agency to do that.
The EPA earlier this month, as HCN reported, announced the first ever greenhouse gas limits for coal-fired power plants. The Obama administration also regulated mercury and other toxic emissions from power plants and tightened other pollution rules.
Governor Matt Mead blamed these regulations for pushing the industry into the difficult financial shape it's in, with one company recently declaring bankruptcy and others close to it. "What's happening to coal right now is a disaster for this state; it's a disaster for this country," Mead said.
Senator John Barrasso argued that the federal government should assess the impacts its own regulations are having on federal coal revenues. "I think it's hypocritical for the administration to ask whether it's getting a fair return on federal coal when it's going to such lengths to suppress the demand on federal coal," Barrasso said.
Senator Mike Enzi, who was mayor of Gillette when its 14 mines opened, added: "We just ask that you don't kill the golden goose... If we put them out of business, it will ripple through the entire economy."
None of the Wyoming politicians mentioned the major role that competition from another local industry — natural gas — has played in reducing the demand for coal. "The biggest problem coal faces right now is not regulation — that's in the future —it's natural gas," Robert Godby, associate professor of economics at the University of Wyoming. "Locked up in this debate is a lot of political partisanship."
Also not mentioned was that coal companies' financial woes were in large part due to major investments they made far from Wyoming that failed to pan out.
That's not to say that Obama administration regulations won't hurt coal production. Under his Clean Power Plan, the EPA predicts the share of electricity produced from coal will drop from about 40 percent to 27 percent by 2030. That 11,000 number was extrapolated from a study Godby did of an earlier version of that plan. He didn't actually calculate the number of layoffs because so much can change before 2030, when the rule takes full force.
Worries about the impact of the regulations overshadowed what the listening session was supposed to be about: whether royalty rates should be increased to give Americans and Wyoming a bigger return for their coal. The state and national treasuries currently split the revenues, which were about $555 million in 2013, according to the Bureau of Land Management.
The vast majority of the scores of speakers spoke in defense of coal, a stark contrast to the DC listening session. In DC, as HCN reported, most speakers called for higher royalty rates and many advocated keeping federal coal in the ground to help fight climate change.
A few speakers in Gillette offered a different perspective, including Shannon Anderson, a Wyoming native and lawyer for the Powder River Basin Resource Council, an environmental group. "We are long overdue for taking a hard look at this program and acting to overhaul it to benefit the public," she said.
So many people wanted to speak — 89 signed up — that the session stretched for more than four hours.
Before it started, coal companies and politicians held a rally behind the library. Richard Reavey of Cloud Peak Energy roared that the Obama administration officials should "stay in DC and stay out of our business."Most of the several hundred people in the crowd wore "friends of coal" stickers, including 17-month-old Addison Means, who wore hers on her bib.
"We're scared. No matter what you do here, we're scared," said Katrina Means, 34, Addison's mom.
For a living, Addison's father installs air conditioning in schools that are paid for with coal revenues.
"If coal miners don't have jobs, no one has jobs," Means added. "Coal is everything here. It's our schools; it's our parks; it's everything,"
Elizabeth Shogren is HCN's DC Correspondent. Follow @shogrene]]>
The low clouds hugging Woronofski Island are just beginning to burn off as the Chutine Warrior leaves the port of Wrangell, Alaska, and begins zooming north toward the Stikine River delta. "My name is Jim Leslie and I am gonna be your captain today," says Jim Leslie, a big guy with a sandy goatee and wavy hair. "We're gonna be looking for wildlife, and we're gonna be looking at incredible scenery. The Stikine is the fastest free-flowing river in North America."
The ten passengers hanging onto Leslie's every word are all white, all retirement age, and all adorned with some sort of camera — a smartphone, GoPro, or DSLR with a lens weighing more than a small dog. As we head into the 20-mile-wide delta, weaving between grassy sandbars and into thickly-vegetated sloughs, we pass a floathouse where a man and his son are getting nets ready for fishing. The tourists lean out the boat windows, snapping pictures. The man and his son avert their eyes.
This is what the new economy of Southeast Alaska looks like. Leslie, who used to make millions and employ 75 people felling timber in the Tongass National Forest, is now extolling the virtues of wilderness to visitors from Los Angeles and Sydney. When a combination of federal mandates and environmental pressure caused the timber industry to go belly-up in 1992, Leslie — like many of his neighbors in a place once known as the Timber Capital of Alaska — lost everything. The mills closed, and Wrangell's unemployment shot up to 35 percent. "I was bitter when the timber industry collapsed," he says later. "My future was set and so was that of my children, and at the age of 44, it was all gone."In the decades that followed, many in Southeast Alaska struggled to revive the mills and timber sales. Yet today, nearly everyone I talk to is resigned to the fact that timber isn't coming back: Only 30 million board feet come from the Tongass each year, compared to more than 520 million at its peak. There's some nostalgia for the excesses timber once conferred (and residual anger at the federal government and outside environmentalists for its loss), but like Leslie, the town has largely moved on. Now, the big question is how to recover from the timber hangover.
There's no easy answer. Some former timber towns in the region are banking on commercial fishing, while others have tied their fortunes to tourism — or more specifically, to the giant floating buffets that cruise up and down the Inside Passage, offloading thousands of tourists onto Main Streets redesigned to meet their needs. Yet the main drag in Wrangell still sells marine hardware instead of chintzy shot glasses, and there's nary a zipline to be seen. Instead, in a state where communities have historically been dependent on a single resource — and subject to its associated booms and busts — Wrangell seems to be limping toward the holy grail of economic development: a diversified economy.
To see for myself what this looks like, Leslie suggested that after taking a ride up the Stikine River with his small tourism company, Alaska Waters, I wander over to the Marine Travel Services Center. Colloquially known as the shipyard, the center is owned by the city and presided over by Don Sorric, who owns a boat-repair company called Superior Marine. Along with a nearby fish processing plant and the town's modest tourism sector, Superior Marine and the shipyard have become the main drivers of Wrangell's new economy.
When I first meet Sorric, he's being interviewed for a new reality TV show, the details of which I promised not to divulge. He doesn't so much arrive on-scene as he explodes into it, driving up fast in a truck with a Grateful Dead sticker on the window, a drink in one hand, and a cigarette in the other.
A former fisherman who helped start up the shipyard after sinking three of his own shoddily-repaired boats, Sorric now employs ten people. He complains that he hates working in the shipyard, that he'd rather be fishing; and in the same breath says that Wrangell's economy is coming out of the dumps and he's proud to be part of its revival.
Nonetheless, this is the future, and on a sunny Monday morning, it looks bright. A handful of tourists walk down the sidewalk, while in the shipyard, amidst piles of net and stacks of crab pots, men are hard at work welding, painting, stripping and sanding. From his trailer office, Sorric surveys the scene. "I'd say," he says, "that we're doing alright."
Krista Langlois is a correspondent for High Country News.]]>
On April 15, protesters swarmed downtown Seattle carrying signs displaying slogans in English and Spanish: "Raise the Minimum Wage," "Because the Rent Won't Wait," "4 Jobs No Time to Sleep Help Momma Get $15 per Hr." They occupied fast-food restaurants and clustered outside Uber's corporate offices, chanting, "We can see your greedy side!" Twenty-one people linked arms and sat in the street in front of a glass-enclosed Ferrari dealership, moving only when arrested.
All over the country, adjunct professors, home health-care workers and employees of McDonalds, Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, Target and other corporations took to the streets to demand a $15-an-hour minimum wage. In Seattle, the protests were partly to support workers elsewhere, because on April 1, that city had already become one of the first to offer a $15 minimum wage, which will be phased in over the next few years.
Other West Coast progressive hubs have started to follow suit, and so far, they're the only places in the country where the "Fight for $15" has prevailed. Seattle's raise followed the success of a 2013 ballot measure in SeaTac, a suburb to the south, which gave a small subset of workers in this airport town $15 an hour and paid sick leave. Last fall, San Francisco voters approved a phased-in $15 minimum; Los Angeles and the state of Oregon are considering the same.
The West's low-wage workers are steadily losing economic ground. Wages haven't kept up with cost-of-living increases in many communities, whether the booming tech centers like Seattle and San Francisco, where rents are soaring, or the service-driven "amenity" and tourist towns like Aspen, Flagstaff and Durango, where second-home owners and retirees distort the housing market for working stiffs.
And in many states, average folks have benefited only marginally, if at all, from recent economic growth. According to a recent Economic Policy Institute report, between 1979 and 2007, only the wealthiest 1 percent in Nevada, Wyoming and Alaska enjoyed rising incomes; the average incomes of the 99 percent in those states fell. Over the same time period, the wealthiest 1 percent in Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico, California, Washington, Montana and Utah claimed between 50 and 84 percent of all income growth. "Today SeaTac, tomorrow the nation?" asked a Seattle Times columnist in 2013. Many Western workers hope the answer is a resounding "yes."
Their dream may not be completely quixotic. It's not just Left Coasters who support raising pay. Last fall, voters in Arkansas, South Dakota and Nebraska voted to hike their lowest pay above the $7.25 federal minimum wage, which adjusting for inflation, is more than $3 lower than it was in 1968, when its real value peaked. Alaska voters raised theirs from $7.75 to $9.75 by 2016.
While minimum wage workers in Seattle, SeaTac and San Francisco were already making more than $7.25, the new $15 minimum represents a raise of between 40 and 60 percent. And yet it still might not be enough to allow them to live in the cities where they work. According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology's living wage calculator, a single adult supporting a child and working full-time in Seattle would need to earn $20.53 to cover monthly expenses; in San Francisco, that worker would need $26.03.
Higher minimum wages alone won't rectify income inequality. There's no guarantee, even, that every low-wage worker will see higher take-home pay, explains University of Washington economist Jacob Vigdor. A restaurant owner adjusting to higher labor costs might notice she does little business in the first hour, for example, and start opening at 11 a.m. instead of 10. "Every worker on payroll from 10 to 11 is not getting paid for that hour anymore," Vigdor says. "If your higher wage is offset by lower hours, your income might not go up." From another perspective, when your time is valued more, you might be able to choose to work less, in order to, say, spend more time with your kids.
Opponents of minimum wage increases argue that they kill jobs, raise prices for consumers and may force some small businesses to close. However, a study conducted for the city of Seattle on wage hikes in places like Santa Fe and San Francisco, two of the first to raise wages above their states' minimums, found no statistically significant impact on overall job numbers, or rates of business openings and closings.
Still, there's no precedent for a raise this substantial. The only way to determine the impact is to carry out the experiment. Vigdor and his university colleagues will study its outcomes over the next five years. Among other things, they'll follow workers and businesses to capture the nuances — like the aforementioned restaurant example — that are often lost in faceless, data-driven studies. Vigdor expects to find that the raise helps some and hurts others. Whether the benefits ultimately outweigh the costs, he says, is a question not for science but for society: It's a question of values.
From a policy perspective, Vigdor thinks the minimum wage is a relatively blunt tool for alleviating poverty. More focused, he says, is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which, through a hefty tax refund, increases the year-end take-home pay of low-wage workers in low-income households, though not, say, a teenager who works but doesn't need to help his parents pay rent. But Washington has no state income tax, so instituting such a credit in addition to the federal one wasn't an option. And politically — even morally — the minimum wage is a powerful symbol. "It's easier to rally people around," Vigdor explains. "If you want to talk about a policy to benefit the poor that you can actually get done, we've seen the evidence come in from all over the country: The minimum wage is something you can get done."
Indeed. Between the time Seattle Mayor Ed Murray convened the labor-business task force that crafted Seattle's ordinance and the city council's passage of it, less than six months passed. "History has its way of unfolding in moments," says David Rolf, the head of Service Employees International Union 775 in Seattle, and co-chair of the task force. "There is pent-up demand for something to be done about stagnant wages." Perhaps it's surprising that $15 happened so quickly in Seattle, he says, "or perhaps it's more surprising it hadn't happened sooner."]]>
Concern has focused on the Frankenfish's potential to inflict environmental harm, including the possibility that the creatures could escape farms and outcompete or breed with wild fish. To reduce that threat, AquaBounty plans to grow its creations in terrestrial tanks in Panama and Canada, and will only rear sterile females. Sterilization isn't foolproof, and anyone who's ever seen Jurassic Park knows that life has a way of foiling the best laid-plans of hubristic genetic engineers (some activists point out, for instance, that AquaBounty's egg production facility is perilously close to an estuary). Nonetheless, the FDA's panel of experts concluded the technology "would not have a significant impact on the environment of the United States."
That ruling angered Alaska's $6.4 billion commercial fishing industry, which fears that a new influx of farmed protein will degrade its bottom line. State politicians have fallen into step: Senator Lisa Murkowski described herself as "livid" at the approval, sentiments echoed by Sen. Dan Sullivan and Rep. Don Young. No, you're not dreaming: Environmental activists are making common cause with the congressman who's tried to open the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to drilling 11 separate times. Murkowski even threatened to block the appointment of the next FDA commissioner. But what will the AquAdvantage salmon actually mean for Alaska's fisheries?
To understand how genetically modified salmon might shape the lives of fishermen, you have to travel back to 1980. That year, farmed salmon comprised just 1 percent of the global market, while Alaskan wild represented more than 40 percent. As salmon farms came online in Norway, Chile, British Columbia and New Zealand throughout the 1980s, however, Alaska's fisheries saw their influence erode. By 2004, the 49th state was supplying just 15 percent of the world's salmon, and prices were a measly one-third of their former levels.
Despite dire predictions, however, aquaculture did not spell doom for Alaska's fisheries. After bottoming out in '02, wild salmon's value recovered in the mid-2000s — even as farming captured an ever greater share of the market. (These days, farmed salmon is at 70 percent and climbing.)
How could that be? First, fishermen got shrewd about marketing, branding "Alaskan wild salmon" as a healthful, natural alternative to farmed fish. And they learned to improve their product's quality, for instance by storing their catch in refrigerated seawater that kept it fresher longer. But they also got a vital assist from their hated competitors — salmon farmers. By seeking out novel markets in countries like Brazil and China in the '80s and '90s, aquaculturists had acclimated a new class of consumers to the unfamiliar pink-fleshed fish. Diners worldwide suddenly craved salmon, and prices for wild fish climbed with surging international demand. The rising tide of aquaculture had lifted the boats of Alaskan fishermen.
History, then, suggests that a new source of farmed fish might not be a complete catastrophe for fishermen. Gunnar Knapp, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, speculates that if AquaBounty somehow made salmon as cheap as chicken, it could price out wild fish — or stimulate another round of beneficial demand expansion. "You could end up with a new opportunity to carve out a distinct niche," Knapp speculates.
Still, you can't blame Alaskans for being anxious. Whereas farmers can control exactly how many fish they take to market (and when, and where), fishermen are subject to the whims of Mother Nature. In 2015, for instance, the sockeye run in Alaska's Bristol Bay exceeded 50 million fish, one of the strongest in history. The bounty proved a market-flooding disaster for fishermen, who saw prices plummet to just 50 cents a pound. (In 2014, they received around $1.20.) Poor exchange rates and a Russian seafood embargo haven't helped, either.
