Salazar: “Why do we have to move head long to commercial oil shale leasing at this point?”

At the Senate confirmation hearing for Interior Secretary on Thursday, Barack Obama’s nominee, Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar painted a picture of a different kind of Interior Department, should he be confirmed.

Salazar said his first order of business would be to clean up an Interior Department troubled with ethical lapses, in particular, the Minerals Management Service which was rocked by a sex, drugs, and corruption scandal last year.

But Salazar also described his vision for an agency that would look as hard (or harder) at developing wind farms and solar thermal plants as it has looked at developing coal, oil and gas in the past.

When pushed about the specifics of his policy positions, Salazar didn’t let on too much. He did not say, for example, whether he would support a reinstatement of the ban on oil and gas drilling off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, which Congress allowed to expire last year. But it is quite likely that Salazar would, in fact, support limited offshore drilling in certain areas, as the senator signed on to the bipartisan “Gang of Ten” compromise proposal in the Summer of 2008 that would have allowed drilling off the coast of certain Southeastern states.

But Salazar was not completely opaque.

A vocal opponent of the Bush administration’s push for oil shale development, Salazar, a former water lawyer spoke of the tremendous water and energy requirements to develop oil shale using current best practices.

“We don’t have the answers to some very important questions, including how much water is this going to take, which is a very important issue to the West.”

Salazar coasted through the two-hour confirmation hearing with relative ease and is expected to be approved by the full Senate next week.

Image: © Tim Hurst