By Kara Choquette
Director, Communications and Government Relations, Power Company of Wyoming LLC, TransWest Express LLC
Many wonderful reasons exist to explore Carbon County. Energy Day at the Carbon County Fair to be held August 5 is a reminder that energy, past and present, is another theme to discover or rediscover our region.
Carbon County has been an energy county since its founding. According to Wyohistory.org, Wyoming’s first coal-mining town, called Carbon, “was founded in 1868 and named for the rich reserves mined there.” Like the town, Carbon County earned its name from coal and became one of the original five counties of Wyoming Territory on Dec. 16, 1868. The construction of the Union Pacific Railroad across Carbon County gave the region a new ability to export resources to outside markets and create local economic opportunities.
The County’s heritage as a minerals producer continued and has evolved into Carbon County being one of Wyoming’s major “power players.” Today, the county is home to multiple oil and gas developments, the HF Sinclair Refinery, nearly 1,200 megawatts of wind power capacity with more wind power on the way, two hydropower plants with a combined 87 MW of power generation capacity, and several major interstate natural gas pipelines, electric power lines and fiber optic lines.
The County honors legacy resources, with the coal story best told at the Hanna Basin Museum, or the copper mining history explained at the Grand Encampment Museum. Copper is a critical element in the power industry. The Medicine Bow Museum reminds visitors uranium is important to the energy world along with the railroad.
Besides visiting Carbon County’s museums, you can follow in the footsteps of Thomas Edison – inventor of the incandescent light bulb – if you drive the Battle Pass/Highway 70, an area that inspired his invention. If you drive Highway 30 or take Highway 13, you can see the County’s existing wind farms, which are among our county’s biggest non-mineral property taxpayers. Take notice of the active oil and gas wells off Highway 789, which have provided hundreds of millions of dollars of severance tax revenues to the County over the decades. Other energy sites are identified in the Energy Map in this edition that you may want to learn about.
According to the Wyoming Department of Revenue 2023 Annual Report, the total assessed valuation of minerals in Carbon County was $340,532,416. In the non-mineral industrial categories, “major electrics” – which includes the existing wind farms – was the top taxpayer with a total assessed valuation of $127,194,185. The other top non-mineral industries after “major electrics” in Carbon County were: No. 2 Petroleum Manufacturing; No. 3 Oil and Gas Extraction; No. 4 Railroads; and No. 5 Gas Pipelines.
Energy Day at the Carbon County Fair is from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., and many different companies that work in the energy industry will be there to talk about their industry’s contributions to Carbon County.
