Transportation
The CO2 Underground
Carbon Capture Remains Elusive
The U.S. Department of Energy will fund a 10-year, $38 million project to study the long-term storage of carbon dioxide in deep geologic formations on the Gulf Coast. For the next 18 months, the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas will pump about a million tons a year of CO2 into brine formations up to 10,000 feet below ground, near the Cranfield oil field about 15 miles east of Natchez, Miss.
Capturing and storing 60 percent of the CO2 emitted by U.S. coal-fired power plants would require the transport and disposal of a daily volume roughly equal to U.S. oil consumption per day, according to an MIT report.
Texas alone could hold 40 years' worth of US emissions.
In other energy news: shale-oil exploration still only prospective on the Western Slope; Gov. Ritter appoints an environmentalist to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission; and state lawmakers try to head off uranium mining in Northern Colorado.
[more]
Monday Business Roundup
November Nightmare for Ski ResortsThe ski resorts of the Mountain West are looking at millions of dollars in lost revenue as unseasonably warm temperatures and an almost complete lack of snow pushes back opening dates for the region's major resorts. This is especially troubling in a year when resorts across the region have invested hundreds of millions in new developments and upgrades in hopes of luring more visitors.
Telluride became the latest ski area to postpone its opening when it said on Friday its planned opening date of Thanksgiving Day is unrealistic given the lack of snow.
Many mountain operators were hoping for a big dump early this week to allow for Thanksgiving skiing – but it now appears that the real snow will happen only in the far northern Rockies, bypassing Colorado and Utah.
In other business news: DIA beefs up its snow-handling force; big labor creates a "behemoth" union for state employees; and Boulder minds the gap between revenue levels and relatively lavish city services.
[more]
Coal Is Still King
Solar Future Suddenly CloudyCoal up, solar down – that's the message from the markets and the media this week, as solar-power companies face a possible expiration of the tax credits for solar investments, while coal producers and coal plants continue to boom despite the looming threat of carbon-emissions caps.
The Solar Energy Industries Association posted an alert on its Web site citing "widespread reports" that the long-awaited energy bill being laboriously squeezed through Congress will not include a measure to extend the Solar Investment Tax Credits.
Meanwhile The Economist reports that for all the news about states in the U.S. delaying or canceling the construction of new coal-fired plants, coal is still king (Sub. req.) in much of the world. "Utilities in both [the U.S. and Western Europe] are running their coal-fired plants at full throttle, have several new ones under construction and would like to build even more," the influential British newsweekly reports.
In other energy news: Western governors team for TV ads pushing energy policy legislation in Congress; "micro-hydro" makes a comeback in the Roaring Fork Valley; and the process of divvying up state oil and gas revenue in Colorado goes on, and on, and on...
[more]
BWAM!
Bike Walk Alliance for Missoula Begins to RollThe Bike/Walk Alliance for Missoula, one of this town’s newest non-profits, has an admirable mission, eager volunteers and already more than 90 members. It also arguably has one of the worst acronyms -- BWAM -- of any local organization (a quick Google search shows a Missouri-based bike group of the motorized variety and a definition in the Urban Dictionary that can’t be printed here).
We’ll try not to hold that against them. After all, Missoula needs all the help it can get improving its bicycle and pedestrian network. The group’s organizers also throw a really good chili dinner, which NewWest.Net attended last weekend. The event served as launching point of sorts for the group, which officially formed last year but had yet to host any community gathering like this one.
[more]
ENVISION MISSOULA
Workshop Looks at Land-Use and Missoula’s Transportation Future
More public transportation. More bike lanes. Higher density housing developments. Fewer traffic jams. Is this the future of Missoula County?
The broad consensus of attendees of the Envision Missoula workshop held at the University of Montana Tuesday night agreed that it ought to be.
The workshop, sponsored in part by the Office of Planning and Grants (OPG), offered Missoulians a chance to share their visions of what Missoula will look like when the population eventually doubles to 200,000, and to discuss how questions of land-use are tied to Missoula’s transportation future.
