INDUSTRY: New Life in Wyoming

Wearing the hard hat and leather belt of a lineman, Wyoming’s Republican Senator Frank A. Barrett stepped up to a control panel in Casper, Wyo. last week. There he threw a switch inaugurating the biggest power transmission project in the history of his state, a 251-mile-long line linking Casper with Billings, Mont. At Billings the $7,200,000 line of the Pacific Power & Light Co. hooks into the big Pacific Northwest power pool. Next year the line will be extended from Casper to nearby Glenrock, Wyo., to link up a $23 million steam electric plant which Pacific Power is rushing to completion. With the new plant operating, Wyoming’s electric generating capacity will increase 50%, transforming the state from a power-deficit area, shunned by industry, to a highly attractive power-surplus area.

Rodeos to Generators. Boosting electrical output is a key phase in the drive to industrialize the state that is eighth largest in area but 47th in population. With only 321,000 inhabitants, Wyoming has long been known for its rodeos, dude ranches, and Yellowstone National Park. But industrially it lags far behind the rest of the nation and its Rocky Mountain neighbors. A few years back the people of Wyoming decided to take matters into their own hands. One result was the election in 1954 of Republican Governor Milward Lee Simpson, 59.

An outspoken critic of the kind of exploitative industrialization that Westerners blame for dotting their country with mining and timber ghost towns, Simpson is at the same time a tireless exponent of responsible economic development. In his administration Wyoming, already friendly toward new investment, made the welcome well-nigh irresistible. Against a tendency of other Rocky Mountain states to “make industry pay” by levying special taxes, e.g., a severance tax on minerals taken out of the ground and shipped away, Wyoming hewed to an exceptionally favorable tax policy supported by Democrats as well as Republicans. Not only is there no severance tax, but Wyoming has no personal or corporate income tax, and no bonded indebtedness.

Another result was the rise of citizens’ groups to seek industry. One of the most dramatic successes was in tiny Glenrock (pop. 1,500). With its chief industry, an outdated oil refinery employing about 60 persons, scheduled to close, Glenrock merchants set up a committee to get new industries that could use the area’s big coal deposits.

When a group of townspeople asked Pacific Power & Light, which had recently bought out local Wyoming electric utility interests, to build a coal-fired steam electric plant at Glenrock, the company had no more idea of complying, said one company official, “than we had of flying to the moon.” But, for the sake of public relations, the company agreed to send geologists. Their reports were eye-popping. Within 15 miles of an ideal plant site were 50 million tons of coal in fat seams, close enough to the surface to be mined by power shovels. Last year Pacific Power broke ground for its new steam plant, whose 17-story boiler-house will be the highest building in Wyoming.

New Stirrings. The Glenrock story was repeated in dozens of Wyoming towns. Midway between Casper and Lander the Lucky Mc Uranium Co. is building a $37,000,000 uranium processing mill, one of five new mills or expansions of mills that Wyoming is asking the Atomic Energy Commission to authorize. Davison Chemical Co., subsidiary of the W. R. Grace Co., is building a $2,000,000 sulphuric acid plant in Casper to provide acid for processing uranium. Intermountain Chemical Co. is expanding its 300,000-ton soda ash plant near Rock Springs to 500,000 tons. U.S. Steel’s Columbia-Geneva Steel Division is thinking of building a huge mill in Fremont County, 8,300 ft. above sea level, to mine taconite, a low-grade but processable iron ore of vast extent. Also on the horizon: a new Reynolds Metals aluminum reduction plant near Lake DeSmet, using electricity from coal.

Said Governor Simpson: “Everywhere new stirrings, new enthusiasms, new capital investments.”