| Petroleum
News: BLM begins review of oil shale in Rockies:
"Shell working in Rio Blanco County": Week of
January 01, 2006
Public meetings for environmental review of oil
shale development begin in January; focus will
be on issues, not any specific site
Judith
Kohler
Associated Press Writer
The Bureau of Land Management has launched
an environmental review intended to guide oil
shale development on huge stretches of federal
land in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah over the next
several years.
The BLM, which oversees millions of acres
in the three states, has 18 months to gather
public comments and complete an environmental
impact statement. The push, mandated in a
federal energy bill, comes more than two decades
after the first oil-shale boom busted, leaving
western Colorado’s economy reeling for years.
Soaring oil prices and demand are behind
the revived interest in trying to tap the large
reserves of oil trapped in rock and sand.
Colorado BLM state chief Sally Wisely said
Dec. 19 the public meetings that start Jan. 10
and the comment period will allow the agency to
consider the potential environmental, social and
economic impacts of development while giving the
country a chance to reap the benefits of “energy
availability, reliability and security.”
Review programmatic
The BLM will conduct a programmatic
environmental review, meaning that it will be an
overview of various issues rather than a study
of a specific project at specific site. The
Interior Department estimates there are about
16,000 square miles of oil shale lands, or more
than 10 million acres, in western Colorado,
northeastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming.
Environmentalists and a county
commissioner in western Colorado said it’s
important for the public to weigh in on
development that could have profound effects in
a region already undergoing widespread natural
gas drilling.
Matt Sura of the Western Colorado
Congress, a conservation group, said he was glad
to see Congress in mid-December scuttle a
proposal to speed up leasing of oil-shale lands.
He said the provisions by the House Resources
Committee would have turned any environmental
review into mere window dressing.
Still, Sura questioned whether the
government is moving too quickly.
“One of the more troubling things is there
isn’t really any technology in place that works
for extracting oil shale,” Sura said. “They’re
looking at these impacts in the dark.”
Shell working in Rio Blanco County
Shell Exploration & Production Co. is trying
to free the oil from shale at a site in Rio
Blanco County by using heating rods drilled into
rock. The company, however, figures it is about
five years away from proving the technology or
deciding whether to build a commercial-scale
operation.
Sura said he believes the potential
environmental impacts would be more extreme than
those from conventional oil and gas development
because of the large amounts of water and energy
needed to process oil shale. He said extracting
the oil could require large open-pit mines and
disposal of “a tremendous amount of waste rock.”
A study released in August by the RAND
Corp. cited some of the same concerns. The
report, sponsored in part by the Energy
Department, said while the economic benefits
could be great, significant environmental
problems could occur.
Local concern over ’82
People who lived through the oil shale bust
of the 1980s are leery of the kind of economic
devastation that occurred when the fledgling
industry failed despite huge government
subsidies. They refer to “Black Sunday,” when
Exxon closed its $5 billion oil shale project
near Parachute on May 2, 1982, putting 2,200
people out of work.
“To avoid another social and economic
catastrophe in the western region rich in oil
shale, impacted stakeholders need to be involved
from the beginning in this federal process to
ensure that all sides and views are fully heard,
understood, analyzed and considered,” Garfield
County Commissioner Tresi Houpt said.
Kathy Hall of the Colorado Oil and Gas
Association, an industry group, said a lot has
changed since the 1980s. She said she expects
energy companies to be more careful this time,
in part because private funds will be fueling
the operations.
Congress created the Synthetic Fuels Corp.
in the 1970s to find more domestic sources of
oil after oil prices shot up and appropriated
billions of dollars for development.
“I also think local communities are a lot
better prepared this time,” said Hall, a former
Mesa County commissioner. |
