This fall, Colorado State University’s (CSU) Dan Zimmerle received a letter from the federal government informing him that his research grants were cancelled. He said it was a shock.
“We've worked with the Department of Energy (DOE) across multiple administrations, both Republican and Democratic administrations,” said Zimmerle, director of CSU’s Methane Emissions Technology Evaluation Center in Fort Collins. “We've never had our projects that were ongoing just out of the blue get canceled.”
He said two of his multi-year research projects that benefit Wyoming depend on the $17 million the federal government is cutting. It’s part of a larger culling of 321 other DOE awards totalling nearly $8 billion, with an additional 300 or so sitting in limbo, according to Politico reporting.
Wyoming Public Radio reviewed Latitude Media’s published version of the list of projects that were cut or in limbo, and identified that as many as 11 or more impact Wyoming projects.
“Following a thorough, individualized financial review, DOE determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” according to a DOE October press release.
But Zimmerle fundamentally disagrees.
In a nutshell, his team goes into oil and gas fields – often in Wyoming – and finds more efficient ways to detect problems on the facilities and “help companies understand what the origin of those problems were.”
Specifically, they focus on downwind emissions that can help signal operational issues.
“We work with regulators, operators, the federal government's research funding, NGOs, and we are in that neutral ground in the middle that allows everybody to kind of look at the facts and communicate on a factual basis with each other,” Zimmerle said. “It's not a controversial space, frankly.”
For example, they worked with operators in western Wyoming’s Upper Green River Basin for about a decade. The area is home to the state’s top natural gas production, but it’s historically had emissions and air quality problems, too. In 2011, the nearby community of Pinedale had higher ozone levels than L.A., and residents were feeling the health impacts.
Industry has since faced strict federal and state regulations on emissions. Zimmerle said it’s both in the interest of operators and the general public.
“It's very important to detect those problems quickly. That reduces the amount of product you lose because it went into the atmosphere, but it also just improves the efficiency of operating the facilities,” he said.
Zimmerle added that companies in the Upper Green River Basin are now considered world leaders in emissions monitoring, “and we've worked with all of them at some point.” In 2021, one of the main operators, Jonah Energy, received international recognition for their work.
Zimmerle’s team was helping to champion that work.
“Part of what you [a company] need[s] to do is describe to the world that the process you're using is actually working, whether that be the regulator like EPA or Wyoming DEQ, or to the people who are buying your gas product or your oil product, that you're doing a good job,” Zimmerle said. “The research we were doing was to show that the control methods that those companies were using have a substantial impact on their emissions.”
In 2012, Zimmerle said nobody clearly understood how to measure and find problems on oil and gas facilities. Now, companies know quite a bit, in part thanks to Zimmerle’s team’s decade-plus research.
“It was very nearly complete,” he added. “What's missing now is that final capstone result that would be very useful to those producers, to basically describe how the investments they've made have paid off.”
But that work, much of it focused in Wyoming, is indefinitely paused. Zimmerle said about fourth-fifths of the funding hinged on the cancelled federal dollars.
“The form letters essentially said it doesn't align with [the Trump] administration priorities, period,” he said, noting the president’s ‘Unleashing American Energy’ executive order. “I don't understand that, because they're actually helping companies operate more efficiently.”
Previous iterations of that federal funding had stretched across multiple administrations – Obama, Trump’s first presidency and Biden – Zimmerle said.
He added there might be some future state or industry funding opportunities to finish up the research. But that’s still unknown.
“It's difficult for a producer, particularly small producers in the Upper Green, to suddenly come up with the other four-fifths of [funding for] the project,” he said.
That means Zimmerle and his team have a lot less work to do right now, as well as less dollars to keep everyone staffed.
“A fair number of people here at CSU will lose their jobs because of the termination of funding in my group,” Zimmerle said, adding that he wasn’t sure the exact number of layoffs yet.
The possible nine other energy related grants, which could potentially impact Wyoming, were either formally nixed or put on an unofficial list. The latter Zimmerle referred to as a “limbo” list, and said DOE won’t answer questions about those projects’ status.
Those projects are being managed by these groups: Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, Membrane Technology and Research, TDA Research, PacifiCorp, Institute of Gas Technology and the University of Wyoming.
The projects range from improved electricity grid resiliency to emissions reduction to carbon capture technology development. Several were based at the Wyoming Integrated Test Center in Gillette.
When reached for comment, several of the grant recipients declined to share a statement at this time. However, Tri-State did confirm their $26.8 million Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships Program federal award was terminated by the DOE in early October.
“The award would have offset some of the costs of implementing our demand response and load management programs, and other tools to optimize the system. We had been working with DOE over the last two years on the award, after being selected in October 2023,” according to a press release.
In an email to WPR, Tri-State said the grant was geared toward their multi-state power system that includes Wyoming, New Mexico, Nebraska and Colorado. The company is a power supply cooperative that serves electric co-ops to more than a million users.
The DOE didn’t respond to WPR by press time.
The Environmental Defense Fund, along with five other groups, filed a lawsuit against the federal government over the issue in early November. Shortly after, they asked the court for a preliminary injunction, which would block the funding from being eliminated while the court hears the case. The court is still deliberating the request.
