20th century Colstrip was established by the
Northern Pacific Railway in 1924 as a
company town to provide coal for their
steam locomotives. The mining at Rosebud Mine, two miles south of the town, is open pit strip mining, where draglines remove soil above the layer of
bituminous coal from the
Fort Union Formation. During
The Second World War, the Colstrip mine was identified as strategically important because it supplied coal for the Northern Pacific Railway steam locomotives hauling military equipment for the war effort. The mine was guarded from sabotage, and the employees were not allowed to quit their jobs. In 1958, the railroad switched to using
diesel locomotives and the Colstrip mine was shut down. In 1959,
Montana Power Company purchased the rights to the mine and the town. It resumed mining operations in the 1970s, with plans to build coal-fired electrical plants. The Rosebud Mine opened in 1968. The power plants were built in the 1970s and 1980s by a collection of contractors including
Bechtel. During this construction period, Colstrip was a
boomtown, with a large increase in population. Plants 1 and 2 became operational in 1975 and 1976, and plants 3 and 4 became operational in 1984 and 1986. In 1974, construction of Colstrip's Castle Rock Lake (formerly called a surge pond) was completed. The Colstrip plants produce electricity from coal using steam. The water for the steam is pumped in an underground pipe from the
Yellowstone River and stored in the lake. The lake is stocked with fish and is the home for a wide variety of wildlife. In 1990, the Colstrip Energy Limited Project began commercial operations. Located six miles (10 km) north of Colstrip, this experimental electricity production facility is owned by Rosebud Energy Corp., a partnership that at one point included
Enron. The plant uses high sulfur
waste coal from the Rosebud Coal Mine's topmost one foot layer of coal. In 1998, plants 1-4 were sold to a group led by
PPL Corporation (PPL) and
Puget Sound Energy (PSE). The Rosebud Coal Mine was sold to
Westmoreland Mining LLC. In this same year, the City of Colstrip was incorporated.
21st century In June 2015, PPL spun off its power generation assets, including the Colstrip plants, to become
Talen Energy. In 2016, PSE reached an agreement with the
Sierra Club and the
Montana Environmental Information Center to shut down units 1 and 2 of the coal-fired generating plant by the year 2022. The agreement said nothing about Units 3 and 4 However, the existing electrical transmission capacity that transmits power from Colstrip to the Pacific Northwest may be used to transmit wind energy. Another blow to Colstrip's economy came in 2016, when an application to create a junction point from
BNSF Railway to connect to
Tongue River Railroad was denied. In June 2019, Talen Energy announced the closure of two of the four coal burning units by the end of the year. At the time, the power plant was the sixth-largest source of
greenhouse emissions in the U.S. Units 3 and 4 remained in operation. In January 2020, PSE announced that Unit 1 and Unit 2 had ceased operating in early January". Units 3 and 4 were to remain operational but would be closed within the next five years. In January 2023,
Avista made a deal giving
NorthWestern Energy their 15% share of the plant for free. The deal was to take effect in 2025. A Washington state law bans use of coal-generated electricity, forcing Avista to relinquish their stake in the company. In March 2025, the plant owner, backed by Montana politicians, asked for a two-year extension using the
second Trump administration's offer to grant presidential pollution waivers. The plant owners argued that continued operation would control energy costs and guarantee grid reliability. ==Geography==