For 37 years and counting, U.S. power plants have burned more coal from Wyoming than from any other state. The millions of tons loaded each year onto thousands of trains and distributed to hundreds of buyers have afforded Americans steady access to the many, multiplying conveniences of modern life.

Lower in toxic sulfur compounds than its East Coast counterpart and possible to mine at an unmatched scale, Powder River Basin coal rose between the close of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st as a natural source of pride, and wealth, for Wyoming.

The big paychecks and good benefits dispensed by coal mines supported entire families. Power plants situated at the mouths of those mines kept utility bills low. The mines’ tax dollars built Wyoming’s schools and, along with oil and natural gas companies, pumped enough revenue into the state economy that individuals remained largely off the hook.

“We have so much money in the state coffers that came in from energy,” said U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo. “We’re committed to make sure those resources don’t get stranded and [are] able to be used for the benefit of all the people of the state. And coal’s a big part of that.”

Almost all of Wyoming’s coal — over 96% in 2021 — comes from Campbell County, where Peabody Energy’s North Antelope Rochelle Mine and Arch Resources’ Black Thunder Mine have competed with each other for the title of most productive coal mine in the country. Seven more Campbell County mines also rank in the top 15 nationwide.

Every one of those mines opened between 1972 and 1985, bringing with them abundant blue-collar jobs that paid roughly double the state average and catapulting Gillette, Campbell County’s lone city, from a population of 7,194 in 1970 to 17,545 in 1990, and to 33,403 by 2020, U.S. Census data shows.

“Arch Coal treated our family amazing,” said Shay Lundvall, Gillette’s newly elected mayor.

(The company changed its name from Arch Coal to Arch Resources in 2020 to reflect a shift in focus away from its Wyoming and Colorado operations and toward its metallurgical mines in West Virginia, which produce a different type of coal used chiefly for steelmaking.)

A few summers at Black Thunder in the early 2000s, when the Wyoming coal industry was nearing its peak, paid Lundvall’s way through college. His father worked at the mine for more than 25 years.

“We have a lot of loyalty to Arch Coal, and Black Thunder, and the staff, and the higher management,” Lundvall, who now works for a heavy equipment construction company, said. “We couldn’t have asked for a better life.”

Every person in Wyoming has benefited, directly or indirectly, from coal money. But with most of the U.S. electricity sector now building toward a future after coal, Wyoming’s dominance — along with its income — is fading fast. State leaders have tried over and over again to do something more than patch the state economy. Over and over again, those efforts have fallen short.

Wyoming’s adversary isn’t a single political figure. It’s not even a single administration. In its quest to save coal, the least populated U.S. state has instead found itself increasingly at odds with the direction of the national economy. The average American wants coal use, or at least coal’s emissions, to come down.

The market for Wyoming’s coal has been shrinking for more than a decade. Production in 2021 barely amounted to half its 2008 peak, and the experts keeping a close eye on state revenue predict that coal yield will halve again before 2030.

Electric utilities across the country have already set plans in motion to eliminate about one-third of the state’s surviving coal demand in those next seven years, a Star-Tribune analysis of publicly announced retirement dates found. Many U.S. coal plants are also likely to see their operations curtailed ahead of, or in place of, retirement.

The White House has changed hands three times since 2008. No federal administration has made much of a difference. Coal markets, buoyed by temporary global factors largely beyond any president’s control, have stabilized more under President Joe Biden than they did under President Donald Trump.

But Wyoming’s coal sales still ceased for good to about a dozen power plants in 2022. Well over 30 more of the state’s legacy buyers are set to shut down this decade. The entire electricity landscape is changing — fast.

In 2008, the U.S. generated just over 48% of its electricity from coal, according to federal data. That share fell to about 22% by 2021, as utilities around the country retired aging coal plants and replaced them mostly with natural gas, wind and solar.

Wyoming tried to resist the shift. But it ships the vast majority of its coal, often upwards of 97%, to the electricity sector. Only a tiny fraction goes to other industrial users.

With the country’s need for coal dwindling, Wyoming’s coal production sank from 467.6 million short tons in 2008 to 238.8 million in 2021. The number of people working at the state’s mines dropped by a third during the same 13-year period.

“The jobs are important,” Barrasso said. “The energy is needed.” His priority, he said, is “to make sure that coal is a viable part of our energy mix long into the future.” It’s a mission most of the state’s voters support, not least because the fate of the Wyoming economy is intertwined with that of the coal industry.

About half of the state’s annual revenue comes from mineral extraction: Roughly one-third each from coal, oil and natural gas, plus a smaller contribution from industries like soda ash and bentonite.

Wyoming’s coal mines pay a state severance tax of 6.5% and a property tax of roughly 6%. Most are located on federal land and subject to a 12.5% federal mineral royalty, of which the state receives just under half. And all the mines pay sales tax on equipment and other purchases.

