Once again, Wyoming lawmakers disagreed on how to “save” coal, failing to move forward a draft bill that would have repealed current state law.
The legislature’s interim Joint Minerals, Business & Economic Development committee spent the morning of July 29 deliberating the state of the coal industry.
“The new administration has released the yoke off of Wyoming,” said Rep. Christopher Knapp (R-Gillette) to his fellow 12 committee members.
Knapp was referring to Pres. Trump’s rollback of federal regulations on the coal industry and incentives for the renewable industry. Most recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to reverse the agency’s 2009 finding that climate pollution endangers people. The basis for much of the federal government’s actions on climate change since.
“So why wouldn't, I guess, why wouldn’t we follow suit?,” said Knapp.
Knapp’s most recent draft bill proposes to roll back Wyoming law that was originally intended to “save” coal, something the committee loosely previewed at its May meeting. Knapp argues that it’s only hindering the industry.
The 2020 law in question was created by HB 200. It set into state law that electricity providers, Rocky Mountain Power and Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power, had to consider carbon capture technology for their Wyoming coal plants.
“Before you can just close a coal fired power plant, you have to evaluate whether carbon capture is a viable economic part of your portfolio,” said Gov. Gordon’s policy director Randall Luthi to lawmakers in a re-cap of HB 200’s history.
In 2019, the six-state utility PacifiCorp, the parent company of Wyoming’s top electricity provider Rocky Mountain Power, was planning to shut down 20 of its 24 coal units by 2038. Largely because the nation’s coal plants are aging and demand for coal has been waning, even under the first Trump administration.
Wyoming is the top producer of the nation’s coal supply and it's the backbone of the state’s economy. As federal and other state policies tamped down on coal and market preferences shifted toward more environmentally friendly energy sources, Wyoming lawmakers feared what the repercussions meant for the state’s top industry.
Luthi called HB 200 part of “Wyoming’s plan”. The hope was the utilities would study the feasibility of carbon capture technology, and eventually use it to create a “cleaner” product.
In the five years since, the utilities have put in the research. But it isn’t straight forward. The technology for capturing CO2 emissions from coal stacks is novel, and largely unproven on a commercial scale. Just to research it has cost Wyomingites money. Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power testified to lawmakers that its customers had to pay about a million dollars as a result.
The company ultimately determined the technology isn’t viable. Not only would it decrease the energy efficiency of a coal unit by about 30%, it’d cost them about $500 million to install a retrofit. That cost would likely be absorbed by the company’s 45,000 Wyoming customers, not its customers in neighboring states, as they aren’t mandating carbon capture.
Rocky Mountain Power has echoed similar sentiments in years prior, but is still determining if the technology is viable. The company testified in the committee meeting that they’d know for certain by 2027.
Knapp pointed to this uncertainty as to why Wyoming should roll back this mandate.
“If nobody has come up with a plan yet, and it's been five years, if nobody has even gone beyond a plan, aren't we really wasting a lot of time and money based on conjecture,” said Knapp. “For now it does nothing to add cost to the end user for energy and so for that reason I’d ask for a repeal.”
Knapp told lawmakers that coal doesn’t need “saving” under Pres. Trump as he’s repealing “clean” energy federal requirements.
“Why would we continue to charge the end user for something that probably will not pan out?,” Knapp said. “Why not let the free market actually take care of that?”
But other lawmakers pushed back, saying all this could change under a new president. Also, just because the Trump administration is changing policies, it doesn’t necessarily mean the market preferences for cleaner energy will change.
Rocky Mountain Power testified that the policy changes from administration to administration feel like a “whipsaw.” And that despite not being the biggest initial fans of HB 200, the company doesn’t support a full repeal.
“We believe there is some value in completing the work that we've begun. There's some value in finding out if this technology is viable because of
the whipsaw that we are experiencing. We don't know what could happen in three years or eight or more,” said Thom Carter, Rocky Mountain Power’s vice president of government affairs. “So we'd like to continue so we can answer the question if it comes up again, ‘Does this [technology] work or could it work or could it be beneficial for our ratepayers?’"
Ultimately, the repeal failed. For an interim joint committee to decide to sponsor a bill, there has to be a majority in favor in both the house and senate members. While all of the representatives voted in favor, four of the five senate members voted no so the draft bill died.
This is the third attempt this year to repeal HB 200. The first two were during the full 2025 legislative session.
