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Book Review
| High Altitude Energy: A History of Fossil Fuels in Colorado. By Lee Scamehorn. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002. xvi + 244 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. Cloth $27.50.
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| High Altitude Energy serves as a fitting culmination to Lee Scamehorn's career as the pre-eminent historian of Colorado's fossil fuel industries. Like his earlier works, this volume presents thorough research in matter-of-fact prose. And like its predecessors, it favors descriptive narrative rather than probing analysis. High Altitude Energy is not a book that asks particularly ambitious questions, but Scamehorn should be applauded for bringing together more information on the coal, natural gas, and petroleum industries in Colorado than any previous scholar. |
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Scamehorn organizes his narrative into ten chapters. The first two consider the coal and coke industries to 1930. Chapter 3 examines the early history of petroleum in Colorado, focusing on the Florence field where drilling commenced just one year after Drake's famous strike in western Pennsylvania. Chapter 4 describes the production and consumption of manufactured gas for lighting and heating; it then considers the ascendancy of natural gas over coal and coal derivatives after power companies constructed pipelines from the Texas Panhandle to Colorado in the 1920s. Chapter 5 addresses the collapse and resurgence of coal-mining, paying particular attention to the impact of federal policies such as the Bituminous Coal Codes and the Clean Air Act. Chapter 6 considers the state's modest petroleum industry from the 1930s through the first oil crisis in 1973. Chapter 7 surveys the natural gas industry during the same era; environmental historians surely will find the section detailing Operation Plowshare attempts to use nuclear explosions "to stimulate the production of natural gas and oil from underground rock formations" (p. 139) particularly intriguing. Chapter 8 tells the story of the state's synthetic fuel industry to 1973, emphasizing repeated failures to extract oil from Western Slope shales. The final two chapters explore the significant effects the OPEC oil embargoes had on the fossil fuel hinterlands of the American West from 1973 through the regional energy busts of the mid-1980s. These chapters also document the popular opposition energy companies and government agencies encountered as they turned to the Rocky Mountains to remedy the nation's increasing dependence on foreign energy sources. |
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The photographs and maps in the book are useful, but the absence of notes in this volume will frustrate those interested in further exploring Scamehorn's evidence (a bibliographical essay provides some direction, but not enough). High Altitude energy is unlikely to appeal to as many readers as James Williams' Energy and the Making of Modern California and David Nye's Consuming Power. Those interested in the fossil fuel industries in the Rocky Mountain West, though, will find High Altitude Energy an indispensable resource and a laudable climax to Lee Scamehorn's long engagement with the region's energy history. |
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Thomas G. Andrews has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an assistant professor at California State University-Northridge, where he is revising a manuscript entitled "The Road to Ludlow: Work, Environment, and Industrialization in Colorado, 1870-1914." |
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