2013-05-26T00:06:34-04:00 Bill Eikenberry http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=bill-eikenberry Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Bill Eikenberry Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1258574 2012-02-07T14:39:28-05:00 2012-04-08T05:12:01-04:00

Bill Eikenberry http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-eikenberry/ 2012 Oil Shale Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement.

By issuing a draft plan that would require companies to prove that development can be commercially viable without serious negative consequences for local economies, lands and water, Interior ensured that millions of acres of public lands won't be handed over prematurely to an unproven industry.

For more than a century, Westerners have been promised a technological and economic breakthrough in the form of "oil shale" development in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. And yet, industry's best engineers and scientists still have not found a commercially viable way to create fuel from oil shale rock. Zero jobs and zero revenue have been created. In addition to the technological hurdles facing oil shale, there continues to be a huge concern for ranchers and farmers about scarcity of water and the amount that would be necessary to make oil shale development viable. The Bureau of Land Management estimates that industrial scale oil shale development could require as much as 150 percent of the amount of water the Denver Metro Area consumes each year.

That's what makes Secretary Ken Salazar's approach to oil shale development so rational: it ensures that the impacts to water are fully understood, and that future decisions on oil shale are made based on that understanding.　

At the same time the Secretary is urging these questions to be answered, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) is pushing through the PIONEERS Act, which would preempt Salazar's approach and fast-track oil shale development. The legislation comes with an endorsement from House Speaker Boehner, who hopes to use non-existent revenue from the bill to pay for much-needed repairs to our crumbling infrastructure -- a smoke-and-mirrors plan that is laughable at best and disingenuous at worst.

In fact, Lamborn's bill, which I testified against last November before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, actually creates a new taxpayer-funded subsidy for companies like Shell by allowing cuts to royalties and shifting basic infrastructure and services costs onto the backs of struggling local governments.

Taxpayers have funded oil shale land deals and direct subsidies for nearly a century -- including a $1.2 billion 1982 loan guarantee to Exxon on a project that failed just one year later and left western Colorado communities in ruin. Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others should prove that oil shale is viable before going to the well with legislation that sets aside millions of acres of public lands to Big Oil, raids the National Treasury, and destroys millions of acres of public land.

Interior should be applauded for moving forward with what appears to be a well thought-out position on oil shale. They realize that the challenges facing oil shale development are great and must be fully addressed before pressing forward with a serious commitment of our precious land and water resources.

Representative Lamborn, and those who support his misguided legislation, should put to rest their political gamesmanship and get serious about meeting the nation's energy needs. More than 20 million acres of public lands have already been cleared for traditional oil and gas development by the BLM, tucked away in the portfolios of the same Big Oil companies that are now pressing hard for additional federal subsidies for oil shale speculation. Congress should first address plans for those 20+ million acres before they even begin to consider dedicating more valuable space for oil shale's tenuous future.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.973874 2011-09-23T15:46:10-04:00 2011-11-23T05:12:02-05:00

Bill Eikenberry http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-eikenberry/
Unfortunately, some in the oil and gas industry and in Congress would prefer to take shortcuts, even if they have devastating consequences to the West. Last month, a Wyoming federal district court judge ruled in favor of the industry and struck down -- on a technicality -- one of the oil and gas leasing reforms put in place by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.

It was a setback for our land, air, and water, there's no doubt about it. Last year, Sec. Salazar had worked to clean-up business in the Interior Department by ensuring that "categorical exclusions" would not be used to let oil and gas companies take shortcuts when it would significantly affect air and water quality, wildlife, and other valuable resources. These shortcuts were used recklessly under the Bush administration, which sidestepped its own rules for protection in 85 percent of cases involving "categorical exclusions," according to a 2009 Government Accountability Report.

It was also the granting of one these hasty "categorical exclusions" that resulted in the unparalleled disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last summer.

When oil and gas companies were allowed to use these shortcuts on thousands of permits in the West, we saw rapid declines in important wildlife populations and ozone pollution levels jump to unsafe levels.

Chairman of the House Energy & Minerals Subcommittee, Doug Lamborn, had teed-up a victory lap for the oil and gas industry lawsuit when he held a hearing earlier this month, but thankfully there was something for Westerners to cheer about.

The Bureau of Land Management announced at that hearing that it would issue a new rulemaking to put Secretary Salazar's measured reforms of the "categorical exclusion" policy in stone.

Now, there's no guarantee that the same strong policy will emerge at the end of a 1-2 year rulemaking, but whatever does take shape will be much harder for oil and gas companies to attack. What is important about this move is that a stand has been taken for what's in the best interest of the West.

The Salazar reforms have been an important success. The number of protested oil and gas leases has dropped dramatically, creating more certainty for industry, while at the same time helping to protect our air, water, and wildlife resources.

Despite claims by oil and gas companies, the truth is that we can have both more responsible energy development and common sense protections for western lands.

We must build on this success, and I hope an emboldened Interior Department will continue to stand up against the oil and gas industry's effort to avoid responsibility and balanced energy development. Here in Wyoming and throughout the West, we can afford nothing less.
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Bill Eikenberry http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-eikenberry/
But then reality, as it always has, crushed those overly optimistic "oil shale" promises and with it, the livelihoods of thousands who banked their lives on those promises.

In the 1910s and 1920s, people were lured West by oil shale boosters' promises of jobs and easy money. But that boom busted in the mid-1920s when oil reserves were found in Oklahoma, Texas and California -- shattering the livelihoods of thousands of people in Wyoming and Colorado's Western slope.

Then came the oil embargoes and fuel crises of the 1970s. The hydrocarbons locked up in shale rocks in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, known as kerogen, was again touted as the answer to America's energy problem.

Yet Exxon pulled the plug on its Colony oil shale project in May 1982, and more than 2,000 local workers lost their jobs immediately. After Exxon left, so did nearly every other company in the area, an economic catastrophe for several small towns in western Colorado.

Twenty-eight years later, not a single barrel of oil from shale has made its way into the nation's commercial oil supply. It's not for a lack of trying.

Shell has said it may be another 10 to 15 years before any oil is pulled out of the rocks on a commercial level. It and other multinational oil and gas companies are holding out hope, and have leases to drill on public lands in the region.

Some members of Congress are also holding out hope, sponsoring legislation that is essentially a multi-billion dollar giveaway for the oil and gas companies.

In the meantime, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar continues to press industry to answer questions about how much water oil shale development requires -- and where it will come from in the parched, over-allocated West.

Last month, Salazar announced that the agency would "take a fresh look at commercial oil shale rules and plans issued under the previous administration and, if necessary, update them based on the latest research and technologies, to account for expected water demands in the arid West and to ensure they provide a fair return to taxpayer[s]."

As a rancher I too, am concerned about what we are getting into with oil shale and the amount of water that commercial development might require. Ensuring oil shale doesn't steal or pollute my water or that of my neighbors requires moving carefully, and I support Secretary Salazar's caution. Understanding the impacts before proceeding with oil shale commercial development is just common sense.

As the Associate State Director for BLM in Wyoming for many years and prior to that, an Interior official in Washington, DC with oversight of energy, water and public lands policy, my understanding of oil shale has always been that it is an energy source of the future ... but always in the future. The impacts associated with oil shale development were simply too broad and deep to ever believe that oil shale would be produced in commercial quantities.

Oil shale is an empty promise; our decision-makers in Washington should instead be focused on sources that offer reliable energy and jobs, while protecting our water supply.

Bill Eikenberry is a third-generation Wyoming rancher and former associate state director of the Bureau of Land Management in Wyoming, where he was responsible for 1,000 employees and managed 18 million acres of public land.
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