Word: coal
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Though oil and gas now are the region's most valuable energy resources, coal could easily replace them if Washington so decides. The Mountain States hold some 50% of the nation's recoverable coal, with Montana and Wyoming containing the richest reserves. Wyoming alone has eight times as much low-sulfur coal as West Virginia and Kentucky combined. At the moment, the Powder River Basin straddling Montana and Wyoming attracts the most mining. Arco, Exxon, Sun and Kerr-McGee are already clawing the land, while Shell, Mobil and Peabody are laying plans to share in the basin...
Electric shovels that weigh as much as 3 million lbs. eat into the hillsides while dump trucks carrying 160 tons of coal roar out of the pits 24 hours a day. During the first year of operation in 1977, Arco took 40,000 tons out of its Black Thunder mine. It has now extracted 1 1 million tons, and will take out 20 million tons...
...Department of Energy predicts that by 1985, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah will produce 316 million tons of coal a year, compared with 22 million tons in 1967. After the digging is finished, the whole landscape will have to be rebuilt. "We'll just widen the valley some and drop the hills," says George Larsen of Arco, "and the land will just be 40 feet lower...
...coal and oil shale are only part of the Mountain West's buried wealth. Ninety-one percent of the nation's uranium lies in the Mountain West, with New Mexico and Utah supplying most of the region's ore. From Arizona comes more than half of all the copper dug in the U.S. each year; the Kennecott Copper Corp.'s Bingham Canyon open-pit mine in Utah, at two miles wide and a half-mile deep, the largest excavation in the world, alone has produced copper-over 11 million tons-than any other mine in history...
...craft shops flourish and stores sell wooden tubs for outdoor bathing. Newcomers may even revive an entire town in their image. Twenty-five miles south of Santa Fe, in the Ortiz Mountains, lies the hamlet of Madrid (pop. 250). Until 1955, the community scraped together a living from nearby coal mines, but when the coal business fizzled, Madrid faded away. In 1975 an enterprising group of outsiders began buying the hillsides and the abandoned, ramshackle miners' cottages. Today the sound of power saws and drills echoes through the valley as the new pioneers rebuild their ghost town. Melvin Johnson...