In the industry’s heyday, the state earned in the ballpark of $1 billion per year just from coal. Coal severance tax revenue alone has dropped by $100 million since 2009. Total losses tied to the industry in each of the last few years reached at least triple or quadruple that toll.

But coal revenue still underpins most state and local functions. It has an outsized role in funding Wyoming’s public education, in large part because, before the 2010s, stable prices kept coal revenue more dependable as an income source than oil or natural gas.

The state also bankrolled school construction using the bonuses coal companies paid when leasing new lands. Coal lease bonus revenue, which peaked above $200 million annually in the early 2010s, enriched school districts across the state. For a while.

“Those have gone away,” said Don Richards, the Wyoming Legislative Service Office’s budget and fiscal administrator. “We don’t anticipate any more in the foreseeable future.”

Lease bonuses were the first thing to go, Richards said — the “canary in the coal mine” for the rest of the state economy.

In the years since coal money started to nosedive, the Wyoming Legislature has taken some steps to diversify the state budget away from coal. It raised hunting fees to help fund the Game and Fish Department and passed a lodging tax to pay for the Office of Tourism. And, Richards noted, it raised the gasoline tax from 14 cents to 24 cents per gallon to support road work.

“Is it making up all of the losses in coal? No,” Richards said. “Is it incrementally shifting the burden of state government costs onto a different set of constituencies, in this case drivers, as opposed to electric generation? Yes.”

The Wyoming Legislature will consider a bill during the upcoming session to restructure education funding and eliminate the historically lease-bonus-funded construction and maintenance account. State lawmakers killed a separate attempt to plug schools’ widening budgetary holes during the 2022 session.

Lawmakers’ efforts have kept the state budget intact, at least in the immediate future, but if new revenue doesn’t materialize and the coal market’s downward trend continues, state leaders will face a difficult choice: raise taxes or make cuts.

The coal companies operating in the Powder River Basin face two existential problems: climate change and cost.

Coal’s damaged reputation as a climate pollutant is a source of frustration for many in Wyoming. It’s also rooted in fact. Coal was responsible for about 14% of the carbon dioxide — the world’s most abundant greenhouse gas — released into the atmosphere by the U.S. in 2020, according to federal data. The U.S. produced more carbon dioxide that year than any country except China.

For the world to have a shot at limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), a point at which scientists hope will prevent further, uncontrollable warming and escalation of climate impacts like extreme heat waves, droughts and floods, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations, has called for the U.S. and two dozen other countries to end coal use — unless paired with carbon capture — by 2030.

It has since warned that staying below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming will require coal plants without carbon capture to shutter by 2050 worldwide.

Only one commercial U.S. coal plant has been retrofitted with carbon capture technology: NRG Energy’s WA Parish plant in Texas. The plant, which has four coal units, is one of the top recipients of Wyoming’s coal that doesn’t have a set retirement date.

The carbon capture facility located at one WA Parish unit, Petra Nova, shut down in mid-2020 after it became prohibitively expensive to operate, and was sold by the utility this fall. Its new owner, oil and gas company JX Nippon, plans to resume carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery at Petra Nova in the second half of this year, an NRG spokesperson said in an email.

Nationally, the slow uptake of carbon capture stems partly from the fact that coal is already one of the more expensive electricity sources on the market. Even though the price of the technology is dropping rapidly, it’s still more than most utilities are ready to invest. Especially when operating U.S. coal plants are, on average, about 46 years old, and often already scheduled to retire.

High natural gas prices in late 2021 and most of 2022, the result of low U.S. production in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and a spike in international demand following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, gave coal a boost in the electricity market. The unexpected volatility prompted some utilities to delay coal plant retirements in an effort to minimize electricity costs.

But Wyoming’s economic experts don’t expect coal’s resurgence to last longer than a couple more years.

“There’s been a real windfall with the way coal markets were affected by the restart of the economy, and the effect on the natural gas prices and coal demand,” said Rob Godby, an economics professor at the University of Wyoming. The companies running Wyoming’s mines “recognize that’s a temporary thing.”

The state is fighting hard to popularize carbon capture and rescue the fading coal industry before demand drops too low for its mines to sustain, but it’s the underdog in a race against time.

As unpopular as efforts to ditch coal are in Wyoming, there’s only so much the state can do to influence the direction that the power sector is heading.

“You have to have a customer for your coal,” Godby said. The Powder River Basin’s customers are disappearing — and they’re not being replaced.

The Star-Tribune sent questions about each mine’s status, workforce and plans for the future to the owners of Wyoming’s nine biggest mines. Arch, Peabody, Navajo Transitional Energy Company and Eagle Specialty Materials did not respond to requests for comment. Kiewit Corporation declined to participate in this story.

