I am shocked at the number of coal fired power plants in the 4-Corners areas have been shut down. From Page AZ to Farmington NM. There are still vast areas of mineable coal in those areas but they have been locked up in quickie “National Monuments”.
They tried to shut down our plant here in the Ozarks, but it is the least cost power generated so the company added lots of new equipment to keep it running even though that new equipment was not needed before Obama.
When I entered the power business in ‘73 after graduating with an ME, the Four Corners area was the big hot spot. The environmentalists succeeded in getting a lot land taken out of consideration for mining. The historical controversy over coal extraction on the plateau began quietly in 1964 -with a proposal from Southern California Edison known as the Kaiparowits Power Project. Later Dutch energy company Andalex Resources planned a 10,000-acre strip mine on the plateau near the town of Kanab, Utah. Andalex intended to mine Kaiparowits coal and ship it to Japan and other countries.
Then, on September 18, 1996, Clinton stood outside announced his intention to proclaim more than 1.7 million acres of south-central Utah as the Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument. In the center of the new monument was the Kaiparowits Plateau, a 5,000 square-mile collection of mountains, mesas, and sandstone canyons.
Here we are decades later, and the area is an energy desert.