Montana · Wyoming · Utah · Colorado — the Continent's Energy Battery
FY2024
scrub the year
Largest counties · gallons modeled from county fuel data × SEDS product mix · extraction-county mix drifts by year (Weld, Garfield, Uintah, Campbell, Sweetwater, Richland); metros held constant
⚠ Exposure
✕
FY2000FY2026
FY2024
scrub the year
The interior West is the continent's energy battery — coal winding down, wind and transmission winding up, sending power and fuel outward.
Blue trapezoid = crude field (DJ/Niobrara, Powder River, Wind River, Uinta, Elm Coulee); area ∝ output. Amber = Uinta waxy crude — moves warm.
Refinery (distillation towers) — the shared anchor.
Blue line = crude in (field → refinery) · amber line = refined product out.
Bottom bubbles = crude production by state (thousand b/d); area ∝ kb/d, shared ceiling. Right window = WTI & the discounted Rockies grades.
Pulsing ring = vulnerability — amber (moderate) to red (critical); in scenarios green rings mark the rescue — surge supply covering a loss
CONSUMPTION / All: metro demand circles (⌂) fed by amber product lines from the refineries; area ∝ kb/d. ⓘ State colors — CO · UT · WY · MT · ID. In All they shrink to the production scale — the make-vs-burn contrast.
ⓘ Data notes CRUDE is the map's base/default lens. Refinery capacities (kb/d) and crude production are EIA-anchored (PADD 4); pipeline routing simplified from EIA product-supply maps; splits modeled. PADD 4 is landlocked — no tanker or barge reaches it. It refines its own crude and ships surplus product out, mostly to PADD 5, while taking modest product receipts by pipeline from PADD 2 and PADD 3 (EIA). Knowledge cutoff Jan 2026; geography pass-2 approximate.
Coal powerhouse — ember = still burning; gray + struck = gone dark on its real closure year
Open-pit surface coal mine (Powder River Basin, WY) — glyph sized by annual output; hover for operator & tonnage
Bottom bubbles = coal generation by state (TWh/yr); area ∝ TWh, ceiling = all-time max. Retired → hollow struck ring.
Top-left counter — Wyoming's coal share of generation (the state that holds on longest)
ⓘ Data notes Coal generation by state: EIA-anchored through ~2024, modeled to announced closures (utility/PUC filings) past that. Powder River Basin (WY) is the nation's largest coal source. Closure years are modeled; knowledge cutoff Jan 2026.
Green trapezoid = gas producer basin (Greater Green River/Jonah, Piceance, DJ-Niobrara, Uinta, PRB gas, Bakken-assoc) — supply, area ∝ output
Teal dashed circles = gas demand, by sector — ⚡ power, ⌂ cities, ⚙ industry (Front Range, Wasatch Front, WY trona)
Opal & Cheyenne hubs (diamonds) — gathering/trading points: basins ship in by pipe, the hub ships out (Opal→NW Pipeline/PNW & Kern River/CA; Cheyenne→REX/east)
Flow line width ∝ volume — the ribbon is fat where the volume is big and narrows as it falls; the moving dots show direction of flow
Orange flame over a dimmed refinery = refinery gas burn.
Bottom bubbles = marketed production by state (Bcf/d); area ∝ Bcf/d, shared ceiling. Right window = the Rockies-basis market story.
ⓘ Data notes Marketed gas production by state, Bcf/d: EIA-anchored, modeled splits. Industry is a real load here — WY's consumption skews industrial (Green River trona/soda-ash) rather than residential, and lease & plant fuel (gas burned running the wells and processing plants) is a large producing-basin use not shown as its own node. Opal−Henry Hub basis shows the pre-REX (~2007) Rockies oversupply disconnect and its relief once REX opened in 2009. Knowledge cutoff Jan 2026; geography pass-2 approximate.
Spinning turbine clusters = live wind, sited on the resource geography. Spin is decorative (slows when paused); cluster size tracks state output.
Dashed cyan arrows = export out of Wyoming — Gateway South to Mona, Utah and TransWest Express to southern Nevada / California.
THE BOTTLENECK card engages ONLY on the ⚡ VULNERABILITY press — the transmission-constrained story behind the export build.
WIND is the counterweight to the COAL lens. Generation EIA-anchored; per-cluster siting and the in-state/export split are modeled and simplified. Capacity factors approximate EIA/NREL. Knowledge cutoff Jan 2026.
PV clusters = solar generation (PV = photovoltaic; a cluster is a group of utility-scale panel arrays) — Utah & Colorado carry it
Neighborhood / rooftop solar — clustered homes with PV panels (CO + UT)
In-state solar (TWh), inside each state; year-driven
The midday pool feeds end-use, batteries, export (rest of WECC) & spill
Dams — conventional hydro. Montana holds six of the bloc’s ten largest: the Kootenai, Clark Fork, Missouri and Bighorn
Pumped storage — Cabin Creek & Mount Elbert, Colorado’s two largest: the water cycles between two pools and never leaves
In-state hydro bars = TWh/yr; Montana generates roughly six times Colorado
Snowmelt = the spring hump; amplitude tracks the year’s snowpack
Smith Ranch-Highland (WY) — in-situ uranium recovery: the mine (header house + well ticks)
White Mesa Mill (UT) — the only operating U.S. conventional uranium mill; yellowcake ships out of region
Electricity — what each state makes, by fuel, against what it uses, by sector
Next-gen / EGS — same ember outline, distinguished by a green node + engineered wells drilled into hot dry rock. Cape Station (Fervo).
ⓘ Data notes GEOTHERMAL is the firm renewable — Utah only in the interior West, #3 nationally. Today ~73 MW; Cape Station (Fervo EGS) is contracted to 500 MW by 2028, the site permitted to ~2 GW. Capacity operator/EIA-anchored; placement approximate. Knowledge cutoff Jan 2026.