The debate over carbon sequestration at the 2008 Wyoming State Legislature is fairly restrained – solons say they are simply laying the uncontroversial groundwork for the day, not too far off, when energy producers nationwide will have to keep the CO2 from burning fossil fuels out of the atmosphere.

   But what’s really taking shape in the legislature is something potentially much bigger. It could be a major step toward moving Wyoming beyond its role as a boom-and-bust producer of raw materials to a central player in the production of clean energy.

   Or, at least, clean energy from fossil fuels. Whether that’s ultimately possible or not, the benefit for Wyoming may be simply from getting into the research end of energy. Because in the modern world, research may be as valuable an industry as production – and much less Third World in its economic ramifications.

   Specifically, Gov. Dave Freudenthal and the legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee want to put $20 million into the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources for clean coal research. (The money would come from the federal government’s Abandoned Mine Lands money – which in turn comes from the coal industry.) Freudenthal and the JAC want to put those millions into a partnership between the university and General Electric, one of the world’s largest corporations.

 

   The specifics are unclear – legislator’s will get a briefing tomorrow – but there’s talk that this could be as big a deal as the decision last year to build a supercomputer near Laramie for NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research).
If it comes off, a massive GE-UW clean coal conversion project like this would be smartly situated both to use the super-computer and to field test whatever they come up with in the energy fields and power plants of Wyoming. This work would be cutting edge and crucial, drawing contracts from coal producers worldwide.

 

Despite the confident talk you hear about the future of coal and CO2 sequestration and ‘clean’ technologies, there is no proven way to do any of it yet on the scale our energy appetites demand.