Arch, one of the two publicly traded companies to stay in the Powder River Basin following the region’s recent string of high-profile bankruptcies, has made it clear in recent years that its time in Wyoming is coming to an end. The company hasn’t said when, exactly, it will exit, but it isn’t expected to stick around much longer.

“The problem with Black Thunder Mine is it will need significant reinvestment, and also, eventually, will need new federal leases,” Godby said. “Unless somebody else wants to buy the mining operations, it’s just really not worthwhile to them to really make those investments, so they’ve been very clear that they’ll shut down.”

The state is running out of options to keep Arch — and the other mine owners — operational in the long term.

Federal coal leases are one obstacle. In August, a U.S. district judge reinstated an Obama-era moratorium on most new coal leasing until the Biden administration completes further environmental review. The Biden Interior Department had defended, unsuccessfully, a Trump-era reversal of the moratorium against a challenge from environmental groups, states and the Northern Cheyenne Tribe.

The lack of U.S. coal demand is even more pressing — and convoluted. One solution the coal industry came up with was to export coal to Asia via the West Coast. The idea caught on in the state.

“If there was a port in Washington or Oregon, certainly we would have customers that would take that coal,” said Rusty Bell, a former Campbell County commissioner. “Most of that is out of our hands.”

Local resistance and subsequent permit rejections, fed by concerns about climate change and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, thwarted the industry’s plan. Some in Wyoming are still holding out hope: In 2021, the Wyoming Legislature set aside $1.2 million for “commencing and prosecuting lawsuits against other states and other states’ agencies that … impermissibly impede Wyoming’s ability to export coal or that cause the early retirement of coal-fired generation facilities located in Wyoming.”

State lawmakers rejected an attempt last year to greatly expand the scope of the law. They will consider the same bill again during the 2023 session.

The coastal states, meanwhile, have long since moved on.

“A coal export terminal has not been proposed in Oregon for years,” Laura Gleim, public affairs specialist at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said in an email. Oregon, she added, has not wavered on the rigorous environmental standards that past proposals were unable to meet.

As export efforts stumbled, former State Rep. Tim Hallinan of Gillette tried several times to push a different industry-backed approach through the Legislature. He finally succeeded during the 2022 session in lowering the severance tax on coal from 7% to 6.5%, a change that went into effect last July.

“The coal industry has paid a heavy price here in the state of Wyoming,” Hallinan said. “I was thinking that they needed to have some kind of help. … And that by taxing it in excess, we’re making it hard for them to operate and stay in business.”

Hallinan still stands firm behind the bill, which was deemed futile by environmental groups, and remains confident the tax cut is in the best interests of his former constituents. The hope, he said, is that sacrificing roughly $10 million per year in revenue will buy the state time to come up with a more permanent solution.

“I think it’s a very important change,” he said. “It’s not completely what’s going to be needed to keep these companies in business.”

Miracles aside, the Wyoming researchers determined to save coal have set their sights on one last strategy with the potential to slow, or even reverse, its downward spiral in the power sector. If carbon capture technology can be proven affordable and effective enough, at least for the country’s newer coal plants, the market might just respond.

It’s a tall order. State leaders, however, appear undaunted.

“It is far too quick to sort of write coal off at this point,” said Gov. Mark Gordon. “There may be some time in the future when it isn’t as big a contributor to the national energy picture. But it’s pretty premature to write the death of the coal industry right now.”

He’s confident, he said, in “our ability to transform the technology so that it stays relevant.”

Wyoming has been trying for years to do exactly that. It’s up against a challenge that, today, is more economic than political.

The Biden administration, disdained as it is in the state, has done little on the policy front to sway utilities’ plans for their coal plants. It hasn’t needed to. Between state and local regulations and the realities of the electricity market, the shift is already underway.

But federal officials have come to Wyoming’s aid on carbon capture. In 2022 alone, they announced billions of dollars in funding for carbon capture initiatives, though not necessarily aimed at coal. The Biden-backed (and Wyoming-opposed) Inflation Reduction Act, enacted in August, also gave a major boost to existing tax credits aimed at carbon capture and storage projects.

No one wants to “end up in a place in 10 or 15 years, looking back in Wyoming, and saying, ‘Well, we should have gotten ahead of the curve here,’” said Brian Anderson, who heads both the National Energy Technology Laboratory and the Biden administration’s working group on coal communities.

“It’s a complicated transition, and we’re putting federal resources specifically hand in hand with states and communities, not to tell anyone what they’re supposed to do, but to just unlock what the opportunities are,” he said.

Wyoming is still in a position to try to preserve the jobs the coal industry supports and the revenue it provides, said Jason Begger, director of the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, a facility that enables carbon capture developers to test their technology on flue gas from Dry Fork Station, the state’s youngest power plant.

The Integrated Test Center and the many carbon capture and storage projects in the works at the University of Wyoming position the state at the forefront of the burgeoning industry. Those closest to Wyoming’s work on carbon capture are careful not to sell its prospects short. But they don’t want to promise too much, either.

