By Josh Patashnik
Ultimately, a more notable proposal in Bush's speech is the one to allow oil shale leasing on federal lands in the Green River basin in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. Unlike the offshore-drilling idea, oil shale development, at least in theory, promises a lot of oil: the Green River basin alone may hold 800 billion recoverable barrels. Unfortunately, the idea also has a number of other problems. For one thing, nobody really knows to how to do it well: Bob Loucks, a former oil shale production manager, told Environmental Science and Technology that "Despite all the attempts to develop a shale-oil industry in the U.S. over the past 100 years, the fact remains that no proven method exists for efficiently removing the oil from the rock." And whereas oil companies say they can drill for conventional oil in environmentally sensitive areas without disturbing the environment, no one even bothers making that claim when it comes to oil shale development, which by its very nature requires disturbing huge tracts of land. It also produces a fair amount of groundwater pollution--which, if it winds up in the Green River, could contaminate the rest of the Colorado basin. Suffice it to say that there are lots of people in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego who would not be pleased.
Read more here.
and here.
1 comment:
Thanks for the links to those articles!
There are some major political movements in Utah afoot to get land re-zoned, taxes re-worked, and subsidies made available for those who want to tap our "shale oil" and "tar sands". I keep hearing the two conflated, but apparently they are quite different. If I understand correctly, the oil in our tar sands can be extracted "efficiently enough" provided that oil stays outrageously expensive because they've been perfecting the technologies in Canada. Putting too many fiscal and political resources into *any* of Utah's 'uncommon' oil comodities concerns me though since it seems to take investment away from less finite energy production (like wind, solar, etc.)
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