Build Here: Deep Energy Tech Leadership in Wyoming’s Energy Communities

By Nathan Wendt, President, Jackson Hole Institute

Executive summary

On September 9, the Jackson Hole Institute convened Deep Energy Tech in America’s Mountain West Energy Communities in partnership with the 13th Annual Wyoming Global Technology Summit. Eight builders shared why they are building in Wyoming, how they are moving as fast as they are, and what it will take to keep the advantage here. JHI Program Officer Sophie Rockefeller moderated the nuclear session, and Rusty Bell of Energy Capital Economic Development moderated the second.

The Jackson Hole Institute believes that Wyoming is positioned to lead the next generation of the energy build-out nationally. More so than other states, Wyoming offers assets that cannot be found quickly anywhere else. A century of energy work has already put the transmission, the rail, the industrial land, the permitting precedent, and the skilled workforce in place, in communities that know how to build, want to build, and have built before. This narrative was reinforced on September 9th, with some takeaways including:

Wyoming and the Mountain West are becoming the nation’s nuclear buildout leaders. Wyoming’s TerraPower project is the leading national example where a legacy workforce trained in coal, oil, and mining is now driving America’s advanced nuclear renaissance. However, this is just the beginning. Four companies reached criticality under the federal Reactor Pilot Program this summer, most of them working within a few hours of one another.

Speed comes from infrastructure already in the ground. Interconnection queues are a well-known binding constraint on new power nationally. The opportunity to build in Wyoming is accelerated — Wyoming’s mine sites, wells, pipe, rail, and industrial-zoned acreage are a development platform most states do not have, and our permitting pace lets companies move at startup speed.

Speed to power. Factory manufacturing, licensing a proven design, defense-first deployment, a reinvented way to generate wind power, and a from-scratch nuclear quality supply chain are five routes to the same goal — more, cleaner, power.

All of the above now includes carbon reductions, because customers still want the carbon associated with their power addressed regardless of the federal landscape. And community consent is the practical gate, whether or not it is the law.

Three recommendations flowed from the conversation:

1.          Support what activates the first-order process. Those that build first will get to market first, generating the power and creating the jobs. The window is measured in years, not decades.

2.          An ecosystem of support matters. Programs like the Wyoming Energy Matching Fund play a key role by providing early stage non-dilutive support.

3.          Branding matters, liabilities are actually assets. To build the next generation of energy quickly, from reclaimed mine-land to abandoned oil and gas wells to legacy infrastructure, what the rules call liabilities are actually assets. Recognize them as such.

Next Generation Energy Leaders

L&H Industrial, led by Mike Wandler, is a Gillette manufacturer that has stood up an NQA-1 nuclear quality program from scratch, the first in the region to do it. That meant a separate shop, separate people, different materials, and documentation retained for the life of a customer’s plant. It is a genuinely different business from the carbon steel work that has built the company since 1964, and it is the reason the region can now supply the reactors going up around it.

Antares (Trace Heffner, operations lead) builds factory-produced microreactors for defense and space, and brought its Mark-0 to criticality at Idaho National Laboratory on June 4, the first privately developed advanced reactor in the United States to do so in four decades. Its bet is that a customer with an urgent national security need will fund front-end engineering and tolerate fast iteration, and the bet is landing. Antares was selected for a prototype deployment at Joint Base San Antonio under the Air Force’s advanced nuclear initiative and for the Army’s Janus program at Fort Bragg.

Applied Atomics (Joseph Jacobson, head of commercialization) holds an exclusive land-based license to BWXT’s mPower Generation III+ small modular reactor based on qualified fuels and materials rather than developing a new design. This is the contrarian move in the sector. mPower is backed by more than $500 million in engineering investment, completed validation testing, and extensive pre-application engagement with the NRC between 2009 and 2014 before BWXT shelved it due to low gas prices and preserved the archive. Applied Atomics restarts that pathway from the existing record instead of beginning the regulatory clock at zero, and is targeting first commercial operation in the early 2030s.