"We still have a lot of product left over from last year," laments Verner Wilson, a commercial fisherman from Dillingham, Alaska. "With where prices are right now, people have to work twice as hard for half the pay."
With his industry already struggling, Wilson fears that GM salmon will depress prices even further. He's petitioning the FDA to rescind its approval. Whether or not the feds budge, pressure from fishermen and anti-GMO activists has already dented AquaBounty's market: Stores including Costco and Whole Foods have announced that they don't plan to sell Frankenfish.
Even so, it's worth asking how much American markets really matter. Though the U.S. is indeed the world's largest farmed salmon consumer, the silvery fish is a global commodity, and no single agency nor buyer sets the price. Remember what happened with aquaculture: Foreign farmed salmon, grown in Chile and Norway for export to Japan, still managed to initially crater prices for Alaskan wild, even though the state banned salmon aquaculture in its waters. Meanwhile, more than half the value of Bristol Bay's fisheries come from Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, and a host of other countries. (The Japanese prefer frozen Alaskan filets, while the Brits, notorious for lackluster cuisine, would rather eat their salmon out of cans.) And to no one's surprise, AquaBounty is actively exploring foreign buyers.
Yet the company might find itself swimming upstream. The European Union has a notorious distaste for genetic tinkering: Over half the E.U. opted out of growing genetically modified crops this fall, and some countries, like France, have severe restrictions on the sale, marketing and labeling of GMOs. But while it's hard to imagine many European nations embracing AquAdvantage salmon anytime soon, the FDA's seal of approval could convince hesitant countries elsewhere to issue their own green lights. It may also give other aspiring genetic modifiers the confidence to proceed with research and development. "There's been a feeling that many companies have been waiting to see if the US will approve GM salmon before going ahead themselves," Helen Sang, a genetic researcher at the University of Edinburgh, told the BBC.
Add it all up, says Knapp, and "the effects won't be immediate, they won't be simple, and they won't necessarily be entirely bad." Ultimately, reconnecting American consumers with their bountiful wild seafood resources will accomplish more for commercial fishermen than any FDA action. As the author Paul Greenberg reported in American Catch, the United States imports 91 percent of the seafood we eat — and exports a full third of the fish we catch. That's far more problematic than the approval of a single genetically engineered fish. "We need to rely less on these foreign markets," says Kelly Harrell, executive director of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, "and use some creativity and innovation in getting wild Alaskan salmon into our own communities."
Ben Goldfarb is a correspondent at High Country News. Follow @ben_a_goldfarb]]>
This is Chaco 2408 32P #114H, one of dozens of oil wells drilled in the last few years in northern New Mexico's Gallup Sandstone, one of the nation's newest "tight oil" plays. Chaco #114H and thousands like it in North Dakota, northern Colorado and Texas exist because of high oil prices, driven by demand from China and the developing world. But now, thanks in part to slower growth in China and the flood of U.S. oil, crude prices are falling. Though the resulting drop in gasoline prices benefits most sectors of the economy (average gas prices in New Mexico dropped below $3 this fall), it may dampen or even crush the shale oil revolution.
Chaco #114H can help explain why. The San Juan Basin, home to some 40,000 oil and natural gas wells, was already one of the most prolific natural gas fields in the nation when, in the early 2000s, high prices made it economically feasible to combine horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to drill in tight shale formations. The drilling frenzy that followed glutted the domestic market with gas, causing prices to crash. Rigs abandoned San Juan County for fields also rich with profitable oil. San Juan County's economy faltered; tax revenues from oil and gas are today just one-third of what they were in 2009, when prices were high.
But there remained hope — oil, that is — in the Gallup Sandstone. Spurred by high oil prices, energy companies recently resurrected this old play, sparking a still small but growing boom.
Chaco #114 is one of the boom's pioneers. In early 2013, WPX Energy drilled down about 5,400 feet, turned the bit 90 degrees, and ran it another 5,000 feet horizontally through the oil-bearing sandstone. At 10,000 feet "deep," as drillers say, it's still shallower than North Dakota's wells, which average 20,000 feet. But it's far deeper than its predecessors, which averaged about 4,000 feet deep.
And that helps make shale wells far more expensive, and therefore more sensitive to price drops. In reports to its investors, WPX Energy says its wells in the San Juan Basin cost $5.2 million on average to drill and frack; its Bakken wells run to a staggering $10 million. Old-school oil wells typically cost $500,000 or less to drill.
As much as a quarter of the cost stems from hydraulic fracturing. Chaco #114 was pumped full of nearly 1 million gallons of water and chemicals — everything from walnut hulls to Bactron K-87 Microbiocide — along with 3 million pounds of sand to hold the fractures open.
Chaco #114 responded in March of 2013, initially gushing as much as 272 barrels of oil per day. With oil selling for $108 per barrel on the global market, the well should have turned a tidy profit within its first year.
According to state records, however, each barrel of oil from Chaco #114 has yielded as much as $26 less than the global benchmark for crude, the "European Brent price." Subtract royalties paid to operate on state land (12.5 percent in this case), other county and state production taxes (about 8 percent), and the costs of extracting hydrocarbons, transporting them to market, maintaining the well and disposing of the tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater, and the well becomes a lot less lucrative.
And there's a bigger catch. Oil and gas wells produce heartily during their first months, and then wane. It's called a decline curve, and it's especially steep for most shale wells. Chaco #114's production had dropped by half by the time it was six months old. A year after drilling was complete, it was producing just 50 barrels per day — a decline of over 80 percent. This phenomenon is repeated across the West's shale oil and gas fields to varying degrees.
That means that, just to keep overall production levels stable, energy companies must drill new wells relentlessly. "It's known as the Red Queen syndrome," says Mark Haggerty, a policy analyst with Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit based in Bozeman, Montana. "They've got to drill faster and faster, just to stay still." Collectively, the nation's producers have stayed ahead of the curve, but only by operating 1,700 to 1,800 rigs at any one time, each drilling multimillion-dollar wells.
When prices are high, that might make sense. But when they crash by 20 percent, as they have since this summer, it puts companies in a tough spot. If they stop drilling, production and revenues will fall. If they finish drilling when prices are low, the well uses up that initial production bonus with less of a return, reducing the chances of ever recouping that multimillion-dollar investment. Had Chaco #114 been drilled this October, the company would have made about $82,000 less during the critical first month of production. That math may not stop drilling in the best spots if prices remain in the $80 per barrel range, says Haggerty, but it could result in a total shutdown in smaller, peripheral plays.
For the brand-new boomtowns of North Dakota, and for the reworked ones in the San Juan Basin, a long-term drop in oil prices is a mixed bag. The social and environmental impacts that accompany the drill rigs will dissipate if drilling slows, but so will the taxes paid by the companies to help mitigate some of those impacts. A 10 percent price drop from year to year could reduce North Dakota's mean annual revenues by as much as $300 million, and the San Juan Basin could forget about recovering from the natural gas slump, at least for now.
This dynamic can be influenced by tighter regulations, which can raise drilling costs, or by technological advances, which can lower them. But whether Chaco #114 will ever pay for itself — or whether the regional boom will keep going or lose its steam — hinges primarily on the price of oil and the unpredictable global forces that determine it.]]>
I'd also bet that we won't have one again any time soon, nor a new lithium mine (to add to the single, small one now operating), nor a vanadium mine (despite promising new uses for the metal), nor any mine for any of the 62 so-called energy-critical elements. Each is vital to modern digital or energy technology. The U.S. contains potential sources for many of them, and powerful voices in politics and business insist that the country must exploit them. But despite skyrocketing demand for the energy-critical elements, would-be domestic producers just can't compete with global forces. This then is a story of comprehensive failure — but not the obvious one. Molycorp's impending demise reflects failure by politicians and the media to understand how weak China's grip on the metals market really is, and failure by Wall Street to understand the most basic dynamics of supply and demand, and failure by Silicon Valley to distinguish between hype and hard numbers. Whatever happens next week in Toronto, Molycorp's story shouldn't be seen as singular. It should be seen as a warning.
Update, June 23: Molycorp has announced it will postpone its shareholders meeting from June 25 to some time later this year.
Update, June 30: Molycorp has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Update, Aug. 25: Molycorp announces closure of its Mountain Pass mine.
Every Sunday at 7 p.m. ET, more than 12 million Americans sit down to watch CBS' 60 Minutes. But on March 22, most of them were met by a surprise: Instead of the calmly authoritative voices of Morley Safer, Leslie Stahl and the rest of the crew, they encountered the verbal fireworks of basketball announcers. The annual men's college tournament was in its second round, and several of the games had run long. When 60 Minutes finally came on, around 7:45, however, its viewers were duly rewarded. Stahl hosted an engrossing segment on California's Mountain Pass Mine and the obscure metals it produces. Called the rare-earth elements, they are key to the production of electric cars, LED bulbs, smartphones, wind turbines and aerospace equipment.
The report's formal title was interrogatory: "Modern Life's Devices Under China's Grip?" Its tone, however, was declarative, in a sinister way. "One country," Stahl warned, "has a virtual monopoly — roughly 90 percent — of the mining, refining and processing of rare earths: China." And: "The U.S. developed this technology, but China bought most of it right out from under us." And, most gravely: "We are dependent on China for our weaponry." CBS had just gratified one American passion — March Madness — and followed it up with another: the Red Scare.
The segment was good television. It was good politics — Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski cited it the next morning in a call for more federal support of mining. But it was not good journalism.
Modern life, or at least its smooth functioning, does depend on rare-earth elements. But it's absurd to single them out as uniquely vital to the U.S. economy, let alone as a unique vulnerability. American manufacturers in 2014 imported just $210 million worth of rare earths, or about 12,000 tons, just 8 percent of global production. (China's share of those imports was 75 percent, not 90-plus.) No American manufacturer or defense contractor — not even the Pentagon itself — has ever indicated supply problems. Moreover, more than half of rare earths are simply used as catalysts in petroleum refining; most of the rest go into cars, digital devices and lighting. And the rest of the world is happy to sell America as much oil, autos and gadgetry as it wants.
More broadly, modern life depends on the energy-critical elements, or ECEs. Taken together, they underpin many of the technologies that fall under the "green" or digital umbrellas. In addition to the rare earths, they include the familiar metal lithium, used in the batteries that power phones, laptops and hybrid cars; the obscure metal rhenium, which strengthens the turbine blades of latest-generation, super-efficient jet engines; and vanadium, employed in megawatt-capacity batteries that help rationalize the variable output of wind farms and other zero-emission electricity sources.
On paper at least, the Western half of the United States has rich deposits of these elements, and given that global demand for ECEs is generally rising, communities from Alaska to Wyoming to Texas are filled with the hope that a new mining boom is just around the corner. Among politicians and executives concerned with domestic mineral resources, the same facts have led to two broad strains of thought. One is optimistic –– innovation-focused, investor-oriented and extensively (and too often ingenuously) championed by the tech media. Because the U.S. is rich in ECE deposits, these enthusiasts say, exploiting them is merely a matter of uniting Silicon Valley venture capital with desert-rat elbow grease.
The other strain of thought is more pessimistic, and typified by the 60 Minutes report. People in this camp (including the National Mining Association, the National Association of Manufacturers and members of Congress of both parties) insist that America's reliance on foreign sources of ECEs threatens our economic and national security. Their solution is predictable: Deregulate and subsidize the mining industry.
But if the camps apprehend the situation differently — a confident "we will dig" versus a fretful "we must dig" — they share two basic assumptions. Both are certain that America's chief prospects for producing energy-critical elements lie in the West, the nation's mineral breadbasket. And both believe that the West is just the stroke of a pen away from yet another resource boom.
Dispassionate assessment, however, reveals a bleak picture. Several of the most-hyped newcomers to American ECE extraction have quietly closed up shop in recent months, and many others — including Mountain Pass — are confronting skeptical investors and uncertain futures. Over the past five years, numerous nations have brought new ECE supplies to market, eliminating most threats of monopoly control. (The brief Chinese monopoly on rare-earth elements has long since been broken.) Mining industry analysts see little evidence that the market will fuel a burst of American ECE production, and little reason to believe that one could or should be ignited through policy.
In short, a new American mining boom is nowhere in the cards, and the global nature of ECE production means that neither Silicon Valley nor Washington, D.C., can do much to change that. The Intermountain West, whose mines supplied the raw materials for every economic revolution of the 20th century — copper for electrification, coal for industrialization, uranium for the Atomic Age — faces something completely unexpected in the green and digital 21st: the prospect of a comprehensive bust.
Every story on American rare-earth production begins in the same place: hard beside I-15 in eastern California, where Mountain Pass — the nation's sole operating rare-earth mine — sits on a ridge in the bare lands between beyond Barstow and Baker. I visited in April on a rare rainy day; desert-bound and drought-struck, the mine is usually baked by the sun.
Not much to look at — few mines are — Mountain Pass is also not much to walk across. There's an open pit a few hundred yards wide, a power plant, a water-purification plant, and a short chain of processing facilities ensconced in dun-colored warehouses, all perched on a hillside covered in sage and Joshua trees. About 400 people work there. Low brown mountains rise on three sides; to the west, Baker's gas stations gleam dully beyond a pink-and-white salt lake. Jim Sims, vice president of corporate communications for Molycorp, which owns the mine, showed me around, and at one point, weighing the mine's physical scale against what I knew of its importance, I began to remark, "It's so —." I intended to say "small." Sims, open-faced and energetic, completed my sentence with an enthusiastic, "Big!" It's a matter of perspective; Mountain Pass is larger than many desert towns, but the whole thing would fit easily inside any neighborhood in Vegas or Phoenix.
In a conference room in the mine's office, a quiet space with neutral shades, vinyl wood and acoustic tiles, Sims outlined the mine's history. At some point, I remarked that every mine office seems to share the same style; call it Extraction Modern. (It's conclusively identified by a closet filled with hard hats and goggles for visiting journalists.) Sims laughed.
The Mountain Pass rare-earth deposit, Sims explained, was discovered in 1949, when exploratory geologists sent a curious rock sample to the U.S. Geological Survey. They were hoping it contained uranium, which it did, along with thorium, though both in very low concentrations. It also contained rare-earth elements — in quite extraordinary amounts. Concentration in the original sample area topped 40 percent. Further exploration revealed a book-shaped ore body sloping into the earth, with an average 8 percent concentration in the easily accessed portion. For comparison, copper ore is generally economically viable at 0.6 percent. By any measure, this was rich stuff.
The problem was that nobody had much use for it in 1949.
The rare earths are a tight-knit family of 17 elements. Fifteen of them fill out a single row near the bottom of the periodic table; two others, higher up, complete the total. All feature an outer shell containing two electrons, which helps account for their similar and curious chemical properties. They tend to be magnetic, and they tend to phosphoresce — to give off light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation — when bombarded with subatomic particles or charged with electricity. Geologically, they travel in a pack: Where one is found, all are found. Sixteen of these elements are not even particularly rare; proven reserves alone are in the millions of tons. The name "rare earth" refers rather to the fact that they don't often form concentrated mineral deposits. Mountain Pass has one of the best deposits of rare earths on the planet.
