By Emily Atkin | Climate Progress
Last week, Climate Progress published a story detailing an Australian company’s proposed underground coal gasification (UCG) plant in Campbell County, Wyoming. The plant would create synthetic natural gas out of coal that is buried too deep for surface mining by setting it on fire and injecting it with oxygen and water.
The plant would be the only one of its kind in the country if approved, and it needs exemption from the federal Safe Drinking Water Act — the law that protects the quality of drinking water — to go forward. Local residents and environmental groups are fighting the project, saying it is an untested process that only promises to contaminate their already dwindling water supply with deadly benzene.
On Monday, the Wyoming Environmental Quality Council rejected those residents’ protests by a 6-1 vote, according to Shannon Anderson, a staff attorney at the Powder River Basin Resource Council. “The one vote against said that he was concerned that the agency didn’t look at water quality,” she said.
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