Green energy called critical

Gov. Jim Gibbons participated in a conference Monday on converting coal to jet fuel and diesel but did not mention his proposal earlier this year for a coal-to-liquids plant in Nevada.

Environmentalists objected to the coal-to-liquids proposal Gibbons made in January, and later the governor's office said renewable energy was a higher priority than the coal project.

"If the governor did not mention coal to liquids, I'm sure that's because he has his energy office concentrating on renewable energy sources at this point," Brent Boynton, a spokesman for Gibbons, said Monday.

Conference participants discussed proposals to use coal, which is abundant in the United States, to make diesel fuel and jet fuel as a way to reduce American dependence on foreign oil.

Alternatives to oil are "critical for our nation," Gibbons said.

"Most of the easily accessible oil reserves in the world have already been consumed," he said.

Gibbons said Nevada is rich in renewable energy, which includes solar, wind and geothermal power from hot underground water.

Gibbons also said he is establishing an advisory committee to study development of power transmission lines that would allow remote renewable energy sources to be tapped.

The governor participated in a joint teleconference with the NextGen Energy Council in Salt Lake City and a separate but related conference, the American Energy Security Summit, in Virginia.

Other Western governors called Monday for national leadership on energy self-sufficiency and said the West could lead the way in clean-fuel technologies.

"We need someone to stand up in this country and say this is the priority," said Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican and host of the energy conference attended by the Democratic governors of Wyoming and Montana.

The governors said more research and development is needed to secure the nation's future. They support incentives for clean-coal technology working off the nation's abundance of coal reserves, a 250-year supply at current consumption rates.

They agree on curbing greenhouse gases, and they say any effort must start with energy conservation and efficiency and improvements to neglected transmission systems.

Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal said while he didn't have much faith in Washington, D.C. -- "I have strong objections to almost everything they do" -- the federal government needs to take a leading role in energy self-sufficiency.

There's only so much the states can do, he said.

"As we say in Wyoming, you want to be careful not to get too far ahead of your headlights," Freudenthal said.

The Salt Lake City conference, which ends today, is in part a showcase for new technologies that capture solar and wind power and promise to economically covert the West's coal, oil shale and tar sands into liquid fuels.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.