But decades ago, when "high tech" meant automats and automatic transmissions, their curious properties had no obvious economic utility. The founders of Mountain Pass got by in the 1950s by supplying the defense and scientific communities with oddments for general research. Then, in the early 1960s, everything changed: A compound containing europium was found to emit a brilliant red light when bombarded with electrons. Almost overnight, it turned early color TVs from muddy affairs into Technicolor wonders, and Mountain Pass, which contains europium in abundance, became a figurative gold mine. Over the next four decades, the mine flourished as uses were found for other rare earths: in medical scanners, lasers, and especially in fluorescent lights and microchips. Individual bulbs and chips used micrograms of rare earths. Multiplied by the billions, they used kilotons.
Sims and I toured the facilities in his black SUV. Dodging Caterpillar dump trucks carrying 100-ton loads of ore and overburden — the waste rock that's dug up to expose the ore — we crept up the muddy mine roads, keeping to the posted 14 7/8 mph speed limit. (The official limit is 15 mph, of course, but the signs "keep us honest," Sims said.) At the very top of the mine, a crusher reduced chunks of ore to pea-sized gravel. A humming conveyor belt transferred the peas to a warehouse, where a spinning, barrel-shaped ball mill, loaded with iron spheres, pounded them to fine powder. Hissing compressors squeezed the powder into dry, crumbly cakes. Beyond that lay alchemical mystery: The cakes vanished into the processing facilities, where, hidden inside various proprietary acid vats and solvent extractors, the ore was slowly dissected into its constituent rare-earth oxides.
After the raw outside air, the warehouse was pleasantly warm. It was also thunderously loud, so when I tried to thank the mill operator for his comfortable reception, I had to bellow my gratitude. He smiled. The building, he yelled back, has a brand-new ventilation system that keeps it comfortable year-round. In the old days, the humidity sometimes got so bad that in summer, the warehouse filled with fog. Winter was worse: On really cold days, it snowed indoors.
The real surprise, though, was that there was anything brand-new at Mountain Pass. The constant noise and bustle made it hard to imagine, but for most of the past 15 years, there was nothing happening at the mine at all.
Beginning in the early 1990s, after 30 years of unchallenged domination of the rare-earth market, Mountain Pass ran into difficulties. Repeated spills from its wastewater pipelines contaminated the Mojave National Preserve — a vast saltbush-and-saltpan wilderness, home to the endangered desert tortoise — with small amounts of lead and trace amounts of radioactive barium, uranium and thorium. In 1997, federal and state authorities brought legal action against Molycorp. (Environmentally, rare-earth mining is generally low-impact. Extraction is chemical, not thermal — no fuel-hungry furnaces — and the chemicals involved are easily neutralized or contained: common acids and bases, water and oils. The chief concern is the trace amounts of mildly radioactive elements that occur in all rare-earth deposits. Modern best practices contain these effectively, and Westernized nations and, increasingly, the Chinese government enforce these practices. The nightmarish tailings lake in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, is a legacy of China's earlier unregulated industry.)
About the time that Molycorp ran into trouble, China initiated a state program to develop its own extensive rare-earth deposits. For the first time, Mountain Pass faced serious competition. In 1998, battered by unfavorable prices and threatened by huge cleanup costs, Molycorp shut down the processing facilities. The excavation and concentration of ore continued for a few more years, but in 2002, Mountain Pass shut down entirely.
Meanwhile, Chinese production boomed, bolstered by demand from two new technologies: LED light bulbs and, especially, the small but powerful magnets found in hard drives, smartphones and the generators of hybrid vehicles and wind turbines. As demand for both products intensified in the 2000s, China found itself in the catbird's seat: It already dominated their production, and now it dominated the supply of their raw materials.
And so things might have continued, but then China, with 97 percent control of the rare-earth market, did the one thing that could change the situation: It deliberately sent prices into the stratosphere.
In 2009, it announced export controls on its rare earths, cutting them by 40 percent. Then, in September 2010, a Japanese naval vessel interdicted a Chinese fishing boat near the disputed Senkaku Islands and arrested its captain. The islands are little more than rocks, and the dispute had more to do with historic Sino-Japanese conflicts than modern state interests. Still, the Chinese government responded ferociously. It ceased all exports of rare-earth elements to Japan, a lighting and automotive powerhouse. The market for rare earths panicked, and prices spiked as much as 2,000 percent.
Immediately, the world's media were agog over what they called a "captive" global market. "China's lock on market for rare earth elements: Why it matters," read a representative Christian Science Monitor headline. But that is pretty much where the popular narrative on rare earths ended. ("They'd been working on that story for two years," Sims said when I approached him, coincidentally, a few days after the 60 Minutes segment aired.)
Of course, the mining industry sprang into action, and back-page stories soon noted the consequence of high prices: increased supply. In December 2010, just two months after the naval incident, Mountain Pass began processing ore again. That same month, the Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo invested $130 million in Molycorp to upgrade the mine's facilities. The new Mountain Pass opened in 2012. (Among other improvements, Sims emphasized its closed-loop water system and encapsulated, dry tailings impoundment, which eliminate the chance of further wastewater spills.) By 2014, America's only rare-earth mine was producing 4,700 tons a year.
But the mining industry operates without any particular loyalties. Australia opened the Mount Weld rare-earth mine in 2011; at full capacity, it may add 22,000 tons of annual supply to the roughly 150,000 tons of annual demand. A joint partnership between Japan and Vietnam began producing small amounts in 2012; it may eventually produce 10,000 tons per year. Worldwide, nearly 60 rare-earth deposits in 16 countries are currently in advanced development. Far from controlling global supply, China no longer even controls its own: It's estimated that Chinese wildcatters add 40,000 tons of black-market material each year to the 95,000 tons the country officially produces. From a near-monopoly of 97 percent in the late 2000s, China's market share has fallen to 86 percent, and seems destined to fall further. More importantly, all the new global production has caused rare-earth prices to collapse from their 2011 peak.
As Sims spoke of Mountain Pass' recent history, we left Extraction Modern behind and found ourselves contemplating Extraction Eternal: a muddy verge on the edge of a brown hole spewing nondescript dirt that might conceivably be transformed into riches. Rain pattered on our heads. "To be honest," Sims said, "we are price-takers. And frankly, the Chinese are price-takers, too." His tone matched the weather.
"Price-taker" is an economist's term, but you don't have to be an economist to understand it. You only have to be a conscientious shopper. I am writing these words in early May in New York City, and my grocer is offering twin-packs of mediocre corn-on-the-cob for $3 apiece. By July, I'll be able to buy a dozen ears of dripping-fresh Silver Queen corn for the same price. Today, my grocer is a price-setter: Because he controls a rare commodity, he dictates the price I pay. In July, he'll be a price-taker: Every farm on the East Coast will have more corn than it can sell, and he'll take whatever he can get.
Fundamentally, price-taking is a matter of supply and demand, but in the mining industry its tangles resemble those of the Gordian knot. The interplay of supply, demand and non-market factors is so complex that many thinkers are attempting to quantify it. Tom Graedel of Yale University ranks high among them. With a handful of colleagues at Bell Labs in the 1970s, Graedel — today the picture of emeritus professorhood, then a young expert in satellite-communications technology — founded the field of industrial ecology: the study of the life cycle of materials. At Yale, he has focused on obscure naturally occurring materials that, though unfamiliar to most consumers, nonetheless are vital to their lives. In an influential 2011 report from the American Physical Society, he and his colleagues identified 28 of them, and gave them a name: the energy-critical elements, or ECEs. Graedel has since expanded the list to 62 elements. They include the 20 under consideration here, which the U.S. contains in quantity — rare earths, lithium, rhenium, vanadium — and several dozen more, many with unpronounceable names. Ytterbium, anyone?
A few weeks ago, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Graedel published a method of untangling the knot of ECE supply-and-demand curves — a way, that is, of supplementing neutral analysis of their industrial ecology with a predictive analysis of their markets.
Graedel's model assigns a value to each of three factors that affect energy-critical element supply: the risk of non-market restrictions, like China's 2009 limits on rare-earth exportation; the risk of market-based bottlenecks, such as those due to demand spikes from popular new technologies; and environmental costs that may eliminate existing sources or pre-emptively cut off prospective ones.
The model is not a predictor of day-to-day ECE prices. Rather, it's designed to help mining firms, analysts and governments rationally assess medium-term (months to years) and long-term (decades) trends. The picture it gives is generally calm: No energy-critical element faces the triple threat of high supply risk, volatile markets and extreme environmental costs. Many measure low on every scale.
Lithium, for example, is widely distributed and plentiful, takes little energy to produce, leaves no nasty waste behind, and faces predictable (steadily rising) demand. Vanadium mining also incurs low environmental costs; its supply-and-demand volatility is moderate at worst. Rhenium measures extremely high on environmental costs, but that's a bit misleading: It reflects the energy-intensive nature of copper production, of which rhenium is a byproduct. (In fact, it's a bit of an afterthought: When I spoke with a representative of the Copper Alliance, the industry's lobbying group, I had to explain what rhenium is.) The rare earths measure high in one area of risk: vulnerability to geopolitical manipulation. But that, of course, is changing rapidly. And they are plentiful and environmentally inexpensive.
When Sims described Molycorp as a price-taker, then, he could have been speaking for energy-critical element producers as a whole. The global ECE crop is abundant, which means that for the foreseeable future, ECE consumers will have the price advantage and producers will be under immense price pressure. For domestic producers, that's bad news. America could theoretically provide many of these materials, but in reality it can't do so as cheaply as many other countries can. Never mind we will mine or we must mine. Basic market realities strongly suggest that we won't mine, for the same reason I won't find cheap corn in New York in spring. Domestically, it simply isn't the right time to harvest.
American hustle, however, is always in season. For much of the 20th century, California's Imperial Valley, down near the Arizona and Mexico border, was known as America's melon capital. Cantaloupes and honeydews thrived in the desert sun. Beginning in the 1990s, however, the valley became known for a second, unlikely export: electricity. Deep beneath the Salton Sea lies a vast pool of superheated, briny groundwater. Pumped to the surface, the brine flashes into steam. Channeled through turbines, the steam generates green electricity (400 megawatts in the latest tally) at 11 geothermal energy plants.
Then, in 2007, came news of a possible third local crop. A company called Simbol Materials announced plans to produce lithium from the power plants' brine. Backed by millions of dollars from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Mohr Davidow, for the next eight years Simbol enjoyed glowing media coverage. "This is not for the faint of heart: the technology is complex," then CEO Luka Erceg told Wired in 2008. "It doesn't surprise me that we're the only ones looking at it right now." "Lithium: The New California Gold Rush," gushed Forbes in 2011. Later stories described a pilot facility, attached to EnergySource's Featherstone geothermal plant, producing hundreds of tons of lithium. On Jan. 15 of this year, The Desert Sun ran a headline that must have thrilled the hardscrabble towns that ring the Salton Sea: "Lithium Plant to Bring 400 Jobs to Imperial Valley." Less than three weeks later, though, on Feb. 4, the story had changed: "Lithium Plans in Doubt as Simbol Materials Fires Dozens."
The Desert Sun reported that Simbol fired only the 40 or so employees who staffed its pilot plant. But my later reporting revealed that the company apparently fired everyone. The multiple voicemails I left at its Bay Area headquarters requesting comment went unanswered. My attempts to directly contact Simbol's executives failed or were rebuffed. EnergySource, too, declined to speak.
But the new California gold rush didn't just fail to thrive; it may never have begun. "I personally do not think they ever had anything," Ed Anderson, founder and CEO of the lithium consultancy TRU Associates, told me. Potential investors hired Anderson to analyze Simbol's supposed revolutionary extraction method; he was twice given the runaround. "I had a chat with the chief executive of that company, and he couldn't explain to me his technology," he said.
Simbol is not unique. In 2013, a similarly hyped startup, American Lithium, went completely bust after years of aggressively promoting lithium-brine prospects in Nevada and Utah. It never actually produced anything, and Anderson considers it "a prime example of a company that ripped off — and you can quote me on this one — that basically ripped off American and international investors." That same year, Rodinia Minerals, an established lithium producer mostly active in Argentina, abandoned its 1,012 Nevada brine claims as economically unviable. Anderson also cast doubt on the viability of a fourth much-hyped prospect owned by Western Lithium, which is exploring lithium-rich clay in northern Nevada's King Valley. The company estimates its per-ton production costs at almost $3,500, far above the cost of brine production; lithium contracts average around $4,500 per ton delivered. The potential profits don't look promising.
That leaves a single active American lithium producer, Albemarle's insignificant Silver Peak brine operation, west of Tonopah, Nevada, and of it Anderson was equally pessimistic: "I'm actually surprised that it is even continuing." The only U.S. prospect he considers potentially viable is in Arkansas, where Albemarle claims to have developed a process to extract lithium from brine at its existing bromine plant. The technology was announced in 2011; no lithium has been produced.
Hype is part of these disappointments, but price pressures ultimately decide the day. Other countries, especially Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, have vast lithium-rich brine sources, low labor costs and political and regulatory regimes that favor maximum production. They don't need hype. And they set the price.
Hype-plus-price also explains American Vanadium. It was positioning its Nevada deposit as North America's only domestic supply of the raw material used in high-capacity vanadium-based batteries. Demand for the batteries, however, failed to meet projections, and existing vanadium sources, primarily in South Africa, Russia and China, more than meet its demand as a steel-alloying agent. American Vanadium shut down its mine project in February; its director has resigned, its stock price has cratered, and nobody has answered the phone at its Vancouver headquarters for months.
There are no stand-alone rhenium prospects anywhere on earth, and therefore no busts, either. But, as a byproduct of copper mining, it, too, is under price pressure. Copper demand, driven skyward by China's industrialization in the 2000s, has lately cooled along with China's economy. At $5 or even $3.50 a pound, which copper commanded as late as 2013, American mining prospects like Alaska's Pebble or Arizona's Resolution looked like slam-dunks. Today, with copper hovering between $2.50 and $2.75, Pebble is moribund and Resolution's fate is uncertain, while the more profitable Andean copper industry is thriving. Meanwhile, the jet-engine industry, rhenium's chief user, has figured out ways to use far less of it. If there ever was an American rhenium lobby, its services are no longer necessary.
As for American rare-earth mining, the future looks bleak. In addition to the fully operational Mountain Pass, there are only four rare-earth deposits officially in development: Bear Lodge in Wyoming, Bokan in Alaska, and La Paz and Round Top in Texas. None is anywhere close to commercial production. Each, however, has a handsome website, enthusiastic profit projections, and a long-term stock chart that dives asymptotically toward sea level from a heady peak during the 2010 and 2011 price spike. (The geology of hype, to warp Stegner's great phrase.)
The stock chart for Molycorp, which alone among the five operations actually produces rare earths — and revenue — is the ugliest of all: From a high of nearly $75 on Tax Day 2011, it had fallen to 57 cents on Memorial Day 2015. A week later, it plummeted to 43 cents on the news that Molycorp had defaulted on its $32.5 million semiannual loan payment. As we cruised around Mountain Pass, Sims hinted a few times at "challenges," referring diplomatically to Molycorp's increasingly desperate financial situation. In the first quarter of this year, the price of its particular "basket" of rare earths fell 8 percent. The company reported a negative cash flow of $73 million, and warned that without the restructuring of its debt, the mine might be forced to close some time this year. On June 3, the Wall Street Journal and others reported that the company plans to file for bankruptcy this month. Challenges, indeed.