Aalo Atomics (Hill Garbo, operations lead) builds fully modular plants aimed at AI data centers, and achieved first criticality with its critical test reactor at INL on July 4, ten months after breaking ground and in the first new reactor facility built at the lab in fifty years. The 10 MWe Aalo-X power plant is now under construction beside it, slated to power a co-located Crusoe data center in 2027. Aalo treats vertical integration as schedule insurance, and the examples are vivid. When its fuel vendor delivered individual pins rather than finished assemblies two months out, the team built its own assembly jig and assembled the fuel itself. When graphite arrived cut wrong for the core, they trained a crew and bought the equipment to process graphite in house.

Prometheus Hyperscale (Trevor Neilson, president) is the only Wyoming-based company developing data centers in Wyoming. Uinta County unanimously approved its flagship Evanston campus in June, initially 1.25 GW with room to expand, and a second 1.25 GW project is planned at Falls Ranch near Casper. Both are designed as fully islanded microgrids, which is a deliberate strategy rather than an engineering preference. Generating on site removes interconnection queue exposure and ratepayer impact from the risk column. The company has also committed to negotiating formal community benefit agreements at every Wyoming site alongside a company-wide local hiring policy, a commitment it believes is a first for a US data center developer.

Airloom Energy (Neal Rickner, CEO) is a Laramie company replacing the conventional three-blade wind turbine with a low-profile track system standing under a hundred feet tall. In addition to its lower height, the differentiator is the parts count: 58 unique parts whether the machine is rated at 100 kilowatts or three megawatts, against roughly 1,500 for a conventional horizontal-axis turbine, which is what makes mass production and container shipping possible, as well as faster speed to power. The company designs for utility scale and targets a fraction of the cost of conventional onshore wind, though that remains a company estimate; the Rock River pilot is built for technical validation at a few hundred kilowatts, with commercial demonstrations targeted for 2027.

U.S. Carbon (Jim Ford, co-founder and Campbell County Commissioner) co-leads an early stage startup synthesizing graphite, a critical mineral, from Powder River Basin coal. The process was validated at the National Energy Technology Laboratory and drops synthesis temperatures from roughly 3,000°C to 1,500°C while cutting processing from days to hours. Two people are moving a federal lab process toward commercial scale in a supply chain that is today almost entirely offshore.

Cowboy Clean Fuels (Ryan Waddington, CEO) turns depleted coalbed methane seams into subsurface bioreactors that produce renewable natural gas while permanently locking carbon dioxide into the coal. The coal seam is both the reactor and the storage vessel, and that is what makes the approach so capital-efficient. The technology was developed over fifteen years at the University of Wyoming and is licensed from the university. It works because the Powder River Basin’s geology already does most of the job.

Five Major Takeaways

1. The workforce advantage is real

Wyoming and the Mountain West carry a concentration of skills built over decades of coal, oil and gas, mining, and national laboratory work. Mike Wandler calls it a high energy IQ paired with a high manufacturing IQ, a combination a number of states traded away years ago and cannot buy back quickly. Trace Heffner described it as a snowball rather than a stock. Physical assets and the people who know how to use them reinforce each other, and the effect compounds wherever the work is already happening.

Wyoming’s high energy IQ inverts prior logic for overlooking Wyoming, the state’s small size. Traditionally, Wyoming’s small population has been seen as a barrier to landing advanced manufacturing. Today, however, automation and modern manufacturing methods mean these facilities do not need the headcount a 1970s industrial buildout required, and the quality, workmanship, and dedication Wyoming energy workers bring are exactly what these companies are shopping for.

Repetition is the prize. The states that land the first anchor customers will be difficult to displace, because their crews will have built the same thing enough times to deliver on schedule and on budget. That muscle memory has to be rebuilt from zero anywhere else. Right now Wyoming and the region hold that lead. It is self-reinforcing as the first projects land here, and it evaporates if they land somewhere else.

