Utah's Dirty Devil Canyon is among 11 million acres of public land that could be made available to oil and gas drilling if BLM plans are approved. (Photo/Dr.DeNo)

Even as Republican Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman declared his state “open for business” to the oil-shale industry Monday in Golden, Democratic congressman Mark Udall of Colorado vowed to fight the Bush administration’s fast-tracking of commercial leasing in the West.

“We will go back to work and make sure that the interests of Colorado are protected when it comes to oil-shale development,” Udall told the Colorado Independent. “If we’re going to have a few months here where the Bush administration wants to try and pull another fast one like they’ve done on so many other ways, let them, but in January I believe that Republicans and Democrats will join together to make sure that the oil-shale development is done right.”

Udall, who’s running against former oil and gas executive and Republican congressman Bob Schaffer for Colorado’s open U.S. Senate seat, helped impose a one-year ban on commercial leasing that expired last month. Now Huntsman and other Bush allies want to see royalty regulations written and leases issued by the Bureau of Land Management before a new president and Congress come into power.

Speaking at an oil shale symposium at Colorado School of Mines in Golden Monday, Huntsmen lamented the regulatory gridlock on developing the resource, which is trapped in the form of kerogen in rocks and sand spread over parts of Utah, Wyoming and northwestern Colorado.

Mining that rock and extracting and refining oil from it is a process that takes intense temperatures and a great deal of electricity and water. Experts agree that much research and development is needed to make the process commercially viable in the coming decades.

Opponents argue the environmental damage to the landscape, in addition to associated air and water pollution, make large-scale oil-shale production a worst-case scenario for reducing foreign oil dependence, particularly given the amount of time it will take to perfect the process.

“The water, the energy, the landscape degradation that occurs, the [lack of] existing technology,” Udall said. “You have to level [hillsides] like a pool table. We’re going to make all of Northwest Colorado look like one big pool table for hundreds of square miles? I don’t think so.”

Udall has an ally in Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat who wants to slow down the leasing process so the technology can be perfected and the regulations can be more carefully considered. Most of the shale deposits, estimated at 800 billion barrels, are on federal lands.

“If you look at where the oil shale is, that’s not really the heart or thrust of our tourism,” said Utah state Rep. Aaron Tilton, a Republican who’s the vice chairman of a Golden-based, industry-backed nonprofit front organization (Astroturf group) called Americans for American Energy.

“It’s just pretty much desolate lands, so to speak, that can be effectively mined and then reclaimed on a basis that would be consistent environmentally with what the federal government has set and what the state sets and what we value in our resources,” Tilton added.

But environmentalists argue Congress needs to reinstitute the leasing ban next session in order for research and development to catch up and so that better deals can be struck with oil and gas companies. Shale advocates say companies won’t pump money into infrastructure and research until the rules are in place and leases are issued.

Dave Alberswerth, senior energy policy advisor for the Wilderness Society, says Shell Oil is currently sitting on 32,000 acres of formerly public land sold to the company by the BLM under an 1871 mining law. He also said the government has issued five R&D leases in Colorado that so far have failed to produce large-scale, commercially viable technology for extracting oil from shale.

“This resource that [Shell has] has tens of billions of barrels of shale oil equivalent in it. Why haven’t they commercially developed it if this stuff is so great and so ready for production?” Alberswerth said. “Same is true of Exxon/Mobil, they have tens of thousands of acres oil shale resources, and a number of other companies do as well. So there’s no lack of opportunity out there for private industry to develop oil shale on land that it already owns.”

Coloradans may be a bit more gun-shy than their neighbors in Utah because of a massive oil-shale boom in the early 1980s that never produced the promised economic windfall before busting virtually overnight and leaving several Western Slope counties dotted with virtual ghost towns.

“Those resources belong to us,” Udall said, “and that’s the reason we want to make sure a royalty structure returns a fair return to us and this isn’t another opportunity for oil and gas interests to have record profits.”