In a bad market, corporations tend to turn to Washington, D.C. Molycorp is no different: Last year, it sent Sims to testify before the Senate Committee on Energy and Environmental Resources in support of the Critical Minerals Policy Act, sponsored by Alaska's Murkowski, then the committee's ranking member. Murkowski's bill, which never made it out of committee, proposed promoting U.S. mineral independence by a number of routes: encouraging efficient use of critical elements, developing alternative materials, offering education and workforce training ("The U.S. lags behind many nations in this area, which in turn can negatively impact investment decisions by private sector companies in critical materials supply chain development," Sims said), and of course, streamlining or stripping down the permitting process.
With regard to the last, Sims noted good-humoredly that Molycorp had to get "more than 500 permits" to reopen Mountain Pass. However, he emphasized, "The most significant barrier to entry for new rare-earth producers is undoubtedly the capacity to take mixed rare-earth minerals out of the ground and chemically process them into separated, usable rare-earth products." Similarly, at Mountain Pass, he repeatedly mentioned the mine's technical difficulties with its novel solvent-extraction and reagent-regeneration processes as the company's main obstacles to growth. With regard to permitting, he noted that Molycorp voluntarily exceeded many environmental regulations in the name of good stewardship and good public image. As he spun them to me, at least, regulations weren't a burden to bear; they were a benchmark to surpass.
Yet the morning after the 60 Minutes report, when Murkowski — now chair of the Energy and Environment Committee — issued a long statement on American mineral "dependence," regulation was her chief scapegoat. She quoted Sims' aside about "500 permits" prominently, as though it were the mining industry's central concern, and blamed U.S. policy failures for China's supposed dominance of energy-critical elements. "I'm grateful that 60 Minutes investigated the depth of America's dependence on China for rare earths, and has now shared that story with its millions of viewers," she wrote. "Our foreign mineral dependence is a serious challenge, decades in the making, and we urgently need to reform federal policies all along the supply chain." That day, Murkowski introduced the American Mineral Security Act of 2015 (S.883). It would direct the White House and the officers of its Cabinet (particularly Interior, Agriculture and Energy, including the Bureau of Land Management, USGS and Forest Service) to "facilitate" domestic production of energy-critical elements through all available means. As with her stalled Critical Minerals Policy Act, the rule changes are broad and vague, but they address education, quantitative assessment, research, and permitting reform — initiatives, frankly, that a Democratic administration could easily bury in bureaucratic sediment, and that a Republican administration could wield like bulldozers. Despite its 2015 dateline, Murkowski appears to be hanging her bill's impact on the outcome of the 2016 presidential race.
But her effort already faces deep skepticism from an unexpected quarter. In December 2011, when the panic over Chinese rare-earth export controls first reached Congress, economist Derek Scissors of the conservative Heritage Foundation read a statement before the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee. Its thesis, as indicated by its title, could not have been more blunt: "Energy-Critical Elements: The Market is Working."
Now at the equally conservative American Enterprise Institute, Scissors has not changed his views. "China does not have market power," he told me. "They cannot strangle us. We do not have to have government involvement in production of these strategic elements." Scissors agrees with Murkowski that the Department of Defense must ensure that supplies of rare-earths and other ECEs are available — but unlike Murkowski, he is confident they are: "What I've been trying to figure out with the DOD is, 'What's the stuff you're worried about in the short term?' And the answer still appears to be: 'Nothing.' " Scissors considers the Murkowski camp to be "lost in old, very statist thinking." Federal initiatives (and spending) are "just not the way we need to fill our strategic mineral needs."
Nor is skepticism limited to politicized think tanks. Gareth Hatch is a founding partner of Technology Metals Research, an independent consultancy that advises governments and businesses on energy-critical elements. He agrees with Murkowski that American regulations slow development of domestic mineral resources, critical and otherwise; Australia, for example, brings new mines into operation in an average of two to three years, versus seven to 10 in the United States. But when we spoke, he also reiterated that "dominance" of any given ECE, by any country, is at best temporary and in most cases illusory. He mentioned, pointedly, China's little-noted capitulation to the capitalist reality of the rare-earth market: Last New Year's Eve, it eliminated all export quotas on its rare earths, and in April it eliminated export tariffs. Now it simply lists them among items whose exportation must be licensed. As Hatch wrote acidly in January, "Perhaps the fact that REEs (rare-earth elements) can be found cheek to jowl alongside live cattle, frozen meat, tungsten, sand, motorcycles and paraffin, to name but a few of the commodities listed, will finally correct the notion that some folks have of REEs as unique, precious snowflakes in the grand scheme of nefarious Chinese strategy. Or perhaps not."
Or certainly not. Given the politicization of the extraction industry, Washington will continue to make hay — and rake in re-election dollars — over the false threat of foreign domination. But the rest of the world has moved on. The night after I visited Mountain Pass, I drove back to Las Vegas to catch my flight home. With hours to kill, I cruised the Strip. Every casino seemed to be named for a faraway El Dorado: the Venetian; the Luxor; the Bellagio; Paris; Mandalay Bay; Caesars Palace; Treasure Island. The nation's wagering capital, like its political capital, has long since recognized that there is big money to be made in the American West. Unlike Washington, it has also recognized that the hottest action often lies beyond American shores.
Tim Heffernan writes about heavy industry, economics and the environment for The Atlantic, Popular Mechanics and other magazines. In 2013, Esquire honored him as one of its Best & Brightest for his reporting on what he terms "big analog": the industrial underpinnings of the so-called digital economy. He lives in New York. You can follow him at twheffernan.com and Follow @Tim_Heffernan
This coverage is supported by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund.]]>
Whitewater parks have been popping up all over the West since the 1980s, engineered with low water levels in mind. The projects typically involve a redesign of riverbeds, often with the help of concrete, boulders, sand and rocks to create bottlenecks, which create rushes of water, and "plunge pools," which add depth. All of these additions, strategically placed to encourage recreation, make not only for more exciting whitewater but also for stabilized flows, which can squeeze a little more use out of water when levels are low.
In Reno, Nevada, the river recreation economy has suffered this year. The flow of the Truckee River through downtown in mid-July was 26 cubic feet per second, which is just a step up from stagnant, thanks to this year's abysmal snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas. Private rafting companies haven't toured that section of the river, which features a whitewater park built in 2004, for more than six weeks. James Bell, owner and operator of a private rafting company, Wild Sierra Adventures, says he will likely need to cancel trips on other stretches of the Truckee soon. "This has been the worst year ever," Bell says; normally raft trips account for 60 percent of his business.
But surprisingly, people are still drawn to the slow waters downtown around the whitewater park — mostly families and children wading and swimming in the river. As drought conditions linger, "a modest splash from a man-made wave gives the river an extended life," says Bethany Drysdale, director of public relations for the Nevada Commission on Tourism. And even though raft trips are waning, the park attracts tubers who rent gear from him, says Bell, which helps his business.
On the surface, the parks might not seem like wise investments when the water gets lower. Whitewater parks are expensive to build and, though free to use, are almost always city-managed and publicly funded. Their economic impact is largely indirect.
Still, the Truckee Whitewater Park in Reno, which cost a relatively cheap $1.5 million, has become a draw for both businesses and tourists. Prior to its construction, the city's downtown section of the river had no access point, and few businesses flourished in that part of town. But the "beautification" of the river, says Ben McDonald, communications manager for the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority, drew in new enterprises and created the new River Walk District. He says that area has provided a boost for Reno. "There wasn't much down there before that, but now the downtown river park is a tourist destination." According to a visitor profile study commissioned by the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority in 2007, whitewater recreation attracted 13 percent of the approximately 4.3 million people who visit Reno each year. Those visitors spend an average of $680 each. "Even though the drought has been bad this year, people have been able to get closer to the waters than they were able to before," says Peggy Nelson-Aguilar, recreation supervisor for the City of Reno.
Reno was one of the few cities in the West whose whitewater suffered from the drought this year. The "May miracle" brought a lot of rain that boosted flows in Colorado, New Mexico and much of the Midwest. (In fact, a section of the South Platte, in Colorado, was closed for part of the summer because its flows were dangerously high.) Either way, though, many cities see parks as worth the cost, one that will help out on the off-miracle years. "When it's a drought year, the park still provides a good wave," says Cathy Metz, parks and recreation director of the City of Durango. "Without a whitewater park, we would see a downfall in users."
When the Reno project was accepted in 2002, projections of the return on investment ranged from $1.9 million to $4.1 million in the first year, according to the Truckee River Recreation Plan. For comparison, Durango, Colorado, commissioned an economic impact study of its whitewater park in 2006 and found that the park and the Lower Animas River generated $18 million per year.
Beyond dollars and cents, whitewater parks offer other incentives in dry years. Around the West, engineered parks extend the paddling season, says Nathan Fey, the Colorado River stewardship director for American Whitewater. "With low flows, whitewater parks begin to address some of the demand of the varied users attracted to rivers," Fey says. The natural peaks provide recreation opportunities for seasoned paddlers, but whitewater parks keep the water exciting even as the levels dwindle. The features also attract new people to water sports. The big question, though, is how far into the future water parks can be beneficial? As of yet, there's no such thing as a drought-proof river. And, as Gary Lacy, engineer of the Truckee Whitewater Park, says: "You can't make water out of nothing."
Paige Blankenbuehler is an editorial intern at High Country News.
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When the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire was finally snuffed out, the residents of Manitou Springs, Colorado, a small town on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, breathed a collective sigh of relief. The community had narrowly escaped what was then the most destructive fire in Colorado history. Not long afterward, Mayor Marc Snyder gave a tour to Carol Ekarius, the executive director of the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, a nonprofit that works to protect the watershed southwest of Denver. As the two walked through the picturesque town, with its eclectic historic buildings tucked between Pikes Peak and the Garden of the Gods, Ekarius pointed out structures she predicted would be damaged or destroyed when, inevitably, there would be flooding off the scorched slopes rising above them.
Snyder initially was appalled by this unsolicited warning. Ekarius, however, was persuasive: She had seen floods devastate her rural watershed in nearby Teller County after the 1996 Buffalo Creek Fire and again after the 2002 Hayman Fire, with catastrophic consequences for one of Denver's main reservoirs. "I wish I didn't have a crystal ball, but I've seen it so many times after fires in the mountains," Ekarius recalls. Snyder quickly recognized the danger his community faced, and he began trying to raise money to upgrade its drainage system — the best way, he thought, to avert impending disaster. "The consensus was it was coming, whether it came in year one or year 10," he says. "It keeps you up at night, let me tell you."
The town applied for funding from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but the small amount Congress allocates to protect vulnerable communities before disaster was already depleted. Unable to upgrade the drainage system, town officials installed new emergency warning sirens, warned residents and steeled themselves for the calamity they knew was coming.
On Aug. 9, 2013, it arrived. Snyder spotted a heavy storm brewing over the mountains. "I'd been living under this shadow of doom for about a year," he says. "I remember looking over and seeing that ominous dark cloud over the burn scar, and I thought: This is it."
As rain pounded the charred slopes, a wall of muddy water carrying rocks, trees and other debris raced off them and raged through town, overwhelming the old drainage system. The torrent was so strong that it picked up cars on the highway and swept them downstream. Two people were killed nearby and dozens of homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged. So was the storm water system.
Afterward, FEMA's largess flowed, helping to repair City Hall and paying for much of a new $6 million drainage system. But upgrading it before the flood would have cost far less, and much of the destruction could have been averted. So why wasn't it?
FEMA says it receives requests for several times more funding than it has available each year for preventive projects. "There's a clear need there," says Michael Grimm, director of the risk reduction division of the federal insurance and mitigation administration at FEMA. (In recent years, President Barack Obama has asked Congress for more funding for pre-disaster hazard mitigation, but Congress has allocated only $25 million. In his 2016 budget request, Obama is seeking eight times that much, $200 million — though the likelihood of getting that is small.)
But the shortage of pre-disaster funding is just one of the ways that FEMA is out of sync with community needs, now that climate change is impacting the West. A close examination reveals policies that discourage upgrades to help structures withstand larger floods; favor flood control using pipes and pumps, instead of systems that mimic nature; or provide aid to communities damaged by floods after wildfires only if each flood has been declared a national disaster.
Billions of dollars are at stake. "Outside of defense spending, this is the biggest area where the feds are spending money to build things," says Jeffrey Thomas, a Louisiana lawyer and former FEMA contractor. "Are they compatible with the high aims we are articulating for our cities to be more resilient to climate change?"
A White House task force recently called for reforms, and Obama responded with an executive order in January. He directed federal agencies to create a new standard, one that requires that projects constructed with federal funds be built on higher ground or elevated to withstand the floods expected with rising sea levels, greater deluges and other consequences of climate change. Obama also encouraged FEMA to support green infrastructure projects, such as moving buildings out of floodplains and planting trees and shrubs instead, to soak up floodwaters and make communities more resilient.
It's too early to judge the effectiveness of the executive order, which FEMA has yet to implement. But it wouldn't even address the dilemma faced by mountain communities like Manitou Springs. The necessary fixes, experts say, won't come from FEMA or the White House alone. Lawmakers need to act, but, as Steve Adams, director of strategic initiatives for the Institute for Sustainable Communities, says: "Nobody thinks you could successfully amend statutes at this time because of the Congress."
There are other possible sources of federal assistance for vulnerable communities. The Federal Agriculture Department's Natural Resources Conservation Service can fund projects, even if the destruction doesn't warrant a federal disaster declaration.
There's not enough money, though, to do very much. For example, the program helped buy concrete jersey barriers and sandbags to protect rural developments near Flagstaff, Arizona, against anticipated flooding after the 2010 Shultz Fire. But "what did come was orders of magnitude worse than anyone predicted" and quickly overwhelmed those barriers, says Dustin Woodman, engineering division manager for Coconino County, Arizona. The torrential rain washed soil, trees and other debris down steep slopes into two rural neighborhoods, killing a 12-year-old girl and filling dozens of homes with several feet of mud.
Woodman has spent the last five years designing and funding $30 million in projects to handle floodwaters to protect the Timberline and Doney Park subdivisions outside Flagstaff. He quickly learned that FEMA would fund projects that used concrete or metal pipes to direct floodwaters, but not the green infrastructure favored by many scientists and communities. He sought funding elsewhere for such remedies, like meandering channels planted with grasses and shrubs to absorb and direct floodwaters. "FEMA is focused more on traditionally engineered flood-mitigation structures — levees and retention basins," Woodman says. "Rather than fight that fight, we focused the FEMA funds we had on projects where we wanted to do more traditional projects."
FEMA also resisted when Woodman wanted to use its money to replace a 2-by-4-foot roadside ditch with a channel 10 times larger. "Those public assistance funds are only able to be used for replacement in-kind," Woodman says. That makes it difficult for communities to upgrade drainage ditches, bridges or other structures when risks increase. But since the flooding had already carved a ditch the size Woodman wanted, he was eventually able to get a waiver for that project.