The data gathered at the workshop -- which will repeat Wednesday and Thursday -- will be used to help inform Missoula's 2008 long range transportation plan update.
[more]
SMARTER GROWTH
Contextual Design Lends to Vibrant Communities, Healthy Landscapes
Checkerboard subdivisions and fragmented open space spotted with homes is not a popular development plan for the Northern Rockies.
Owners dividing large tracts of land to create smaller lots to sell to buyers became widespread post World War II. This formalized method of expansion assisted in cities rapidly growing suburbs into surrounding farmland.
The problem: The old approach did not address the overall impacts and ignored the need for a comprehensive approach to planning communities – hence, it created rural sprawl.
The lesson: develop in town, or when it happens in rural areas, reduce the impacts through good design.
Through the Sonoran Institute’s research in Building from the Best of the Northern Rockies book project, the group has witnessed a remarkable renaissance of well-designed neighborhoods and subdivisions in the region.
[more]
Hurdles For E-Trains
Light Rail Loses Its Green LusterBackers of Northern Colorado's ambitious FasTracks plans for light rail spidering out from downtown Denver cannot be pleased with the results of this week's referendum in Washington State.
There, voters soundly rejected a long-term, multi-billion-dollar mass transit plan for Seattle that had as its centerpiece the Puget Sound's first light-rail system. Notably, among the groups expressing doubts about the "Roads & Transit" Proposition 1 were environmentalists like the Sierra Group.
In other energy news: Gov. Ritter unveils his Climate Plan while seeking middle ground with the oil and gas industry, and energy prices hit an unfortunate trifecta with gasoline, heating oil, and diesel fuel all topping $3 a gallon.
[more]
OPG Wants You!
Citizens Urged to Help in Missoula’s Transportation PlanningIf the population of Missoula County continues to grow at around 1.5 percent annually, which the state of Montana predicts it will, the county will double in size -- to 200,000 residents -- somewhere between 2050 and 2065.
“At some point in time,” said Roger Millar, director of the Missoula Office of Planning and Grants (OPG), “there are going to be 100,000 more people in the Missoula area.”
“At that point, when they are here, what do we want to see? Where do we want to see them living? Where to we want to see them working? To see them playing?”
OPG is preparing a long-range transportation plan to address how these questions of land-use are tied to Missoula’s transportation future, and invite Missoulians to share their ideas at interactive mapping workshops to be held in the middle of the month on the University of Montana campus.
[more]
Connecting the Greater Yellowstone Area
Meeting Focuses on Regional Biofuel Public Transportation
With the hopes of creating a network of public biofuel transportation systems throughout the Greater Yellowstone Area—particularly between Livingston, Bozeman and Gardiner—local government officials and citizens held a community meeting at the Livingston Public Library on Friday, October 19, 2007.
The City of Livingston and Park County are currently involved in a Transportation Advisory Committee with David Kack of the Western Transportation Institute and Bozeman’s Streamline bus service. The committee’s goal is to provide a commuter bus service between Livingston, Bozeman and Gardiner.
[more]
Offering free classes and parts
The Bozeman Bike Kitchen Assists Youth and Community
When Taylor Lonsdale and Emily Harrington were researching community cycle centers across the country to help create a model for their own, they came across the Missoula Free Cycle Web site. Their first piece of advice: Have a space before you have all those bikes.
For its first year, The Bozeman Bike Kitchen, a free community center to build and repair bikes, was operating out of Harrington’s driveway. As more donations came in, they quickly outgrow the space and needed a place to store their growing collection of bikes, bike parts and tools.
This summer, the center found a home on a plot of land where every Tuesday evening, the doors have been opened for every member of the community to build and repair bikes.
More than a bike shop, the organization hopes to promote bike advocacy through fostering the budding relationship with the Bozeman School District and local students by possibly integrating bike safety and mechanical education, especially those at risk of not graduating, in order to have a place to pursue a life-long skill and gain confidence.
[more]
