“Oil and gas is such a big driver of the state economy and employs so many people in Wyoming, and when we see those drops in demand and drops in drilling across the state, that can really have massive impacts on Wyoming’s economy,” McConnaughey said. “And given the fact that this program, the amount of money dedicated to it, we will see come back through taxes and other revenues — it’s beneficial to the state of Wyoming.”
In most cases, a grant of up to $500,000 won’t cover entire projects. Most companies chosen for the program still have to source funding for any remaining costs independently.
“Because of that additional required investment from these companies, if they didn’t believe that it would make sense to utilize that money, they wouldn’t apply, because they would still be investing their own money as well. So that really kind of combats this idea that there could be frivolous or wasted money there,” McConnaughey said.
But after the last cycle awarded a lopsided distribution of resources to applicants, Shannon Anderson, staff attorney for the Powder River Basin Resource Council, wants to know what share of this year’s funds will go to smaller companies that wouldn’t have been able to pay for their proposed projects without government assistance.
Last year, “basically, what we found is that the larger companies got by far the majority of the money,” Anderson said. “So it’d be interesting to see if that was the case with this round as well.”