Other towns haven't been as lucky. In Williamstown, near Vermont's Green Mountains, for instance, FEMA paid to replace a pair of culverts four times — after they washed out — in 2004, 2007, 2011 and 2013. Each time, the agency refused to pay to upgrade the corrugated metal culverts, but it spent a total of about $1 million to repeatedly repair the stretch of road destroyed by flooding. Town manager Jackie Higgins remembers telling a FEMA representative in 2013: "You're still only going to put back what was there? You're wasting money." Late that year, Williamstown finally replaced one of the culverts with a much larger concrete structure. The project was funded by the state.
For years, counties have been asking FEMA and Congress to acknowledge that major fires often cause flooding and should be treated as one disaster. Currently, unless each flood is declared a federal disaster, victims likely won't qualify for FEMA's help.
Kayle Higinbotham, 68, lives in an 1880 Victorian ranch house five miles west of Manitou Springs, at the base of Pike's Peak. Her home flooded this spring when a 12-foot-deep gulch next to her house filled up with debris, and sediment washed down from the slopes. But even though three feet of muddy water filled her family room, her house isn't in a mapped floodplain, so Higinbotham doesn't qualify to have it bought out or moved to a safer location. Before the fire, her house and the 60 acres she inherited were valued at $1.7 million. Now, her real estate agent tells her she couldn't find a buyer.
The risk of a dangerous flood is so great that the fire department advised her to leave home during the summer monsoon. When Higinbotham is home, she anxiously monitors the weather and listens for a flood warning on her radio. All this has left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. "You get on your feet from the fire, and then comes the flood," Higinbotham says. "And then you get on your feet from the flood, and here comes the next flood. There's just no end in sight."
The plight of people like Higinbotham has inspired community leaders to compete for federal grants, call for changes in federal policy and even levy new taxes. Other communities, however, have yet to awaken to their increased vulnerability to the bigger fires and bigger storms that are likely on the way.
This is a condensed version of a larger investigation by Elizabeth Shogren in partnership with the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. NECIR is a nonprofit newsroom based at Boston University and WGBH News that produces investigative reporting and trains the next generation of journalists. The Fund for Investigative Journalism paid for travel for this report. For additional features on climate change issues, visit necir.org and follow @necirbu.]]>
In a way, so does Fissinger, but hers are the oil-drilling rigs that have popped up lately in her area. She looked computer-tired, clad in a white turtleneck, her hair pulled into a ponytail. She led me upstairs to a cluttered home office, cleared a stack of documents from a chair and urged me to sit. When she came here from L.A. in 2006, she explained, she was worried about the separation of church and state.
She didn't yet realize that the plains further to the northeast were pin-cushioned with tens of thousands of wells, many of them hydraulically fractured, or fracked — a process that involves firing water, sand and chemicals thousands of feet underground at incomprehensible pressures — or that the boom had intensified in recent years.
Then one day in 2011, an automated phone survey asked her an odd question: How would she feel if drilling took place on Longmont open space? "Radar, radar!" she exclaimed. A company, it turned out, had proposed drilling around a local reservoir. The more she learned, the more she worried. She thought of her great-grandkids. A lung cancer survivor, she thought of her respiratory health. She thought about the flat lot near her house that might be a perfect place for a rig.
And in 2012, she helped found the nonprofit Our Health, Our Future, Our Longmont, which spearheaded a ballot initiative that made the city the first in Colorado to ban fracking. The next fall, despite industry's expensive counter-campaign, several other Front Range communities followed suit. Places across the West and the country have also joined in, from rural Mora County, New Mexico, in 2013, to, most recently and significantly, the state of New York, which overlays a booming shale gas formation.
Though many bans face long odds in court — Longmont's and others have already been shot down and are headed for appeals — activists and local officials keep fighting. "We're in it for the long haul," Fissinger told me emphatically. "Fracking is a toxic, extreme energy extraction method. I don't think it can be made safe."
The prospect of a drill rig towering over one's home would terrify just about anyone, me included. But I still felt conflicted: A near-term transition from oil and gas is profoundly unlikely. Natural gas is slowly supplanting coal as a primary electricity-generating fuel. Petroleum runs our planes, trains and automobiles. Both make it into a dizzying array of plastics and personal care products.
The corporate machine of hydrocarbon development contains a ghost. And the ghost in that machine is us. Until that changes, every fracking ban — Longmont's, Mora County's, New York's — no matter how heroic and justified, simply pushes drilling somewhere else. I wanted to know: Where are we saying yes to such development, and how can we say it in a way that lessens impacts on landscapes and people?
I had one hunch. To see if it bore out, I rented a red Chevy Cruze, filled the tank, and got behind the wheel. "Remaining Oil Life: 97%" blinked on the dash. How appropriate, I thought, and drove west, toward Energy Country.
I wasn't the only lone driver headed into the mountains on I-70; hundreds of us sped along in Subarus, Tacomas and other sporty rigs — Colorado cockroaches, we call them — likely bound for the outdoor meccas around the Continental Divide. But once the resort bedroom community of Glenwood Springs was in my rearview, traffic thinned. The tiny Cruze wobbled in the wake of scattered semis ferrying goods. Compressor stations and natural gas well pads lined the roadsides. Not far west of the Colorado-Utah line, I pulled off at the exit for Danish Flat. There, amid eerie silence, was a vast complex of plastic-lined ponds: The final resting place for the waste from the drilling operations I had passed in western Colorado.
In their 2003 report, What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy, historian Patty Limerick and her colleagues observe that there seems to be nowhere left to put energy infrastructure without a fight. "We have run out," they wrote, "of unloved and unlovely places." Clearly they weren't talking about this spot, I thought, peering across the chain-link fence at the stagnant water and plugging my nose.
To the northwest, exploding from the flat expanse of weed-scattered earth, the Book Cliffs looked like a better example of a lovely, loved place. Beyond their rims stretch great swaths of unbroken piñon-juniper forest that eventually give way to sun-etched canyons pouring into the Green River where it wends through Desolation and Gray canyons. About 6,000 boaters annually ply an 84-mile stretch of whitewater through their remote depths. For years, the hardline Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, based in Salt Lake City, has fought development that threatened these and millions of other acres of wilderness-quality land.
And yet, in 2010, SUWA essentially said yes to hundreds of gas wells that a company called Bill Barrett Corp. had proposed on the West Tavaputs Plateau not far west of Desolation Canyon. By doing so, SUWA wasn't caving. It was allowing inevitable development to go forward in a way that was least harmful to landscapes it wanted to protect. It was also making a sort of tradeoff.
On a sunny October day, I hitched a ride to the top of the plateau with Bureau of Land Management Price Field Office Manager Ahmed Mohsen to see what SUWA got in return. "Isn't this pretty?" Mohsen said as we gazed from one of the field's well pads on a finger of mesa top into a red-rock fissure called Jack Canyon. A wilderness study area, it feeds into the much larger Desolation Canyon wilderness study area that encloses a stretch of the river's west flank. The promontory we stood on was part of Horse Bench, an unroaded sagebrush mesa sweeping to the northeast, backed by a pastel layer cake of buttes. On a primitive road at the field's edge, I found black bear tracks threaded along the tire marks of an oilfield services pickup.
Bill Barrett had legal right to drill in all three places, and had proposed nearly 240 wellpads there. But it relinquished plans for all but a half-dozen of those, sparing some 65,000 acres of wilderness quality land, in exchange for SUWA's agreement not to sue to delay the entire project, most of which sprawls farther from the canyon to the west. The cluster of remaining wellpads that Mohsen showed me that day were near historic wellpads that the company has since reoccupied, and their infrastructure was set out of sight below ground, with seasonal restrictions on drilling to avoid disturbing boaters. Jarring as the naked scrapes of earth were, they clearly beat the alternative.
The deal — the largest of a handful of similar compromises SUWA has since made — seemed like a win-win from here. It also openly made the judgment implied in every fracking ban: Some places are more valuable than others. "Part of the thinking was to push development back to stay next to existing development, and that way limit new roads, new intrusions, new infrastructure," SUWA attorney David Garbett had told me earlier. Because the group's focus is on wilderness protection, from its perspective, "once oil and gas is a use in an area, it's the dominant use. It's already a sacrifice zone."
That's not an unusual sentiment among conservationists working on oil and gas issues, particularly in politically conservative states: With limited resources, many opt for triage, focusing on protecting superlatively beautiful places or intact islands of important wildlife habitat — just as the Fissingers of the world work to protect their communities — while actively or tacitly accepting development in other places. That same compass of reasoning suggested I might find what I had come for in the gray area between the two, in places already drilled enough that more could be tolerated. And it pointed due north from West Tavaputs, to the massive oil and gas fields at the heart of the Uinta Basin.
As I pulled down the main drag toward my hotel in Vernal, Utah, a sign for a juice bar and camo seat-cover shop popped into view: "I ♡ DRILLING!"
Perhaps, I thought, "tolerated" is the wrong word.
On a chilly night the weekend before Halloween, I visited the Pumpkin Festival in Jensen, southeast of Vernal. Hundreds of young families — many pregnant or toting infants or both — milled around a circuit of jack-o-lantern dioramas and a giant pallet fire while an old-time band strummed sweet-sounding harmonies. I felt on edge as I lined up for a cheeseburger: Could they tell I hailed from Boulder, Colorado, an epicenter of anti-fracking sentiment? I had heard stories of public meetings here where the mere suggestion of limiting drilling incited virtual riots. But a teenage girl in a Nirvana T-shirt, with ratted hair and a face painted like a sugar skull, offered me a shy smile along with my food.
I sat down at a picnic table next to a woman named Ellen Mecham, who pointed out her father picking a guitar at the far end of the bandstand. She wore dark eye makeup and her hair in stiff black spikes and bounced a fussy granddaughter in her lap. She grew up in the nearby town of Gusher, she told me: "Lots of time outside, not much TV." All three of her brothers work in the oil fields; her mother, sitting across from her, also counted a son-in-law. Nearly everyone I spoke to said the same: Multiple members, multiple generations. Hydrocarbons run deep here: in the ground and in the blood of the people.
Below our feet stretched the same geologic treasure trove that contains West Tavaputs' gas. The Uinta Basin has tar sands, oil shale, even obsidian-esque gilsonite, used in inks and drilling fluids. Natural gas and oil have been produced here for decades. The bulk of that development — more than 10,000 active wells — is concentrated several miles southwest of Jensen and Vernal in the central part of the basin, in an area informally called The Fairway. What's another 1,000, even 10,000, wells in a place like that?
That Saturday, Mike Stiewig, who oversees much of the development as BLM's Vernal Field Office manager, drove me through The Fairway's west side. I could see what SUWA's Garbett meant: A web of connecting roads and dozens of densely spaced pumpjacks, tanks and wellpads stretched to the horizon across dun-colored grass, amid plumes of dust kicked up by service trucks. Each pumpjack's engine blatted with backfires, accumulating into a low frequency thrum like a swarm of approaching bees. Whatever might have been lost here looked like it was already long gone.
Stiewig showed me the Monument Butte field, where one company hopes to drill over 5,000 new wells, more than half likely from the wellpads of thousands it already operates. It's basically infill, like when new homes and businesses are built within a dense urban core instead of leapfrogging across old farmland as far-flung suburbs. "The appearance wouldn't really change much," Stiewig explained, except for one thing: "It would pretty much just be lonely pumpjacks. All those tanks would go away." Instead of being stored on individual well pads, oil and other fluids would be pumped through bundles of black piping to giant centralized plants where off-gassing chemicals are much easier to contain. These thousands of individual, widely scattered tanks are, it turns out, a major source of air pollution, as are the trucks required to service them.
If all the companies developing here adopted similarly stringent controls, as they increasingly must under Utah's and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's tightening air quality rules, then perhaps the basin really can sustain the more than 25,000 new wells projected in the coming decades. I tried to picture their sprawl: the perfect place to drill, colonized to the max. But the scale was so mind-bogglingly vast that I couldn't help but doubt the premise of my trip.
The fact that controls like those in Monument Butte even exist in such a rural part of Utah is evidence that development is already hitting some very real limits. When wintertime inversions seal oilpatch pollutants into the valley like a giant Tupperware lid, ozone levels here spike well beyond federal limits designed to protect human health. The gas can harm healthy lungs and exacerbate existing respiratory problems. Some of the primary chemicals that contribute to its formation, called volatile organic compounds — including benzene, a potent carcinogen — also collect in the valley's communities at high-enough concentrations to warrant further scrutiny. But thanks in part to a lack of year-round monitoring and comprehensive studies, the health risks they pose remain mysterious. It leaves some residents wondering, especially given reports of birth defects, increased infant mortality and other weird health problems near drilling sites here and elsewhere.
The day before I left the Uinta Basin, I went back to Jensen to visit a curmudgeonly river rat named Herm Hoops. Oar blades engraved with the names of the rapids that broke them from their shafts decorated his garage; rare books on historic river expeditions shared shelf space with volumes by Mary Oliver and Ellen Meloy in his living room. Stocky and boisterous with a full beard, Hoops regaled me with tales of many trips down Desolation, including one that involved hiking dozens of miles overland back to civilization after getting stuck in an ice jam early in the year.
"There are nights when we can't sleep with the windows open," Hoops told me. Hydrogen sulfide gas pools around the house, pouring in from an old oil field and complex of waste evaporation ponds down the road. He gave me directions to see more; there are about 160 such ponds in the basin, each adding its own chemical vapors to the hazy air. A bitter cold west wind kicked up while we spoke; when I stepped out the door, the smell of rotten eggs slammed me in the face. I headed south, then southwest, descending through scrub-topped benches and knobs of painted earth, all of it dotted with gas wells. In the distance beyond, the Green River carved toward Desolation. From here, the land between looked no less lovely, no less worthy of protection. "There's enough drilling here," Hoops had told me. "If you want a sacrifice zone, move it to Boulder. Let's have big money fight big money and see who comes out the winner."
And so it was that my quest led me back home. As I drove down I-25 toward Longmont and Boulder, ranchland and sporadic cornfields gave way to new subdivisions, and soon enough, the giant scaffolds of drill rigs came into view, towering over car dealerships, strip malls and houses, with the massive pyramidal bulk of Long's Peak looming to the west on the Front Range skyline. I looked at the dash: "Remaining Oil Life: 74%." Perhaps Hoops was right, I thought. If we're worried about peoples' health and welfare, and if we truly value the wilder parts of the world, then our wealthy and bustling suburbs and cities are exactly where we should be drilling. Not because anyone deserves the accompanying nightmares, but because no one does.
Drilling was going strong in the West's rural oil and gas basins long before fractivists like Fissinger began fighting, long before fracking was a household word. But companies have figured out how to develop much more of our energy domestically, tapping giant, once-marginal reserves and drilling more wells at a faster pace to maintain production. As drilling has reached more densely populated areas in the West, or rural areas not far from places like New York City, oil and gas development has at last begun grabbing regular national media coverage. And vastly more people have been forced to directly confront the costs of something they've always used freely.
