Mining for oil
During the anti-environment, pro-industry era of former President George W. Bush, former Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar was a voice for reason in the debate over development of rules and selling of leases for oil-shale production.
Now that he’s secretary of the Interior, Salazar has the clout to stop the rush to move forward with oil shale and the bully pulpit to bring others to his side — the side of caution. He should act quickly to overturn the regulations on mining of oil shale, a process that is not economically viable and could despoil 2 million acres of public land in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.
Salazar now rightly calls the push to get commercial oil-shale regulations drawn up “premature” and criticizes Bush’s actions as “midnight rules” forced through between Sept. 4 and Jan. 16, just before the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Salazar now has the power to either halt or revise those midnight actions, and that’s good news for the scenic lands of the West and the Westerners who rely on a dwindling supply of clean water.
Salazar has been right about moving slowly on oil-shale development. He sponsored a moratorium passed by Congress to prevent rule-making for oil shale until the results were in on new commercial production techniques that the industry says will make strip mining of shale for oil less devastating to the environment and less voracious in its use of water.
The only known commercial process for taking oil from shale
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rock would require from 105 million to 315 million gallons of water to produce 2.5 million barrels of oil, according to a study done at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
But, capitalizing on public fears sparked by $4-a-gallon gasoline last summer, Republicans and some Democrats in Congress — including, unfortunately, Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah — unwisely convinced their colleagues in Congress to let the moratorium expire. The Interior Department under former Secretary Dirk Kempthorne then acted quickly to rush through new regulations so that leases on public lands could be sold to developers.
The truth is that researchers are at least a decade away from learning how to produce large amounts of oil from shale rock, if it is indeed commercially feasible at all. Learning to produce it without ruining the environment will take even longer.
Until the current experimental drilling yields the knowledge we don’t now have, Salazar should act decisively to stop the sale of leases.
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