{"id":3443,"date":"2008-11-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/uncategorized\/oil-shale-development-2\/"},"modified":"2008-11-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-24T00:00:00","slug":"oil-shale-development-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/oil-shale-development-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Oil Shale Development"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Congress: Re-enact oil shale moratorium<\/p>\n

CRAIG THOMPSON
\nPerspective<\/p>\n

In a blind rush to promote oil shale development, the Bureau of Land
\nManagement released rules Nov. 17 governing public-land oil shale
\noperations and royalties. Not surprisingly, oil shale royalties are a
\nfraction of those charged for other public-land energy resources. Paltry
\nroyalties sweeten the deal for public-resource speculators.<\/p>\n

The potential energy reserve in Rocky Mountain oil shale is both
\nenormous and seductive. Ten million acres of sparsely populated lands in
\nUtah, Colorado and Wyoming overlie the Green River Formation, remains of
\nancient lake sediments enormous in area, thickness and concentration of
\nkerogen — a solid hydrocarbon made from ancient rich aquatic plant
\nlife. Kerogen is carbon dioxide from our primordial atmosphere now
\nlocked up in rock. Oil shale boosters tell us that there may be a
\ntrillion or two barrels of kerogen — perhaps 800 billion barrels of it
\nrecoverable. That is a Saudi-sized reserve that sings a seductive song
\nto a fossil-fuel addicted country.<\/p>\n

Appropriately seduced, the BLM is in an obvious hurry. Their rules will
\ntake effect three days before the Bush administration leaves office.
\nTheir urgency was obvious when in May they denied a request by Gov. Dave
\nFreudenthal and Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter for additional time to review
\nthe 2,000-page environmental impact statement.<\/p>\n

Why the rush? After all, the reserve has been here for the last 50
\nmillion years, and industry has been trying to figure out how to
\neconomically extract kerogen from oil shale for almost a century.
\nFurther, industry has failed to develop the oil shale on the 3,200,000
\nacres of land they already have rights to develop.<\/p>\n

First, kerogen is not oil. In fact, solid kerogen has low heat content
\n— about 10 percent of crude oil. That means it has a lower heat content
\nthan municipal garbage, and half the heat content of prunes. Second, you
\nhave to melt the kerogen out of the rock and then refine it to get
\nusable oil-like liquids. That requires energy — enormous amounts of
\nenergy. There are two ways to accomplish this. You can mine the shale,
\ncrush it, heat it, and melt out the kerogen, or you can heat the oil
\nshale in the ground [in-situ] and pump it to the surface. Both processes
\nare fraught with problems.<\/p>\n

In spite of enormous government support, the mining\/processing option
\nalmost drove the Exxon\/Unocal Colony project into bankruptcy in the
\nearly 1980s at their project site near Parachute, Colo. Exxon pulled the
\nplug and 2,000 workers were suddenly unemployed. The effects on Colorado
\nlasted for years.<\/p>\n

Imagine two pick-up trucks filled with rocks. Heat the rocks up to twice
\nthe temperature of your household oven and you can get enough kerogen to
\nfill one of the pickups’ gas tanks. But wait: the kerogen solidifies in
\nthe tank. You also have 40 percent more spent shale than you had rock to
\nstart with. That is right, oil shale expands when retorted. It expands
\ninto an enormous solid waste problem — rich in water-soluble salts and
\nmetals that must be isolated to prevent environmental contamination.<\/p>\n

What about the in-situ method? We have tried heating the oil shale with
\npropane, steam, micro-waves and electricity. But there is a problem. Oil
\nshale beds often serve as the floor for aquifers. Heat the oil shale in
\nplace and you heat the aquifer. That causes the groundwater to dissolve
\ncompounds that otherwise would never be dissolved and in some cases
\nnever formed — elements like arsenic and fluoride, and compounds like
\nthiocyanates and cyanides. This becomes a groundwater nightmare. Midway
\nbetween Rock Springs and Green River, taxpayers are still paying for
\ngroundwater cleanup from several in-situ oil shale experiments now over
\nthree decades old.<\/p>\n

Oil-shale development produces huge environmental costs. One will be
\npaid in units of acre-feet — water. Turning shale into useful fuel will
\nrequire lakes of it, in site construction, in operation and refinement,
\nand in cleanup. Water is also required to produce all the electricity
\nnecessary to convert the kerogen into usable fuels. Water has to come
\nfrom somewhere in this arid region. It can only come from the
\nunappropriated Colorado drainage water or from existing users. The
\nformer source promises a fight and the latter a major war.<\/p>\n

The 2005 Rand report on oil shale development concluded that the
\nColorado River and tributaries like the Green and Yampa would be “highly
\nimpacted” regardless of which technology is employed. The oil shale
\ndebate has lacked any thorough discussion of the water impacts.<\/p>\n

Water is not the only environmental issue. Public oil shale lands
\nsupport some of the richest wildlife populations in North America and
\nare already impacted by a booming gas development industry. At the scale
\nenvisioned by the BLM, it would forever alter the wildlife-rich Western
\nway of life.<\/p>\n

Everything about oil shale seems enormous. We need enormous amounts of
\nfurther research before we lease development rights to speculators.
\nGovernors Freudenthal and Ritter, along with U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar and
\nSen.-elect Mark Udall, get it. They have called for a go-slow approach.
\nWe need to support them and to urge them to call on Congress to re-enact
\nthe oil shale moratorium.<\/p>\n

How will that help achieve American energy independence? In spite of the
\nenormous promise, oil shale remains a finite non-renewable resource.
\nWith current technology, oil shale development is too costly, and a
\ndesperately poor excuse for a fuel that can be highly polluting. Oil
\nshale will not solve our energy problems. That solution will ultimately
\ncome by converting to sustainable resources. Oil shale development may
\ndelay a transition to renewable energy that we will have to make in the
\nfuture in any case.<\/p>\n

Craig Thompson was an oil shale worker in the 1970s, an oil shale
\ngroundwater researcher in the 1980s, and is now professor of Engineering
\nand Environmental Science at Western Wyoming Community College.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Congress: Re-enact oil shale moratorium CRAIG THOMPSON Perspective In a blind rush to promote oil shale development, the Bureau of Land Management released rules Nov. 17 governing public-land oil shale operations and royalties. Not surprisingly, oil shale royalties are a fraction of those charged for other public-land energy resources. Paltry royalties sweeten the deal for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3443","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-news","7":"anons"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradowildlife.org\/bow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}