Oil Shale – Rushing Ahead With No Place To Go
It’s been called fool’s gold for a reason. For decades, energy companies have tried to extract oil from rock, but oil shale technology has never been developed to make large-scale production economically viable or environmentally sound.
Even the oil and gas industry admits that a viable oil shale technology is years, if not decades, away.
Yet, despite large public concern, Congress has given the go-ahead for oil shale development on public lands in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, three states that are home to major oil shale deposits.
Oil shale is a sedimentary rock containing kerogen which, when heated to extreme temperatures, yields oil.
When the Bureau of Land Management issued a draft environmental impact statement about oil shale development in western states earlier this year, it garnered huge attention. Nearly 105,000 public comments came in during a 120-day period, many identifying significant problems from shale’s highly polluting processes to the huge amount of water required.
The comments wisely pointed out inaccurate estimates of water available in the Colorado River Basin to support a commercial oil shale industry and the BLM’s utter disregard for the potential global warming impacts of pursuing oil shale without significant additional research.
But the BLM made no adjustments to its plans.
As a result, on Oct. 6, The Wilderness Society sent a letter of protest to the Interior Department about the manner in which the BLM is ignoring the public and side-stepping bedrock environmental laws with regard to oil shale.
“This administration willingly sacrificed good governance in favor of using their last days in office to fork more public lands over to the oil and gas industry,” said Nada Culver, senior counsel for The Wilderness Society’s BLM Action Center.
“In this case, the BLM denied the public its basic right to protest land management plans that could affect their ways of life. Unfortunately, this denial also violates federal law,” she said.
Ironically, even though the government is trying to rush into leasing new public lands for oil shale, more than three million acres of oil shale lands in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming are already in private hands and have been for decades. In other words, industry has ample resources already at their disposal to begin developing a commercial-scale industry without the need for large scale commercial leasing of the public lands.
The Wilderness Society will continue to fight the mad, premature rush to develop oil shale on our public lands. We’ll report more as the story develops, so keep checking back!
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Sam Goldman
Sam has been with The Wilderness Society since Fall 2007. He came most recently from M+R Strategic Services in Washington, DC where he worked with national environmental groups to improve their online campaign work and field organizing capacity. Before that, Sam was the Assistant National Field Director for U.S. PIRG where he covered a variety of issues including the fight to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
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Comments
ludicrous
The idea that oil shale development will somehow lower our gas prices is ludicrous. Lets get real about our energy future. Mining for more dirty fossil fuels is not the answer.
respnse to penypacker
i agree with pennypacker that alternative fuels and technologies are crucial. Though if one remembers obtaining oil through sand...at one point it was not financially/economically possible, but since the price of oil has risen northern canada has been able to produce oil from compressing the sand. Creating technologies to obtain oil through shale might be a potential short term solution until futher more significant long term technologies and alternate fuel sources are obtained.
Response to Vandalay
Unfortunately, most of the news stories in this country about oilshale (oil sands) development have failed to adequately consider the environmental costs of production. The UK's Guardian has taken a close look at Alberta's oil sands production:
"A decade ago, the vast landscape of forests and lakes around Fort McMurray and the Athabasca river provided a fairly minor and barely profitable sand oil industry. But it is now pitted with hundreds of square kilometres of toxic waste ponds, mines that are 300ft deep Every day brings a bumper to bumper stream of lorries carrying the world's largest plant, pipes and machinery to the area, as well as young men seeking fortunes, and, say critics, the devastation of a pristine land. " The article also covers some of the effects of this growth on communities. THese are costs that must be considered, and should be prohibited from our public lands.
You can read the entire article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/11/fossilfuels.pollution
Yes, America needs many responses to our energy challenges, but subjecting our lands and waters to this sort of profound degredation is not one of them.
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response
By no means am I condoning degradation of our planet. But i wonder what the long term socio/political effects of our dependency and securing of oil will have on America and the rest of the globalized world. Perhaps these effects are even more detrimental than the environmental ones, or perhaps not. I guess these determinations, cost/benefits, and trad-offs are in the eye of the beholder.