Today Wyoming’s coal-bed methane gas play in the Powder River Basin is a bust. Few of the 24,000 wells drilled during the heyday of the 2000s produce much gas, many sit idle and approximately 3,000 wells are left orphaned—a liability for the state to clean up," Dustin Bleizeffer reports in the public-interest publication WyoFile.

"But in the early part of this century, the fervor surrounding coal-bed methane gas and its potential was as enormous as Powder River Basin coal itself—a trove of mineral wealth lurking just below the surface in coal formations the size of Lake Erie. Coal-bed methane was a play for both big operators and mom-and-pops. It made new millionaires among companies and landowners—not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars for local and state coffers.

"Coal-bed methane also fueled hot controversies in the realms of landowner rights, environmental stewardship, the value of water and—at every turn—state and local politics.

"Some blamed the development for harming domestic water wells. One rural homeowner fired shots at a compressor station in rifle range of his house out of frustration at the constant whirring noise. A fistfight nearly broke out on a tour bus in front of elected officials, including then Montana Gov. Judy Martz, who stepped in to cool tempers. One operator said he feared he would be blackballed by his colleagues for putting in a new water well for an elderly couple on the Powder River to replace one that had supposedly been bled dry.

“If a company or an individual involved in trying to help these people with this [replacement] well were named, there would be those who would perceive them as being guilty of something,” Casper geologist Jimmy Goolsby of Goolsby, Finley & Associates, told the Casper Star-Tribune in December 2003.

"For a time, coal-bed methane was responsible for making the Powder River Basin the largest producing natural gas field in the state, at more than 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day. During the early 2000s, coal-bed methane was the only big gas play in the state—a godsend for a mineral revenue-dependent state that had endured a long dry spell in the 1990s.

"As did so many resource booms before it, Wyoming’s coal-bed methane gas boom burned brightly and then died, leaving a complicated legacy. And, as often is the case, it left lingering hope for a revival, as well as frustrations over lessons that still appear unlearned."