With a twist of a pipeline valve outside Seattle one day last week, Seattle's Mayor Gordon Clinton and Mayor George Culmbach of Everett, Wash, linked their cities' kitchens to natural-gas wells on the Colorado-New Mexico border 1,488 miles away. For the Northwest cities that received natural gas for the first time this month, the 18-m.p.h. surge of fuel from the San Juan Basin was as momentous as the first whirring of dynamos at Grand Coulee Dam in 1941. Long hobbled by power shortages, the Northwest in another year will be tapping a gas supply equivalent to 15% of U.S. reserves,...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