That awareness is already having an impact, inspiring reams of new research into how development affects air, groundwater, health, economies and more. It's helped spur both federal and state governments to begin reining in an industry that had long enjoyed a regulatory carte blanche. Colorado, arguably the Western focus of this clash, is widely regarded as a leader, though its rules are hardly perfect. Over the past several years, the state has moved to better protect wildlife, force disclosure of jealously guarded fracking fluid chemicals, increase setbacks from homes, and require companies to test nearby groundwater before and after drilling. Most notably, last winter it passed strict industry air pollution controls that are the first in the nation that aim to curtail releases of methane, the primary component of natural gas that also happens to be a potent greenhouse gas.
"It's sort of like in forestry," Pete Morton, a Boulder-based economist with the Conservation Economics Institute who served with The Wilderness Society for 18 years, told me over breakfast at Hotel Boulderado. The sound of jazzy music and clinking flatware wafted over the mostly empty tables as a hard rain fell outside. "They used to put in the beauty strip to hide the clear-cut. What we've done is cut down the beauty strip on oil and gas. Now we have all these eyes on industry." And some companies are clearly paying attention. When Colorado officials rolled out those new air measures, they did so alongside representatives from three of the state's major operators, Noble Energy, Anadarko Petroleum and Encana, which worked collaboratively with the pragmatic environmental group Environmental Defense Fund and the state to help develop the proposal.
More significant, though, is what this new awareness may do to galvanize action around the root cause of the problem: our own energy use. As Patty Limerick told me before I embarked on my journey, those same suburbs railing against drilling were enabled by the availability of cheap gasoline. "We live," Limerick said, "in the era of improbable comfort made possible by a taken-for-granted but truly astonishing infrastructure. Now that we have peoples' attention, maybe this production-consumption thing can get thought about."
There are signs that this is beginning to happen on a scale that transcends a few solar homes and plug-in vehicles, Morton told me. Liberal Boulder, often dismissed as the ultimate Not-In-My-Back-Yard community, is trying to become its own electrical utility in order to reshape its power supply around renewable sources balanced by natural gas. As part of that effort, a working group that includes Morton is looking at how the city might use its buying power to influence the way that gas is extracted by adopting environmental certification standards not unlike those developed for the sustainable timber industry. Someday, Boulder might replace natural gas entirely with biogas, generated perhaps by excess manure from Greeley, a former cowtown ironically positioned in the midst of Colorado's oil boom.
Little of this comforts fractivists like Fissinger, who worry that regulations are a cynical political ploy that will only encourage people to embrace a dangerous and inherently unsustainable status quo. And indeed, whatever you believe about the risks of fracking and horizontal drilling, the techniques have ensured that scarcity won't be the crisis that weans us off hydrocarbons in time to avert the worst effects of climate change. No matter how completely we might mitigate drilling's local impacts, no matter how carefully we protect special places, near or far, oil and gas development's ultimate externality, global climate change, still looms.
It's a conundrum that demands the "ideal future" that Yi-Fu Tuan envisioned in Topophilia, his seminal 1974 work on cultural geography. A future wherein we give our deepest loyalties to home — the place we love beyond all others, Tuan writes, the shelter of memory and family — and "at the other end of the scale, to the whole earth."
And therein lies the true power of the hardliners' "no." "The reality is that we're not going to flip a switch tomorrow and everything's OK," acknowledged Jeremy Nichols of the environmental group WildEarth Guardians, which hopes to leverage anti-fracking energy to influence public-land battles over oil and gas in the absence of higher-level climate policy. "But I don't want to say, '(development) is OK here.' Some of it is going to happen whether I say yes or not. If no one points out the costs or says no, there's really not going to be incentive for anyone to develop something different. Crisis fuels innovation and invention and creates opportunities." In other words, "no" can squeeze us toward an acceptable "yes." And expanding development is giving us a bigger, more widespread NO than, perhaps, we've ever heard before — a "no" that seems to hint at genuine change.
With the rise of fractivism, "you have people who were never involved in these issues before, and they're moving the goal posts 200 yards down the field," Morton said as he polished off his eggs benedict. "I think it's the rebirth of the environmental movement."
On a clear November Saturday, Vic's Coffee in north Boulder buzzed with hip 20- and 30-somethings grabbing late-morning lattes and pastries. Petroleum geologist Matt Silverman, a fit 61 years old with salt-and-pepper hair and a tidy mustache, blended in surprisingly well, lounging on the sunny patio. He led me to his SUV, apologized as he moved some yoga equipment, then ushered me into the front seat.
A little ways northeast of town, we pulled off the road at a barbed-wire fence. Beyond it, at the center of a wedge-shaped plot of rib-high grass with a clear view of Boulder's iconic Flatirons, was an ancient-looking pumpjack and tank coated in chipping green paint and rust. This is the McKenzie #1-21 — the first producing, and the last remaining, well from a 200-well oil field that has since been replaced by city open space and stately homes. The equipment is from the '50s, Silverman explained, but the McKenzie was drilled in 1902 and produced until the 2000s. This was the first field in the basin that is now booming to the northeast, and helped establish Denver as the energy capital of the Rocky Mountain region, he said. "Let's not turn our back on any of our history. Let's recognize all of it."
I looked past the pumpjack at the three buzzing highways hemming us in, planes floating into the nearby municipal airport, and, to the south, the boxy complex of National Center for Atmospheric Research offices where scientists study climate change. If the McKenzie is a monument, I thought, does it celebrate all that hydrocarbons have given us and, as Silverman argues, provide a lesson that the scars of their extraction are fleeting? Or could it become a memorial to a world that we no longer want — a reminder that, if we push hard enough, this history could someday be just that, the past and nothing more?
Sarah Gilman is a deeply ambivalent hydrocarbon addict, freelance writer and High Country News contributing editor now based in Portland, Oregon. She served as the magazine's associate editor for six years. Follow @sarah_gilman
This story was originally titled "Sacrifice Zone" in the print edition.]]>
The Department of Agriculture has been trying to revitalize a younger generation of farmers for many years, and earlier this month, Deputy Secretary Krysta Harden announced another $18.5 million that will go toward education and assistance under the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program. The program was originally established in the 2008 Farm Bill, and was reauthorized under the massive 2014 Farm Bill. March 13 marks the deadline to apply for this year's grants. (USDA defines "new" as having worked the land for no more than 10 years, which accounts for less than a quarter of all American farmers).
The new round of USDA grants is part of the agency's attempt to help out new growers who don't necessarily have the institutional knowledge, community resources or access to land that previous generations inherited from parents and grandparents. It's a positive sign that the government is trying to address the problem, but bolstering educational opportunities may not be getting at the root. The main challenges for young farmers and ranchers are finding capital for startup costs and gaining access to land. (A 2011 survey found that 70 percent of farmers under 30 years old rented their land, as opposed to 37 percent of those over 30.) And part of the reason young farmers aren't inheriting is because many aren't kids of farmers—they're part of the local food movement, 21st century back-to-the-landers, or passionate about sustainable agriculture. Or if their parents are farmers, that older generation is getting out of agriculture because it's so difficult to make it as a small farm today.
And why is it so difficult? The same legislation that's authorizing the millions of dollars in grants also gives billions of dollars in subsidies to large-scale farms that produce a handful of commodity crops like cotton, corn and wheat. Those subsidies help make mega-farms even bigger, perpetuate our nation's reliance on large-scale food production, and push small farms out of the market.Not to mention the fact that the current West-wide drought, which NASA scientists recently announced could develop into an event drier and longer in Southwestern states than any dry spell in the past 1,000 years, doesn't exactly create an inviting environment for new farmers.
Some analysts have pointed out that the aging agriculture industry mirrors the overall general labor force, which also is getting slightly older (average age of 41). Farm policy professor Carl Zulauf at Ohio State University wrote in 2013 that, "Putting the age of farmers in perspective suggests the U.S. will likely have little problem replacing its aging farmer population. It takes time for someone to accumulate the capital necessary to compete, either through inheritance or savings or both. The 1970 period of farm prosperity (when the average age of farmers dropped from 51 to 50) suggests the current period of prosperity will lead to an influx of young farmers."
Sure, there's no doubt that, in the past decade, there's been a surge of interest in farming from organic-minded twenty-somethings. But apparently not quite enough to mitigate the trend of the aging industry. There's still a long way to go before the young farmer movement transitions into a sustainable, long-term option for a critical mass of people. The USDA has cited predictions of an 8 percent drop in the country's agricultural work force between 2008 and 2018—in part a result of fewer young farmers joining the force and older ones retiring. The $18.5 million in grants is a step toward mitigating what's now being called a 'grain drain,' but it's going to take a more comprehensive look at the Farm Bill (which is renegotiated every five years) to make real change.
Tay Wiles is the online editor of High Country News. Homepage image by the author, of Zephyros Farm in Paonia, Colorado. Follow @taywiles]]>
If you doubt the power of bikes to transform a place, consider the saga of the Brickyard, a sunken, vacant lot spanning nearly three blocks east of downtown in a mostly residential district of this small New Mexico city. Up until about 1960, it was home to the kilns that cooked the bricks for Gallup's historic homes and businesses. After it shut down, time and neglect claimed the few remaining structures, and weeds and scraggly trees moved in, followed by drinkers and vagrants. Local legend held that some of them barbecued stray cats in a camp on the edge of the lot, next to the Junker Bridge, which was named after a former mayor.
Chuck Van Drunen hated the Brickyard. He lives just a few doors down from the lot with his wife, Jenny, and their two young kids, and he grew tired of the Brickyard's tenants wandering through the alley behind his house. So, Van Drunen, who co-owns Gallup Journey, a monthly alternative magazine, made a video blog in which he sports an Abe Lincoln-style beard and expresses his frustration. After his house was broken into, he complained to the Brickyard's owner. And when that went nowhere, he phoned his spandex-clad biking buddies, flagged some of the older trails that had been worn through the overgrown shrubbery, and started leading afternoon group rides through the lot in hopes of driving out the riff-raff. Call it Occupy The Brickyard, with bikes.
To Van Drunen's surprise, the city soon got involved. Behind the scenes, Mayor Jackie McKinney convinced two of the Brickyard's three property owners to donate their share of the five-acre lot, and then got another local to buy out the third owner, and donate that piece. Other community members, with the city's backing, solicited donations to commission nationally known park designer Nat Lopes to draw up plans. The local Youth Conservation Corps then went to work, clearing out brush and garbage and building trails.
Last September, the Gallup Brickyard Bike Park celebrated its grand opening, with Levi Leipheimer, a former pro-cyclist, officiating. The park now sports a pumptrack, jumps, whoop-de-doos and walking trails with interpretive signs – not to mention swarms of kids having a blast on their bikes.
Van Drunen, an avid cyclist with a laconic manner and wry wit, is delighted with the change. As he wrote in the Gallup Journey: "The Junker Bridge Bed and Breakfast club has officially closed its cat-cooking kitchen to overnight guests."
The park is just the latest step in a long-running effort to re-create Gallup as a mountain-biking hub. Over the last 15 years, local bike-advocates have built and designated dozens of miles of trails in the nearby desert and forests and spiffed up the old downtown. Gallup now hosts several mountain bike races each year, including the 24-hour national championships. In 2011, the state Legislature even formally designated the city as the Adventure Capital of New Mexico.
To Westerners who haven't visited recently, the moniker sounds more ironic than anything else. The Gallup in most peoples' mind – with its lingering reputation for public drunkenness, economic inequality, exploitation of Native Americans and just general all-round roughness – bears little resemblance to, say, Moab, Utah. And it's still not clear how far the two-wheeled revolution can go in turning things around.----
Gallup, population 20,000, sits along Interstate 40, Route 66, the major cross-country rail line and at the terminus of Highway 491, née 666. The railroad came in 1881, coal mining shortly thereafter, and an often boisterous little city sprouted on the sandstone slopes above the dusty trickle of the Rio Puerco. Over time, Gallup became a supply center for the region, known for brickmaking and uranium and coal mining.
But Gallup is probably better known for Native Americans and its complicated relationship with them. The town itself is not on a reservation, but it sits in the heart of Indian Country. Zuni's just down the road to the south, Laguna and Acoma Pueblos aren't far to the east, Hopi's a few hours west, and the massive Navajo Nation wraps around the city – the Navajo capital of Window Rock is just a half hour's drive. By 1900, Gallup was a major trading center for Indian jewelry. It's long been the place where Native Americans come to visit Wal-Mart and get a bit of an urban experience; the regional office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs is here, as well as a major Indian hospital. One of Gallup's nicknames is "The Indian Capital of the World."
Gallup's cultural quilt also includes a strong Hispanic community and the descendants of Italian and Croatian immigrants who came to mine coal. There's even a Palestinian community – a mosque sits along old Route 66 – that is mostly involved in the Indian jewelry trade. Squeezed into that demographic stew are doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, missionaries and AmeriCorps/VISTA volunteers, many of whom come from elsewhere and end up staying; they're the major force behind the recent cycling push. The town's historic character hasn't been diluted by postwar sprawl; the kitschy/cool Route 66 storefronts mostly endure and the old brick homes are still stacked closely along steep streets. It all gives Gallup a gritty, diverse, even cosmopolitan feel, very different from the placeless suburbia that has gobbled up so many Western cities.
Yet Gallup is also notorious for its dark side: It's not only the unofficial Indian capital, but also the epicenter of Indian exploitation, a place whose very identity and economy were built on taking advantage of the local Native Americans. The jewelry business, for example, has occasionally been tainted by fraud, with machine-made and imported goods pawned off as handmade by Indians. Nor is it uncommon for the traders to offer the jewelry makers – often unskilled in business dealings – a pittance for their product. One of Gallup's biggest tourist draws since the 1920s has been the annual Indian Ceremonial. In the early 1970s, Native American activists regularly protested the event, saying it appropriated their culture, then commodified it for the profit of white businessmen. "Colonialism has a lot to do with it," says John Redhouse, a Navajo and one of those early activists, who has spent much of his life fighting for Native rights. "Gallup is a border town, and the tribes around it constitute economic colonies."
And then there's alcohol. In 1953, the federal government lifted the ban on selling alcohol to Native Americans. Tribes, however, continued to prohibit its sale on the reservations. That created a vast, new, thirsty market for Gallup's liquor peddlers: During the following decades, as many as five dozen different drinking establishments flourished at one time in town, far more than allowed under state law. Garden De Luxe, a sweet, fortified Tokay wine, was shipped in from California in rail tanker cars and bottled in Gallup to be sold for a buck or less per bottle. An entire economic sector grew up to feed the epidemic, including dozens of pawnshops, a blood-for-cash place and bustling bottle- and can-recycling centers.
