Last week, the Department of the Interior released its 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.
IT IS NOT for sale or to be GIVEN away to highly subsidized industries!!!
I am a native of Colorado. BEEN THERE, DONE THAT!
This give away has been done before in 1982. Witnessing my community destroyed and left to pick the pieces.
IT will never be the same again. PLEASE SAVE my beautiful Colorado!
Is it the same infrastructure that the Pres is proposing be repaired with non existant dollars ???
Just curious.
Serious about our energy needs how ??? With windmills and Solyndras ????
Jordan, which is no closer to oil shale production than Utah, already has a program defining royalties, tax rates, and environmental regulatory programs for oil shale, and the country has made most oil shale land available to companies willing to work with the government. No one in industry is asking for another Synthetic Fuels Corporation, just the same type of tax credits wind and solar still insist they need after decades of continuous development. Encouraging business however, is something the government has always done.
Industry has answered the question of how much water they would use, but BLM insists there are questions about water, which they have not yet asked, nor made any attempt to support research to answer these unasked questions.
If the Administration were interested in encouraging all types of energy, they could have offered more land, let companies rather than the government decide which acres were best, and made it clear a lease application would have to include 1) description of a commercial technology and 2) a water management plan. That would have ensured equal protection of the environment, but not postponed again the opportunity for companies that don't already have leases to investigate this challenging but very large resource.