2. Proximity to the national laboratory system and Wyoming institutions and leadership is a hard asset

Four companies met the federal Reactor Pilot Program deadline this summer, and most of them were working within a few hours of one another, centrally located around the nucleus at Idaho National Laboratory. That is not a coincidence. The relationships behind those milestones substantiate this region’s opportunity to lead the nuclear build-out.

Antares has put more than $40 million into Idaho and rebuilt Building 793, which once housed the Army’s first mobile reactor, into an enduring testbed. Aalo has started its second reactor beside the first and intends to keep drawing on the lab for training and technical support. Hill Garbo was unambiguous that the July milestone would not have happened without INL staff on site.

Heffner has worked in commercial operations and at a national lab, and he told the assembled crowd that he had never before run a program that was neither regulator-constrained nor workforce-constrained. This time both fell away.

Wyoming’s institutions and leadership also deserve recognition. Governor Gordon played a direct role in bringing TerraPower to Wyoming. Legislator support for matching funds has significantly benefitted projects’ ability to build in Wyoming. Research institutions and assets like the Integrated Test Center at Basin Electric’s Dry Fork Station, now managed by the University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources, and UW’s broader research base are our in-state analogues. BWXT’s fuel investment in the region means the fuel supply chain is moving toward the reactors rather than away from them. And Cowboy Clean Fuels is the clearest example of what a research university can produce for an energy state. Its entire process came out of fifteen years of work at UW’s Center for Biogenic Natural Gas Research and is licensed from the university.

3. In Wyoming and the Mountain West, the infrastructure is already in the ground

Federal reclamation rules treat large industrial footprints as liabilities to be erased, when in practice many of them are assets to build the next generation of energy leadership. The Nature Conservancy laid out the statewide scale of this opportunity in its Coal Infrastructure Reuse Report, and Rusty Bell added the other half of the argument from his seat on the Game and Fish Commission. Building on ground that has been industrial for forty or fifty years keeps new development out of migration corridors and intact habitat. That is an environmental win and a permitting win at the same time.

The Fort Union mine north of Gillette is the proof. Coal production there ended decades ago and the property later came out of bankruptcy. Jim Ford’s partnership, Greenbridge Holdings, acquired it, met the reclamation obligation on the mined acreage, filled a 300-foot pit, and retained roughly 500 acres of shops, offices, rail, power, and water. Wyoming ordinarily grants termination of jurisdiction only after full reclamation plus a decade in good grazing condition, which is what makes carving out and releasing the plant facilities so notable, and Ford believes it was a first in the state. That retained acreage is now the Fort Union Industrial Park, zoned I-2 heavy industrial, with the largest commercial rail siding in Campbell County and high-capacity electric, gas, water, and communications already in place. Its tenants include Atlas Carbon, which makes activated carbon from Powder River Basin coal, and the Wyoming Innovation Center. Campbell County officials are now working to repeat the model at the closing Coal Creek mine, and several operating mines have put heavy industrial zoning in place around their own plant sites in anticipation of a next use. Look at a 40,000-acre mine site with big power, big water, big gas, and rail service, and what you are really looking at is a heavy industrial park somebody already built.

Underground, the geology is an even more substantial asset. Cowboy Clean Fuels’ Triangle Unit sits about 30 miles southwest of Gillette across roughly 12,000 acres and 139 wells. Sugar beet molasses injected into deep coal seams is converted by native microbes into renewable natural gas, while the carbon dioxide adsorbs onto the coal in one of the most durable forms of storage we know of. At full scale the company projects on the order of 700 million cubic feet of renewable methane and 185,000 tons of stored CO2 equivalent per year. Now consider the inventory around it. The basin holds roughly 25,000 coalbed methane wells, hundreds of miles of pipe, and hundreds of miles of electrical infrastructure, nearly all of it bound for plugging and abandonment absent a second use. Cowboy Clean Fuels offers that infrastructure a second life of thirty to fifty years, longer than the first, with surface use payments still flowing to landowners and royalties still flowing to mineral owners. The geology is the part no other state can copy. Ryan Waddington counts roughly a dozen places worldwide where these conditions exist, and none better than the Powder River Basin.