During the 1970s and '80s, police hauled more than 30,000 people each year to the drunk tank, which was little more than a cage where people could sleep it off before being released to get drunk again. Cirrhosis killed many, but hundreds of others each year died more quickly – killed when they passed out and froze to death on long winter nights, or staggered out in front of traffic or the freight trains that rumble through town. Inebriated people were beaten up for sport, or raped. It got so bad that, in 1973, Larry Casuse, a Navajo college student and activist, kidnapped the Gallup mayor and part-owner of the Navajo Inn – the most profitable liquor store in the state – which was perched cynically right on the edge of the reservation. The mayor escaped, and Casuse was killed in an ensuing firefight.----
Then, in 1986, Ed Muñoz ran for mayor, promising to tackle the alcohol problem. He wanted to put up billboards declaring Gallup "the drunk-driving capital of the world," a suggestion that enraged local businesses anxious about tourism. The billboards weren't necessary, though: The town had caught the attention of the media. In 1988, the Albuquerque Tribune published a six-part series entitled "Gallup: The Town Drunk." ABC News' 20/20 followed with a feature called "Drunk Town, USA," a name that stuck for years. Mother Teresa even put Gallup on her list of "forsaken places," along with Calcutta.
Finally, in early 1989, a drunk driver slammed into a car on the highway to Zuni and killed four of its five occupants, including an infant. That inspired dozens of community activists to march from Gallup to Santa Fe to force the Legislature to wake up to the problem. By the time it reached the State Capitol, the procession was 2,000 strong.
State lawmakers finally listened. They helped fund a rehabilitation center in Gallup (since taken over by the Navajo Nation) that included traditional Native American healing methods; banned open containers in the front seat of vehicles; and passed a law to shut down drive-up liquor windows. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gave nearly $5 million in grants to fund various efforts combating alcohol abuse. Eventually, Gallup banned package liquor sales in the downtown commercial area. Some of the worst bars have shut down.
By the late 1990s, the situation had improved markedly. It was about then that some locals figured it was time for Gallup to get a reputation for something new.
Bob Rosebrough's handshake is startlingly gentle. Perhaps it's from spending a lifetime among Navajos, who are known for diffident handshakes, or maybe it's because he's 6-and-a-half-feet tall with the paws of a basketball player and enough strength for a bone-breaking grip. He grew up in Farmington, went to college and law school in Albuquerque and has practiced law in Gallup since 1979.
In the 1990s, Rosebrough started mountain biking. He and his friend, Peter Tempest, a Gallup native and now a local surgeon, would seek out established trails in Colorado or Utah to ride. While on one such outing in Telluride, they picked up a guidebook that described local trails and rides. It occurred to them then that the Gallup area, with its high mesas, towering red rock fins and ponderosa-covered plateaus, was just as rich in recreational opportunity. Someone just needed to publicize the trails. It would be worth it, even if it just encouraged locals to ride closer to home.
Rosebrough, who wrote the definitive climbing guide to the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado, was up to the task. In 1999, he and Tempest published The Gallup Guide: Outdoor Routes in Red Rock Country, which featured not only climbing routes, but also road biking, hiking and a few mountain biking trails.
The book was hardly the first of its kind for the Southwest. Moab, Utah, had transformed itself from busted-down uranium-mining burg to industrial-grade recreational tourism desert mini-metropolis, thanks largely to two brothers who opened a bike shop there in the early 1980s. Telluride and Durango had long banked on trails and mountain-biking terrain to supplement their tourism industries. And in 1995, Troy Rarick opened a bike shop in the farming and oil and gas town of Fruita, Colo. Simply by building trails and marketing them, Rarick changed his town into a hip recreation destination. Rosebrough and Tempest's little book opened up many Gallupians' eyes to new possibilities.----
Gallup had long been famous as a gateway to Indian Country. But by the 1990s, the tourist industry and the lodging taxes it generated were stagnant, the coal mines were dying and the uranium boom had busted. In 1999 Patty Lundstrom, then executive director of the Northwest New Mexico Council of Governments, held a forum to figure out how to "use existing assets as an economic driver for the region." Adventure tourism "floated to the top," she says. Moab was the obvious role model and Lundstrom visited there often, hoping to learn how to draw the same number of visitors without provoking tension between old-timers and pedaling newcomers. Unlike Moab, though, Gallup had no bike shop or other private enterprise to encourage the effort. Adventure Gallup & Beyond, the campaign's umbrella organization, would have to rely on volunteers and the public sector to get started.
The first step was legitimizing the spider web of "social trails" that wandered around the sagebrush and sandstone, mostly on land owned by Gamerco, a coal company. The task turned out to be tougher than anticipated. Rosebrough got so frustrated with the lack of progress that he successfully ran for mayor in 2003. He then helped get an easement across Gamerco's land northwest of town to provide public access to the 26-mile-long High Desert Trail, the flagship of the local trail system.
Meanwhile, Lundstrom was elected to the state House of Representatives in 2001. From there, she was able to help secure funding to buy a nearby rock-climbing crag, to upgrade Red Rock State Park and its associated trails and to design, build and market trails to the outside world. Another longtime local, Karl Lohmann, formed a local chapter of the Youth Conservation Corps to turn the rutted paths into a world-class trail system.
This loose-knit group of trail builders and cyclists eventually coalesced into Trails 2010, a nonprofit based on Durango's wildly successful Trails 2000. The organization worked with the U.S. Forest Service to designate existing single-track trails in the Zuni Mountains, some 15 miles from town, as mountain-bike-friendly. Now, the group is working with the agency to vastly expand – by as much as 250 miles – the mountain biking trail network. Today, when you cross the state line from Colorado, you see a huge state tourism billboard sporting a photo of a mountain biker on Gallup's trails.
The immediate Gallup area now has two major networks of buffed-out, fast single-track trails that rival those in Fruita or Durango. Several races are held on them each year – more than in any other community in the state. In 2012, the Department of Interior designated the High Desert system as a national recreation trail, and the community is urging the International Mountain Biking Association to designate it as a "Ride Center," one of just a dozen or so worldwide. Supporters say that would help Gallup capture a decent piece of the billion-dollar bike tourism industry.
When Lindsay Mapes walks into Gallup's downtown coffee joint and introduces herself, I'm momentarily taken aback. In her form-fitting black-and-white dress and high heels, she looks more like someone who strolled off the streets of Manhattan than a resident of Gallup. Before even sitting down, Mapes announces: "I'm the success story."
What she means is that, in her role as owner of Zia Rides, Mapes is the only private enterprise making a direct, quantifiable profit from Gallup's newfound status as an adventure hub. Mapes came to Gallup in 2003 as a volunteer with AmeriCorps/VISTA, which had sent a crew to work on promoting "entrepreneurship through adventure tourism." She got a job with the Chamber of Commerce to manage mountain biking and running races and other events, then broke off on her own to start Zia Rides. She now runs and promotes two endurance races in Gallup, including Nationals, as well as rides in El Paso, Texas, and Ruidoso, N.M. As if that doesn't keep her busy enough, Mapes is also the executive director of the Business Improvement District and just received her master's degree in public administration in December.
Cycling is already giving an economic boost to Gallup, Mapes says. Last year's Nationals attracted 500 racers from all over the nation, along with support crews and spectators, and the biking and trail-running events of the Squash Blossom Classic draw around 300 participants. Adventure Gallup figures that the racers and their families and friends spend around $30,000 locally on food, lodging, gas and merchandise over the course of each event. ----
That's less important, say Mapes and others, than the event's power as a marketing tool. The races introduce the trails to the kind of people most likely to plan a hiking-and-biking vacation in Gallup, bringing still more money to town. A 2011 University of Wyoming study, for example, found that the Teton County trail system around Jackson Hole generated $18 million for the local economy in just one year. In Oregon, bicycle tourists spent $400 million in 2012, according to a study done last year by a marketing research firm. And an extensive Arizona Department of Transportation study found that out-of-state bike-related travelers there spend an average of $263 per person per day on lodging, food, gas and bike parts.
That can mean a lot in an economically challenged place. When Moab's uranium industry, which employed some 25 percent of the area's workers, busted in the 1980s, it left a shell of an economy and community. But as the masses started flocking to the Slickrock Trail, as well as the area's rock-climbing, rafting and jeeping opportunities, the place experienced an abrupt turnaround. Between 1990 and 2000, employment grew by 65 percent, according to a Headwaters Economics study. There are now more than 3,000 service and retail jobs in the county, quadruple the total number of mining jobs when that industry was at its peak.
In Gallup, lodging tax revenues have increased by almost 70 percent since 1999, when the adventure tourism push began, and two new hotels, one along I-40 and another downtown, are currently under construction, adding to a handful of other lodging establishments built in the last several years. It's impossible to say exactly how much of this is attributable to adventure tourism, but the estimated 15,000 people who ride, run or hike the High Desert Trail each year are certainly having an impact.
But a lot of cycling money bypasses the city. Trail riders who do no more than fill up their gas tank, grab a fast-food bite, even stay a night in a hotel, contribute little more to the economy than random interstate travelers. But when they slow down and spend time downtown, they tend to drop more cash. The problem is that Gallup largely lacks the sorts of establishments that would draw bikers, such as a brewpub – one of the prerequisites for being a "real" bike town and for getting IMBA Ride Center designation – or even a downtown bike shop. And would-be entrepreneurs are not likely to risk opening a business until they're convinced the bikers will venture into town. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing.
Van Drunen puts it bluntly: "To really have a tourist economy, we'll have to overcome the shitty aesthetics. We need a legit downtown."
Progress is slowly being made. During Rosebrough's time as mayor, the city refurbished infrastructure, spruced up parks, gave land and money to affordable housing initiatives, and generally spiffed up the historic downtown by planting trees, fixing up the old El Morro theatre and having local artists paint murals on graffiti-covered walls. It also passed a quality-of-life bond measure to fund such improvements, along with trails and the like. The local Business Improvement District is trying to attract businesses to downtown by touting the cheap rent, round-the-clock security guards and various other incentives.
Gallup now boasts a popular weekend farmer's market and a couple downtown art galleries with a broader range of wares than the usual Southwestern kitsch. There's even a monthly, well-attended Arts Crawl, "where people are drinking cappuccinos," says Lundstrom, "and they actually know what that is. It's just really cool. Who would've ever thought Gallup would attract that kind of attention?" And yet, for all that, the problem remains: To most outsiders, Gallup is, well, still Gallup.
"It's a real remarkable community," says Rosebrough. "It's disproportionately wonderful and disproportionately terrible at the same time."----
Driving into Gallup on Highway 491 from the north can be an overwhelming experience, and not in an aesthetically inspiring way. After a couple of hours of wide-open road, where smog-tinged vistas stretch out for miles, you crest a hill only to be bludgeoned by traffic, far too thick for a city of 20,000. And every block or so, nestled in the strip malls, next to window-tinting places and garishly-colored fast food joints, are dozens of small loan companies, the kind that promise quick cash via payday loans, tax refund anticipation loans or car title loans.
These places congregate where cash is in short supply and regular banking services are either unavailable or out of reach. They offer customers short-term loans in exchange for exorbitantly high interest rates, averaging more than 300 percent. Of New Mexico's 618 active "small loan company" licenses, 46 are in Gallup –– twice as many as in Santa Fe, which has more than triple the population. Cash Cow, one of the major local lenders, calls itself "The Home of the Loan Ranger" and boasts: "We speak Navajo." In one strip mall on the east side of town, next to a Dominos Pizza and a dentist, three loan outlets are lined up in a row. Gallup is like the Wall Street of high-interest short-term loans.
The proliferation of payday lenders is a reminder of the desperate poverty that persists here. More than a quarter of all families in McKinley County live below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate is among the highest in the economically challenged state. The loan companies indicate that the old exploitation economy still grinds on. "If there is some kind of abusive lending practice happening," says Nick Mattison, an attorney at Feferman & Warren, a consumer rights law firm in Albuquerque, "it's happening in Gallup."
"It's still a racist border town," says Redhouse, the longtime activist. At best, he says, Gallup has gone "from terrible to bad." The Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, which draws some 50,000 people, is similarly still problematic from his perspective: "Aspects of our culture continue to be commercially exploited."
And though it has done a great deal to shed the old "Drunk Town" label, Gallup still has a drinking problem. McKinley County is consistently second in the state, and among the top in the nation, in alcohol-related deaths and injuries. Though involuntary protective custody admissions have been slashed dramatically since the '80s, the police continue to haul 19,000 or more annually to the detox center, which in recent years has struggled to get adequate funding to stay open. In an effort to allow police time to focus on other problems, the city last year asked 50 liquor merchants to shut their doors from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. All but eight ignored the request. Earl Tulley, one of the leaders of the 1989 march on Santa Fe, says the problems of the past simply have been adopted by a younger generation – a young friend of his recently froze to death while on a drinking binge. "Maybe we need another march," he says.
McKinley County's diabetes death rate is the state's highest, nearly three times that of the U.S. The city's crime statistics look like they came out of Natural Born Killers, the 1994 ultra-violent flick that was partly filmed in Gallup. There were seven murders and 36 rapes in 2012, and the violent crime rate was about five times the nationwide rate, on par with Oakland, Calif., and not too far below Detroit's.
There are those among the Gallup adventure movement who see the development of trails and the cycling scene in an admittedly selfish light, merely wanting to improve their own quality of life. Still others believe it can be a tool to improve a troubled town. "We want to create a physically healthier, financially healthier and fair community," says Mapes, "and outdoor adventure is the way to go." Adventure tourism doesn't rely on exploiting or commodifying Native Americans or their culture in any way. Though it does impact the landscape, it's nothing compared to the older energy economy: In 1979, a dam at a uranium mine not far from Gallup collapsed, sending millions of gallons of acidic and radioactive water into a tributary of the Rio Puerco.
Though tribes were brought into the Adventure Gallup planning process, the trail-boosters' community is notably void of Native Americans. "Cycling is still seen as an outside, transplant, Anglo activity," says Dirk Holenbeek, a cyclist who moved to Gallup from Michigan in 1998 to work as a teacher at the Christian High School just outside of town.
And critics see a racist tinge in some efforts to improve the town's "aesthetics" for tourism's sake. This spring, a local group launched a campaign to rid the city of panhandlers by convincing residents to donate money to charities rather than to the solicitors. Local veterans will also be posted to provide a "safe" atmosphere for shoppers, and police presence stepped up to enforce the anti-panhandling ordinances. But Jennifer Rose Denetdale, a Navajo Human Rights Commissioner and associate professor of American studies at University of New Mexico, calls this organized harassment of mostly Native transients. "I am incensed at this targeting of the most vulnerable population who cannot protect themselves," she says. The eviction of the Brickyard's previous occupants in order to make way for a bike park might be seen in a similar light.
At the same time, the bike park may be the very thing that connects the adventure movement with the Native American community. "I wish the bike park would have been there when I was there," says Ryan Tsosie, a Navajo and competitive cyclist who moved from Virginia to the Gallup area as a teen in the '90s. He was part of the budding Gallup cycling scene, and even opened a bike shop that eventually failed. Now he lives and helps run a bike shop in Albuquerque. He's tried to pull other Native Americans – including his family – into cycling, without much success. But the bike park might help. On most school-day afternoons, the place teems with a mix of local Hispanic, Native American and Anglo kids.
The majority of the YCC trail builders are Native Americans. And the local affordable housing nonprofit, Care 66, which is building a colorful, modern mixed-income housing project downtown, even held a bike ride fundraiser last year.
A decade ago, when Mapes told people where she lived, she'd get what she calls the "Gallup Look" – an expression of exaggerated pity or disgust. "Now it's like: 'Oh, yeah, I love it there. The trails are great!' " she says. "I love it when I see locals interacting with someone in the outdoor community, boasting about the assets we have. There's a lot of community pride.