(Image, Americans for American Energy.org)

Fresh off declaring a “total win” in the wake of the U.S. House allowing offshore drilling and oil-shale leasing bans to lapse, the conservative pro-domestic-energy group Americans for American Energy wasted no time pouncing on two prominent environmental groups.

Last week AAE, a nonprofit social welfare organization based in Golden, crowed that its efforts over the past year-and-a-half led to the House moving to drop the nearly three-decade-old ban on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and lift the commercial oil-shale leasing ban in Colorado and the interior West.

“It is a total win,” AAE President and CEO Greg Schnacke said in a press release. “Congress had to feel the heat to see the light. They listened to the public and to voters on this one.”

The same day the group, which is not required to disclose its donors but which critics say is funded by the oil and gas industry, issued another press release demanding a congressional investigation of what it alleges were improper contacts between environmental groups and U.S. Interior Department officials.

AAE’s allegations, stemming from an inspector general’s probe of the matter, comes just weeks after a report detailing inappropriate contact between Interior Department officials and oil and gas industry workers in Colorado two years ago that involved parties with sex and drugs.

A spokesman for the Wilderness Society, one of the groups fingered by AAE last week for too closely coordinating legislative actions with the National Landscape Conservation System [no mention of hookers and blow], called everything AAE does “political theatrics.”

“Americans for American Energy is an industry-funded disinformation clearinghouse pretty much bent on painting anyone pushing commonsense environmental policy as radicals, when the reality is we’re trying to keep oil and gas development from ruining the wild open spaces, public health, quality of life and well-being,” said Bobby Magill, communications manager for the BLM action center of the Wilderness Society.

Particularly galling to some in Colorado, including 10 small-town mayors who fired off a letter to AAE late last year during the BLM’s approval process for drilling on the Roan Plateau, is the group’s ongoing insistence that if you’re not with them on the “drill, baby, drill” bandwagon, you’re chumming up to Osama Bin Laden and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“We object in the strongest terms possible your repeated attempts to equate any questioning of your industry’s agenda to abetting terrorists,” the group of mountain mayors wrote. “This is a scurrilous and irresponsible effort to muddy the waters and avoid discussion of the real issues and real values at stake.”

AAE’s vice chairman, Republican Utah state Rep. Aaron Tilton, contradicted Schnacke’s “total win” on the House energy bill Monday, calling it “a complete political farce” that didn’t have “any chance of passing” in the Senate. But he did stand by AAE’s blasting of environmental groups for being in bed with terrorists.

“Your intentions may be good, but the net effect is the support of those organizations indirectly,” Tilton said, “the reason being that if you cut off production here and our economic security, and we end up shipping these resources overseas — $700 billion a year annually — a lot of that money ends up in these organization’s hands.”

Having helped to open up the Roan to drilling, AAE is now focused on clearing regulatory hurdles to ramping up oil shale production in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, despite what critics argue is a lack of existing technology and water needed for production, as well as the necessary infrastructure to refine and transport any crude that’s produced.

“We need to wait until we find out if the technology is viable and we’re not there yet,” the Wilderness Society’s Magill said. “We shouldn’t lease until the technology is proven and until they can prove that they can do this in an environmentally sound manner.”

Tilton counters there are workable oil-shale technologies close to coming online or already online in other countries and that not nearly as much water is needed as when the oil-shale industry boomed then just as rapidly busted on Colorado’s Western Slope in the early 80s.

Tilton cites an independent Rand Corporation study that estimates there are about 800 billion barrels of oil trapped in the shale rock of what’s known as the Green River Formation in the three-state region — or roughly three times the known reserves of Saudi Arabia.

But the same report goes on to detail the technological uncertainties associated with extracting the oil and the potentially huge financial and environmental costs, including massive disturbance of the landscape, air and water-quality degradation and at least a 20-year timeframe before as much as 1 million barrels a day could be produced.