4. All of the above is what the market is buying, and the supply chain sustains it

Wyoming has fewer than 600,000 residents and has long supplied a share of the nation’s energy far out of proportion to that. Jim Ford put it plainly: we sit on the supply side of a market that is asking for more energy, faster, for the first time in twenty years, and we can choose to participate or not.

Part of what that market is asking for is carbon reductions. Trevor Neilson’s customers, the AI labs and hyperscalers, still want the carbon associated with their power addressed regardless of the federal landscape. Gas will carry much of the near-term buildout here, which puts the buyer and the answer in the same state. Cowboy Clean Fuels’ removal credits were verified, registered, and put up for sale in April, and Climate Vault Solutions selected its Triangle Unit as the first biomass carbon removal and storage project to clear its technical review.

Each link gets cheaper and lower-carbon when it sits close to the others. Data centers create the load. Reactors that can supply it run on nuclear-grade graphite, but both Aalo and Antares ended up processing it themselves because nobody could supply it on schedule. The United States imports all the natural graphite it uses, but U.S. Carbon would make it from Powder River Basin coal with an NETL process that runs at half the temperature and in hours instead of days. The shorter the chain gets, the faster it goes, the less it costs, and the less it emits.

5. Community consent is the practical gate

Consent-based siting is a DOE process for finding willing hosts for spent fuel storage, not a requirement in commercial reactor licensing, which the NRC handles. Communities exercise their leverage through zoning, conditional use permits, and state industrial siting review. It is practical rather than statutory, and it decides projects all the same.

It works when the community benefits, and Prometheus has built a program around that. Its Build Wyoming campaign commits the company to community benefit agreements at every Wyoming site, local hiring and contracting, vocational training with the community colleges, and public reporting on jobs and local spending. In Uinta County, residents packed meetings in Mountain View and Evanston last May with questions about water, noise, and worker influx. The company kept working with the county and the City of Evanston, and commissioners approved the rezoning unanimously in June.

How Wyoming Can Lead: Recommendations from the Conversation

1. Activate the first-order process. The window is measured in years, not decades. The advantage compounds wherever the first repeat orders land, and it does not transfer easily once it is established. Wyoming should be working now to convert the demonstration projects at INL and the permitted campuses at Evanston and Casper into repeat orders placed with Wyoming suppliers.

2. Build an ecosystem of support, including non-dilutive state funding. Airloom’s pilot was built on a $5 million Wyoming Energy Authority matching grant, and Cowboy Clean Fuels paired $7.8 million in energy matching funds with its Series B. Ryan Waddington spent his career as a clean energy venture investor before founding CCF, and he was explicit that early government support of this kind is what carries hard tech companies to the point where private capital will follow. The Energy Matching Funds program has been at risk in recent legislative sessions. The companies already through the door will be fine. The next cohort is the one that would not get founded here.

3. Reframe the asset inventory, because what the rules call liabilities are assets. The mines, the wells, the pipe, the rail, the interconnections, the industrial-zoned acreage, and the people who built all of it add up to a development platform most of the country does not have. Fort Union shows the path, and it also shows how long that path takes. Zoning and permitting processes that expedite the reuse of previously industrialized sites, coordinated from the local to the state to the federal level, should be a priority. These sites were active before. Making them active again should be fast.

Wyoming has supplied energy to the rest of the country for a century. For the first time in twenty years, demand is rising to meet what we can produce, and the companies that will build the next generation of it have already chosen where to work. The Jackson Hole Institute will keep convening them, and through the Jackson Hole Investor Group we will keep working to connect Wyoming projects with the capital that gets them built.

Our thanks to all eight companies for joining us, to Sophie Rockefeller and Rusty Bell for moderating, and to the Wyoming Global Technology Summit for the partnership.