Showdown in Montana

Residents of eastern Montana are justifiably proud of their "big sky" country. Its green-brown prairie, dotted by scrub and ponderosa pine, stretches in austere grandeur to a distant horizon. But the stark beauty of this region, into which cattle and sheep ranches comfortably blend, is now being threatened by America's insatiable appetite for energy.

The reason is coal. Beneath the prairie sod of Montana and the neighboring areas of Wyoming and North Dakota lie an estimated 1.3 trillion tons of coal and lignite--40% of the U.S.'s reserves, enough to power American industry and heat American homes for decades. Moreover, since the Western coal contains little sulfur or sodium, it will produce relatively little air pollution when it is burned. This is especially important in cities with strict air-quality laws at a time when other clean fuels (natural gas and oil with low sulfur content) are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. Best of all, the thick coal seams are close to the land's surface and can be easily reached by ponderous machines that peel back the prairie and gouge out the underlying coal.

Such surface mining is so mechanized, however, that it would provide few new jobs for Montanans. The state is therefore considering ways to reap greater benefits from the coal in the form of economic diversification, greater tax revenues and new jobs. The coal could be converted into natural gas at huge plants near the mining areas. Or it might be used to fuel a complex of 21 giant electric power plants in Montana, as recommended by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and some three dozen electric utilities. Then the electricity would be sent on long transmission lines to power-hungry cities on the West Coast and in the Midwest.

The Montanans also insist that industry pay the costs of remedying the environmental damage done by mining and processing the coal. Last year a special Montana task force reported that by the time the state's coal deposits are exhausted, some 800,000 acres of Montana--an area larger than Rhode Island --would be chewed up and perhaps even made useless.

If the coal-gassification and power-plant complexes were built, the report noted, more serious problems would arise. The new jobs created by industrialization would swell the state's population from its present 700,000 to more than 1,000,000, causing a need for more services and more taxes to pay for them. Since the best antipollution devices available cannot filter out all the fine particles that go up the stacks or out the water-discharge pipes of new plants, there would also be more pollution.

Despite the gloomy report, says Ted Schwinden, commissioner of state lands, "many people feel that the coal will inevitably be developed." To control that development, the state legislature recently enacted one law to govern the location of power plants and another that requires coal companies to restore stripped land to its "approximate original contour and use." Industry's objections were relatively muted.

In the little town of Colstrip, a coal mining electric utility, Western Energy, is operating an eleven-acre test reclamation project at a working mine. The company has regraded the land and planted trees and several species of grass for a total cost of $700 an acre, which adds only pennies per ton to the total cost of obtaining coal. But local farmers and ranchers are not convinced, because reclamation is extremely difficult in the semiarid region (average rainfall: 14 in. per year). "If I used as much fertilizer as they did on that test site," says Rancher Wally McRae, "I could grow grass on the roof of my house."

What most bothers thoughtful Montanans is the lack of definitive information about the long-term effects of development. "We still don't know enough about such things as what will happen to rivers and underground water supplies, about air pollution and population disruption," says State Representative Dorothy Bradley. But the legislature recently voted down her bill setting a 2 1/2-year moratorium to study these problems before coal mining begins on a massive scale. Thus there seem to be radical changes in the future of the big sky country, highlighting a dilemma that will become increasingly familiar as the natural resources of the U.S. become scarcer: Should the residents of one region of the nation be asked to give up their land and traditions for the good of other Americans living hundreds of miles away?

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