When your hometown is the world test site for a new fossil fuel technology.

News of the world environment

 NEWSLETTER | JANUARY 31, 2025

A Landscape of Lies

I GREW UP IN a landscape of lies. As a child, I was told that every lake in North Dakota freezes. This isn’t true. One lake — Nelson Lake, my home lake — doesn’t freeze.

In the 1960s, when generational coal plants were first built in south-central North Dakota, the Square Butte Creek in Oliver County, a small, squiggly stream that eventually empties into the wide, muddy Missouri River, was dammed, and Nelson Lake was created to help with fossil fuel extraction.

In childhood, I roamed the rocky shores of Nelson Lake with worms and bobbers to catch fish with my Grandpa Hatzenbihler. I spent hour after hour in the shadow of the Milton R. Young Power Plant, its blocky structure pierced with two enormous cigarette-colored smokestacks. The power plant was a type of postmodern-volcano-skyscraper that framed my life.

The plant was always within view. On nighttime trips back into coal country from Bismarck, where my family would buy groceries, shop for clothing, or go out to eat at Fiesta Villa, The Ground Round, or The Walrus, I could clock how far we were from home by where we were in relationship to the glowing and blinking lights of Minnkota Power. The lights colored low-laying clouds amber. The power plant was an eerie Polaris that allowed me to navigate my way toward home in the city of Center, North Dakota…

Though we never said it at the time, it’s clear to me now that I grew up in a company town. Coal colored my childhood, sponsored baseball tournaments, fueled pancake breakfast fundraisers, gave me food, clothing, and shelter. It was the resource that gave eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota electricity, and it gave those of us that pulled it from the ground in south-central North Dakota money, a type of financial security in a region where, previously, most men ranched or farmed.

North Dakota is home to the world’s largest known deposit of lignite coal, estimated to last nearly eight hundred years with current consumption rates. But with increasing calls to leave fossil fuel development in the past, my home power plant is now the world test site for a new fossil fuel technology: carbon capture and storage.

Journalist and author Taylor Brorby writes about the lies the community he grew up in told itself to make life next to a power plant bearable. He worries the arrival of a new fossil fuel technology could continue to perpetuate those myths.

READ MORE

Photo by Illustration by Henrike Lendowski / IllustrationZone.

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