“I think we’ve got to realize that the days of 480 million tons a year are over,” Begger said. “There’s just no way that market is coming back. The amount of power plants that it would take to construct to consume that amount of coal is just pretty unfeasible.”

The Integrated Test Center serves as a launching point for technologies with the potential to chart Wyoming’s path forward and a valuable foothold in an industry with a wide range of possible applications, he said.

“Do I think that a company that comes in and does some testing there and it’s really successful is going to move down the road and open up a large manufacturing facility, building whatever technology they came up with? No. But I do think that we need places like the ITC to do that critical sort of research,” he said.

The carbon capture advancements taking place at the Integrated Test Center might even shape the future of the plant that hosts it.

Dry Fork Station came online in 2011, two years before the completion of the last planned U.S. coal plant. If things go as Wyoming hopes, the installation of carbon capture at facilities like those will stave off expected closures until utilities start to replace them with new, novel coal plants that capture carbon by design.

“There’s lots of debates, whether that makes sense or not, or if there’s cheaper solutions or not,” Begger said. “Ultimately, the market will determine where things head.”

Wyoming’s influence over the market is limited, even within the state, by the reality that its coal plants barely make a dent in total demand. Responsible for almost three-quarters of the state’s electricity output in 2021, they consumed less than 8% of its coal.

Many also face looming retirement dates — against state lawmakers’ wishes — as both of the state’s regulated electric utilities, Rocky Mountain Power and Black Hills Energy, advance sustainability goals that include cutting back on coal. Both have considered carbon capture. And both deemed it prohibitively expensive.

Basin Electric Power Cooperative, the generation and transmission wholesaler that operates Wyoming’s Dry Fork Station and Laramie River Station, is involved in an effort to expand carbon capture use at Dry Fork.

It hasn’t made any arrangements for carbon capture at the larger and older Laramie River Station, according to spokesperson Tracie L. Bettenhausen.

“Our current plans are to run the Wyoming coal units to end of life, but we continuously look for the most reliable and economical means to serve our members,” Bettenhausen said in an email.

Rocky Mountain Power and Black Hills Energy are taking a different approach. The utilities have set or are considering deadlines to stop burning coal at two of four units at Rock Springs’ Jim Bridger plant by 2024, Kemmerer’s Naughton plant and Gillette’s Neil Simpson II plant in 2025 and Glenrock’s Dave Johnston plant in 2027.

In total, those closures and conversions will erase roughly one-third of Wyoming’s internal coal demand, mostly from smaller, at-risk mines in Sweetwater and Lincoln counties that still employ hundreds of workers.

But both utilities are also studying whether carbon capture would be affordable to install at a handful of their coal facilities — Rocky Mountain Power at one Dave Johnston unit and two Jim Bridger units and Black Hills Energy at the much smaller Neil Simpson II and Wygen II plants — in compliance with a 2020 state law. Basin Electric, like all Wyoming electric cooperatives, is exempt.

Rocky Mountain Power and Black Hills Energy have each raised doubts about whether carbon capture is the right choice for their facilities. The Rocky Mountain Power units are all more than 40 years old and nearing the ends of their expected lives. Operating the technology is likely to consume a substantial chunk of the Black Hills plants’ already limited electricity supply.

A key worry for the utilities is that investing in carbon capture will hike customer costs without having any significant impact on reliability.

The results of future economic analyses will determine how big a share of those costs could be borne by residents of Wyoming, the only state that has passed a law requiring utilities to either install carbon capture or prove that doing so would harm ratepayers.

“When that becomes really economical for customers, we’re fully supportive,” Kyra Coyle, Black Hills Energy’s director of regulatory and finance, told the Wyoming Public Service Commission, the state entity that regulates utilities and has been charged with enforcing the carbon capture law, at a public hearing in October. “We feel like we’re not quite there yet.”

Rocky Mountain Power, meanwhile, has another predicament to contend with.

Its sister company, Pacific Power, supplies electricity to almost 800,000 households and businesses in Washington, Oregon and California — five and a half times its Wyoming customer base. Washington law bans power generated from coal by 2025. In Oregon, the deadline is 2035. In California, it’s 2045.

The utility has yet to raise the issue of carbon capture with its West Coast regulators, James Owen, the utilities’ vice president of environmental fuels and mining, told the commission during a separate October hearing. How those states respond could shape eventual electricity prices in Wyoming.

That “is a very complicated calculation with a lot of variables that we haven’t undertaken right now,” he said.

For Wyoming’s carbon capture mandate, utility approval is only the first hurdle. Paying for it is a whole different problem. As the coal industry clings to life in the Powder River Basin, whether the state finds enough customers willing to fund its vision could still decide everything — at least when it comes to electricity.