Bush Administration Proposes ‘Fire Sale’ of Rocky Mountains for Oil Shale Development
On Tuesday, the Bush administration moved to accelerate oil-shale development across the Rocky Mountain West. Along with calls to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling, and open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, Tuesday’s release of proposed rules for shale exploration (pdf) by the Bureau of Land Management was merely another shot across the bow in the political blame game over $4-per-gallon gas.
According to Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming could provide 800 billion barrels of oil, enough to meet U.S. demand at current levels “for 110 years.”
But the Interior Department is limited in what it can do. Language inserted in a spending bill by Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) bars the department from issuing final rules on oil-shale development. Though the moratorium is set to expire this October, Sen. Salazar said on a Denver radio station Wednesday that it would probably be extended for another year, so that the issue of oil shale development could be given a much closer look. Salazar said:
“The administration is trying to set the stage for a last-minute fire sale of commercial oil-shale leases in western Colorado, despite the fact that we are still years away from knowing if the technologies for developing oil shale on a commercial scale are even viable.”
Each barrel could require 1 to 3 barrels of water to produce
Tens of millions upon millions of people all over the southwest rely on water from the Colorado for everything from growing crops to meeting drinking water needs, making it one of the most heavily used and managed water systems in the United States.
One study done at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Wilson et al.: 2006) projected that it would take 105 to 315 million gallons per day to produce 2.5 million barrels of oil per day from shale. The authors also projected that an industry that size also would result in a regional population growth of 433,000 people, requiring another 58 million gallons per day.
Shell not in a hurry to develop oil-shale
Shell Exploration & Production Co. is working an oil-shale project on three 160-acre parcels in Colorado but the company seems to recognize that the technology to squeeze billions of gallons of oil from the rocks of the Rockies is not high on the company’s list of priorities. According to the Denver Post:
“The company is two years into its 10-year research-and-development leases. Shell will make a decision on commercial leasing closer to the end of that decade, [Shell spokesperson Tracy] Boyd said…The company won’t be ready for commercial leasing until probably 2015, Boyd said.
So, what’s the rush to hand out these oil leases now? Even the BLM report states that “currently, there is no oil-shale industry and the oil-shale extractive technology is still in its rudimentary stages.”
The lack of a domestic oil-shale industry makes it purely a speculative endeavor to project the development of the technology necessary to extract oil-shale, the future demand for oil-shale leases, and the costs of developing those resources.
After another day of falling oil prices, the hurried rush to hand out oil shale leases for hundreds of thousands of acres of the Rocky Mountain West is merely another knee-jerk reaction from a Bush administration that is struggling to gain political favor in an election year. But that begs the question - who’s favor are Republicans trying to gain?
Despite what Republicans would have you believe, this election will be about much more than gas prices. And if Republican strategists think otherwise, they’re in for a big surprise in November.
Related Posts:
- “Bush Lifts Executive Ban on Offshore Drilling - Why it Matters and Why it Doesn’t”
- “McCain Calls for More Offshore Drilling - What Else Would he Say in Houston?”
- “Billions of Barrels Under the Bakken Shale”
- “Offshore Drilling Ban Opens Door for Other Domestic Oil Options”
Photo Credit: dsearls via flickr Under a Creative Commons License
Sources: Denver Post; Salt Lake Tribune
I also live in Colorado. We already have strict watering guidelines and consistently are on the edge of a drought (which is a misnomer in-and-of-itself). We live in a freaking desert here! We don’t have water to spare. Many restaurants do not serve glasses of water automatically, you need to request it.
DenverWater.org has a great ad campaign to get people to conserve. Check out http://www.useonlywhatyouneed.org/
Basically - we’d be straining another great natural resource if we tapped into the oil shale here in the west…water.
Wow, some of the comments on here are amazing. Have any of you ever seen oil refineries? You guys make it sound like they’d completely dominate the horizon, but we’re talking about something maybe the size of a small airport in a state that is absolutely massive.
About the only sensible argument I’ve read on here is the pollution it might lead to with the water they use to convert shale into oil.
We need oil in this country; that is a fact. Without oil this country would shut down and we’d starve or freeze to death or not be able to get an ambulance to our homes or drive to work. Renewable is the future, but it’s a long way off, and we need more oil in the meantime.
Many years ago these deposits were abandoned because of the cost of recovery was to steep. Now with prices far beyond $100. a barrel, it is more economic but still very costly, not only in money but in the damage to the environment.
I’m so sick and tired of this ‘green’ movement. THOSE THAT ARE PART OF IT (the ‘greenies’) ARE WHO HAVE CAUSED OUR PROBLEMS!!! You want to blame, Bush, Cheney, SUV’s, and everything except yourselves. Each time you cry ‘wahh’ on every tiny subject someone in Washington bends to your will. Well the average everyday Joe has had it, and we are fighting back. We will drill for out own oil, and use oil shale - like it or not!!!
Your so called ’solutions’ are also laughable. Wind power, yeah, sounds great - until you get into the actual numbers and realize that it would take just as many years to build the infrastructure as it will to gain a benefit from drilling our own oil, and cost a MASSIVE amount more to ultimately the tax payer, as no sane business would fund such a failed prospect - government would have to step in and carry the financial load. Solar has the same problem. Granted, Solar, Wind, Water as a whole put in use together would be a viable alternative, but it will take a lifetime to get all of the infrastructure built to tie them all together into a cohesive unit.
And for those of you that always say.. buy a smaller car, take mass transit, walk or ride a bike to work… Sorry, not all of us are 5′10″ tall, and live within a mile of work. I’m 6′7″, and I live 25 miles from where I work. So a small car is simply out of the question for me - as too is walking or riding a bike. Start to consider other peoples lives for a change!!! And I’ve heard the argument ‘why don’t you just move closer to work, or move to a city’? Well lets see, I could do that - but I’m only 1 person… if everyone did that, we would all be in a world of hurt because many of us are farmers, and blue collar workers. We’re the ones that put your food on your plate and make sure you have clothes on your back! You liberal pukes wouldn’t even have the capacity to whine as you do if it wasn’t for us who go out and WORK for a living - all the while you look down your noses at us for driving a vehicle that you despise! But you know what, keep complaining and whining, it’s all you people seem to know how to do!!!!!
excuse me = drill for OUR own oil
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So this means mining out million of tons of shale from the mountains to refine using millions of gallons of fresh water that probably comes out at the end as sludge to get oil so that it can be put in your car and burned to produce CO2. All this so we can possibly reduce oil prices by $.50 a gallon in 20 years. We don’t even know how much it would cost per gallon to refine the shale into oil. It could be really expensive seeing as how as of right now it’s just in a research phase. Renewable energy resources is where we should put our money and research because of the pure fact that it’s renewable and in another 40 years we won’t be having this same argument because all the shale will have been mined out and there will be no oil to be refined from it. I’m not even a green type of person, but there needs to be a way for us to produce enough energy for all that will always be there.
if gass goes up 1 more cent im kicking your @$$
I live on the east coast and i pay 4.90 a gallon drive the crap out of Colorado i could care less. I hate hippies.
What will they do with the water once it has been used? Obviously, they will re-use it to get more oil.
All Federal land holdings together with the mineral rights should sold to private owners. The government has no business holding vast tracts of land.