"Sometimes," says Mapes, "I see it as a revolution. This group is really using the bike as an agent of change." ----
Van Drunen describes Gallup's changes from the seat of his bike. On an unusually warm but typically windy March afternoon, we do a couple of laps of the Brickyard's berms and jumps. Then Van Drunen motions me to follow, and we tear across a street, down a trail through a vacant lot, across a gas station parking lot and into Route 66 traffic before leaving a frontage road to climb up a narrow path onto the "Northside" trail.
We stop on a high island of slickrock with an expansive view, and Van Drunen points out and praises all the trails – some for hiking, some for biking – that surround the town. It occurs to me then how odd this whole concept of trail-as-economic-development really is: You take a piece of long-abused land, you establish some paths through it, and you invite people to ride or run or hike. It sounds crazy, yet it seems to work.
A quarter of a century ago, I spent summers living and biking in Cortez, Colo., another reservation border town that resembles a smaller version of Gallup. Back then, the place was downright hostile to bicyclists. Rednecks in pickups thought it was hilarious to lay on their horns at the sight of a skinny lycra-clad guy, and roadside mutts thought I was a tantalizing piece of steak on wheels. But a few years after I left, a little bike shop opened on the main drag, a few renegades started mountain biking on desert hiking trails, and others carved trails on a stretch of public land that had previously been used for dumping and then shooting old appliances.
Today, the local Chamber of Commerce touts the county's trail network as one of its primary draws, along with Mesa Verde and Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. The little bike shop has grown into one of the biggest and best in the region, and a few road and mountain biking pros have even based themselves in Cortez and nearby Dolores. Meanwhile, Cortez's main drag, once a cultural and culinary wasteland, has gained a brewpub, a sushi joint, a farm-to-table restaurant and a few coffee shops. I think my 17-year-old self would have been a lot less lonely there today.
Gallup will never be another Moab, and some say that's just as well: These days, Moab too often resembles a spring-break beach town set amid red rock. Gallup has too much culture and character to become totally sterilized and steamrolled by the industrial recreation machine, and despite its poverty, it has an existing economy. But it may still experience a trail-driven, cultural and economic shift similar to Cortez, only on a larger scale.
"We're on the cusp. It's just a matter of time," says Van Drunen, who makes road and mountain bike excursions with the local team – Rez Dog Racing – deep into the reservation, where he says there are rides on vast slickrock formations that put Moab to shame. "The assets are there. ... The gold is there. ... Someone just needs to dig it up and polish it and market it."
HCN senior editor Jonathan Thompson writes from Durango, Colorado.]]>
Dick went on to found Save Our Canyons, an organization that's fought for more than four decades to keep development out of the Wasatch Range. The wild land of the Wasatch, which abuts Salt Lake City and its exurbs, has become a ski mecca, with six resorts scattered amid thousands of backcountry-skiing acres. Most of the resorts are separated by just a single ridge, a proximity that has fueled the ski executives' dream: Connect them all, so that skiers can hop chairlifts from one to the next, thereby stimulating an already lucrative industry that brought more than 4 million visitors and 18,000 jobs to the state last year.
A growing community of backcountry skiers, though, object to that plan. They see themselves as more akin to Gale Dick than to Jean-Claude Killy, and, increasingly, they feel squeezed out of public land by the big resorts. Earlier this year, Vail Resorts Inc., a Colorado-based industry giant, purchased and consolidated two Wasatch Range ski areas. In mid-November, Park City opened for its first season as the country's largest ski area, charging more than $100 for a daily pass. Vail's move has created fresh impetus for further consolidation and connection of resorts, and set the stage for a new battle.
The conflict between backcountry users and resort operators highlights two very different visions for the mountains: One that eagerly welcomes the rapidly growing population in the nearby urban areas, and another that wants to hold the growing mass of humanity at bay. The population of Salt Lake and Summit counties will more than double by 2050, according to the nonprofit Utah Foundation, and the tussle over competing uses of a finite resource is only growing as demand increases. "Everyone wants more — more terrain and more solitude within those spaces for backcountry skiing and more acreage for resort skiing," says Chase Lamborn, a research associate with the Institute for Outdoor Recreation and Tourism at Utah State University. "But the reality is, you're talking about this confined space, and all of the areas are already being heavily utilized."
Central Wasatch skiing has a lengthy history, beginning with the Brighton Ski Resort (1936), followed by Alta Ski Area (1938), Solitude Mountain Resort (1957), Park City Mountain Resort (1963), Canyons Resort (1968), Snowbird Ski Resort (1971), and Deer Valley Resort Company (1981). All are crowded into 64,000 acres within the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest.
In 2012, a Canadian developer first proposed a project called SkiLink, which would have required the sale of 30 acres of national forest to connect two Wasatch resorts with a high-speed gondola. Ski Utah, the marketing arm of the state's ski industry, has long sought to boost tourism through a Wasatch connectivity project, but backcountry users feared the influx of infrastructure and lift riders into formerly remote terrain. The newly formed Wasatch Backcountry Alliance rallied hundreds of backcountry skiers and snowboarders and, with the help of the older group Save Our Canyons, defeated SkiLink. Because the proposal relied on resort connections via public lands, it was easy to rally support against it, says Jamie Kent, Wasatch Backcountry Alliance's president. "Everyone loves the canyons."
In 2014, on the heels of the SkiLink failure, Ski Utah proposed "ONE Wasatch," which would connect all of the area resorts, providing access to 18,000 acres of in-bounds terrain. The linkages would be made over private lands owned or controlled by the resorts, instead of through public lands, and both costs and profits would be shared by those resorts. "The ski industry has learned from their past mistakes and have come back with another, more powerful proposal," Kent says. "They have packaged ONE Wasatch very well." Vail has just completed the first of the three required connections by adding a gondola between Park City and Canyons resort, so only two more remain.
The backcountry community supports small-scale infrastructure, such as trail signage, restrooms in popular areas and a transportation system that would limit traffic. But most members vehemently oppose a resort-connectivity project like ONE Wasatch. Earlier this year, Lamborn helped survey more than 4,000 recreationists in the Wasatch. While about half of resort skiers supported a mega-ski resort connection, a mere 1 percent of -backcountry users did so.
Backcountry aficionados fear that the ONE Wasatch proposal would clog up both vistas and slopes, taking away some beloved backcountry access points. They see it as an assault on their lifestyle, one that will also degrade a natural resource, further commercializing the mountains with each new development, expansion and marketing ploy. "How can you enjoy skiing when everything has been developed?" Kent says. "That takes away the whole point." Critics also contend that the new lifts and their service and access roads would fragment wildlife habitat and impact popular mountain-biking trails.
Proponents, however, say ONE Wasatch would make Utah an international destination, modeled after the sprawling resorts of the Alps. The European-style gondola and lift connections would also help free narrow mountain roads from car and bus traffic. David DuBois, an airline pilot who lives in Park City and frequently skis at Alta, Solitude and Snowbird, says, "It's a no-brainer for me. I'd much rather ski than be in a car." Nathan Rafferty, president of Ski Utah, believes ONE Wasatch would provide an "unrivaled" product to skiers. "There's nowhere in North America that could tie so much acreage together."
For the moment, ONE Wasatch is stalled amid a tangle of interlocking interests. And it's further complicated by an even broader initiative called the Mountain Accord, which has pulled together dozens of stakeholders to prepare for a growing number of recreationists in the Wasatch while also protecting the area's environment and watershed, which supplies drinking water to half a million Salt Lake City residents. The accord began with meetings between Salt Lake City and county leaders, area ski resorts and Save Our Canyons, who hired a neutral leader, Laynee Jones, as the project director.
The Mountain Accord, like ONE Wasatch, yearns to improve traffic flow through the canyons — but it wants to do a lot more than link up ski areas. During ski season, more than 8,000 cars per day travel Little Cottonwood Canyon alone, according to a 2012 Salt Lake County transportation study. Mountain Accord's proponents want to dramatically decrease that by using a train, light-rail system or buses to connect the Salt Lake Valley and the town of Park City with popular recreation sites in Big and Little Cottonwood canyons.
In July, after two years of negotiations and public comment, local, state and federal governments, Utah's ski industry, recreational advocacy groups and environmental groups signed on to the first phase of the Mountain Accord. That step signifies a "good faith agreement" on broad goals for the mountains, but is not legally binding, Jones says. In phase two, environmental impact statements and studies will be completed for the initial agreements — transportation solutions, a federal land designation to provide stronger conservation protections, an environmental monitoring program, and land swaps to put key parcels in public hands. The accord does not derail ONE Wasatch, but it's not yet clear how the ski connection proposal might be affected by it.
Backcountry advocates like Kent see the accord as a way to leverage more protection for the Central Wasatch, to hold back development and preserve backcountry access. Perhaps the crux of the conflict with the resort ski industry lies in Grizzly Gulch, a small slice of land owned by Alta that backcountry skiers have fought the hardest to protect. The resort has traditionally allowed backcountry skiers to use this gentle, popular terrain. But it's also the best place to site a new ski lift for a key connection under the ONE Wasatch plan that would merge Alta's terrain with Snowbird's. Onno Wieringa, manager of Alta Ski Resort, says that if the Mountain Accord can't come up with a solution to move skiers from one canyon to the next more easily, he will install a lift through Grizzly Gulch.
Kent and off-piste enthusiasts know this time is pivotal for the future of backcountry skiing in the Wasatch. The outcome will hinge on community comment during the next phase, which, Jones says, will be announced to the public in the coming months. "Participation at this point is crucial," she says. "It could go -either way."
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Apparently that would be too much to ask. ABC's Blood & Oil has about half of its first season under its belt and, well, it's not exactly The Sopranos. It looks a lot more like its 1980s-era, Colorado-based predecessor, Dynasty.
There are eerie parallels between the two shows, including the overarching theme of upward mobility via oil. In Dynasty, Krystle Jennings, a secretary at a refinery, is set to marry Blake Carrington, Denver oil tycoon (and owner of said refinery) at the outset of the 1980s oil boom. Meanwhile, Blood & Oil's Billy and Cody LeFever are headed to North Dakota to open up a laundromat in the oilfields and make it rich. After a pair of oil rigs run them and their washing machines off the road, the LeFevers team up with oil tycoon Hap Briggs. Both Jennings and the LeFevers are thus drawn into the dramas of the wealthy, imbued with sex, familial tension and violence (though, notably, no cocaine or meth).
In other words, both Blood & Oil and Dynasty are mere soap operas in a petroleum-soaked setting. Dynasty admirably taps into the Zeitgeist of the '80s, at least in the first episode. Carrington's company is booted out of an unnamed Middle Eastern country, and there are several exchanges about the need for energy independence. Even Ralph Nader earns a mention. Carrington could be seen as a proxy for Ronald Reagan, who had just been elected president, and Carrington's bright, sensitive son, Steven, as a stand-in for Jimmy Carter. "Why aren't you out building windmills and turning Corn Flakes into gasahol?" Carrington says to Steven, bitingly, after Steven accuses his father of unethical business practices.
Blood & Oil, on the other hand, veers away from politics, except for when Darla, Briggs' wife, manipulates the Mormon oil commissioner into handing over some secret U.S. Geological Survey report by promising him the governorship, and thus the power to approve an LDS temple right there in North Dakota.
We sat down and watched the first two episodes of each show, so you don't have to. Here's how they matched up.
|Blood & Oil
|Original Working Title
|Krystle Jennings (Linda Evans), climbs socioeconomic ladder by marrying Denver oil tycoon, Blake Carrington.
|For her bridal shower gifts, Krystle receives a riding crop (symbolizing her move to the upper classes) and The Joy of Sex.
|At the LeFevers' going away party we learn that their laundromat seed money comes from friends and family.
|Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) is an aristocrat, who spends his time in his Denver
|Hap Briggs, a.k.a. "The Mayor of the Bakken"
|Denver during the late-'70s/early-'80s oil boom, ignited by the Energy Crises of the '70s.
|The 2007-14 "shale revolution," ignited by high oil prices and new drilling and fracking techniques, in the fictional town of Rock Springs, North Dakota, in the Bakken oil patch.
|Geographical Faux Pas
|Dynasty's scene-setting shots are in Denver and the Colorado Front Range mountains. But most of the show is filmed in Southern California.
|The North Dakota of Blood & Oil is suspiciously mountainous; it was mostly filmed in Utah.
|The Good/Bad Wife
|Krystle is kind and intimidated by her newfound
|Darla (Amber Valletta) is scheming
|Oedipus Complex
|Carrington is disappointed in his son Steven because he's educated but jobless. Worse, Steven's gay, leading to this Carrington monologue: "I'm about as Freudian as you could hope for in a capitalist exploiter of the business class ... I understand about sublimation. I understand how you hid sexual dysfunction behind hostility toward a father…"
|Briggs is disappointed in his son, Wick, because Wick dropped out of college and is jobless. Briggs forces Wick to push mud on a rig. Wick
|Daughterly Rebellion
|Falen feels like Carrington, her father, treats her like a bargaining chip. So she sleeps with the chauffer.
|Lacey doesn't like her stepmother, Darla. So she sleeps with the driver.
|Geology Quote
|"I'm a geologist. I make holes in the ground. I'm not paid to set foreign policy ... But I'd say we'd damned well better start drilling for oil over here, a little deeper and a little faster." -- Matthew Blaisdale.
|Hap: "That plot's been drilled harder than a Tulsa whore."
Darla: "The old wells didn't go deep enough."
|The Lover
|Krystle pines for ruggedly handsome Blaisdale,
|Hap is sleeping with his son's love interest, Jules Jackman (India de Beaufort, who wasn't even born
|Shoulder pads and hair! Fur! Conservative suits, narrow ties and hair! Noticeable dearth of bolo ties and cowboy boots. But the hair!
|North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp said it best in a tweet: "Anyone who's been to Williston knows there are a lot more steel-toed boots and a lot less cocktail attire." And then there are the trendy running shoes: Hap Briggs is spotted wearing a pair of Hoka One Ones in one scene.
|Architectural Faux Pas
|Carrington's sprawling estate is so obviously not in Colorado that it's painful. It's more likely that he would have lived in a house like the Briggs'.
|Briggs lives in a giant Park City-esque ski-lodge of a house. Jackman, meanwhile, lives in an exposed-brick, urban loft/warehouse style apartment. Really?
|Dynasty started its run in 1981, just as the U.S. oil boom was ramping up. But the boom busted catastrophically in 1986, and ratings plummeted along with the rig count. The show ended in 1989.
|Blood & Oil was first conceived of in 2011, during the height of the boom. By the time it hit the air this summer, the boom had decidedly busted, no less severely than in the mid-1980s. The script hasn't caught up with the changing economics.
|What It Gets Right
|The push for energy independence via drilling at home during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Steven tells his father: "You didn't develop this country's resources when you had a chance. You developed the Arabian fields because it was cheaper."
|The exorbitantly high housing costs in the North Dakota oil patch. "Around here you either have two jobs or two houses," says Jackman.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor of High Country News. Follow @jonnypeace]]>