In Grand Junction on Thursday, an energy researcher told an audience attending the Mesa State College Energy Management Symposium that longer permit periods for natural gas exploration and production on public lands and greater gas reserves in other states could hurt Colorado in coming years.

“Exploration is shifting to other areas,” Evergreen-based Bentek Energy CEO Porter Bennett said Thursday, according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. “It could be ominous for the Rockies.”

But even as debate raged on Capitol Hill Wednesday and Thursday with the introduction by U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., of his CLEAR Act (Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act), Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette’s FRAC Act continued to grab the spotlight as a potential jobs killer in Colorado.

While CLEAR would create a new Interior Department agency to revamp and oversee oil and gas leasing on public lands, FRAC would remove a 2005 Safe Drinking Water Act exemption granted the natural gas industry by for the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or injecting wells with water, sand and chemicals to free up more gas.

An Oregon consulting firm recently produced a critique of a report by the American Petroleum Institute that found the FRAC Act would result in a 10-percent drop in domestic natural gas production over the next five years. The ECONorthwest critique concluded the API report was exaggerated and failed to consider the economic benefits of environmental regulation.

“Developing energy and protecting the environment is not an either/or scenario,” Amy Mall of the Natural Resources Defense Council in Boulder told the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent. “We strongly believe clean solutions are readily available, economical, and sometimes even profitable for industry. The FRAC Act is a common sense approach, especially when drinking water and human health are at risk.”

Colorado Oil and Gas Association spokesman Nate Strauch countered jobs will be certainly be lost if pending federal legislation goes through: “Any time you’re overburdening the industry with regulation, there’s no question there’ll be economic impacts. A lost job is not a statistic to [the 70,000 gas industry workers in Colorado]. It’s their livelihood.”

Still, a recent phone survey conducted in the heavily drilled Third Congressional District found two-thirds of the voters favor greater federal regulation of hydraulic fracturing. Gubernatorial candidate and state Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, didn’t like those numbers, reportedly responding, “I’ll bet 95 percent of voters also wish unemployment wasn’t at a 65-year high.”

Natural gas is being touted nationally by U.S. Sen. Mark Udall and Gov. Bill Ritter as the cleaner-burning “bridge fuel” that will wean the state off coal-fired power and fill in nicely when the sun isn’t shining for solar power plants or the wind isn’t blowing for wind farms.

But, according to an in-depth story by veteran Colorado journalist Allen Best in the Summit Daily News on Friday, state geologist Vincent Matthews has his doubts about both natural gas as a way to break our coal addiction and carbon dioxide sequestration as a means of offsetting the higher greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants.

Shale plays so prevalent in the latest gas boom stop producing very rapidly, according to Matthews, meaning more than three times as many wells were needed in 2008 to produce just as much gas as 1995. “You have to drill more and more just to stay even,” he told Best. So while reserves may be statistically impressive, production requirements are rising.

“It’s just like oil shale. What difference does it make that the U.S. Geological Survey has increased the estimated reserves of oil shale from one trillion to 1.5 trillion barrels. We haven’t gotten one drop from it yet.”

Best also reported that no less of a coal-power expert than Jim Rodgers, CEO of mega-utility Duke Energy, called natural gas the “crack cocaine of our industry” during a speech in Boulder last week. Rogers is a homeowner in the Vail Valley and a major investor in wind energy on Colorado’s Eastern Plains.

The first project of the Colorado Carbon Fund, which is funded by selling carbon offsets to companies and organizations like Shell Oil, Alpine Bank, Key Bank and the University of Colorado at Boulder, the methane-to-electricity project will begin this fall and should be completed by the spring.

The Poudre Valley Rural Electric Association has committed to buying the energy, and Timberline Energy – a leading landfill energy system manufacturer – will build the project.

The Governor’s Energy Office also recently announced a $3.8 million stimulus grant from the federal government will go to a project in Northwest Colorado looking into the possibility of sequestering carbon dioxide in deep geologic formations near the Craig Power Plant.

Called “Characterization of Most Promising Sequestration Formations in the Rocky Mountain Region,” the project is being spearheaded by the Colorado Geological Survey and the University of Utah. Other partners, including the Utah Geological Survey, Shell Exploration and Production, Westminster-based Tri-State Generation and Transmission and Schlumberger Carbon Services, will chip in another $1 million.

The goal of the project is to investigate storing CO2 in three 8,000-foot, deep-rock aquifers containing salt water beneath Colorado State Land Board land south of the coal-fired power plant.

Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers acknowledged the urgency of slowing carbon emissions and dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050 – certainly a step in the right direction for the head of the third largest power provider in an industry that for years has fought to deny global warming.

Watch CBS Videos Online

But as the program pointed out, Duke has spent nothing on carbon-sequestration technology – basically injecting carbon emissions into underground reservoirs – and recently cut the ribbon on two new coal-fired plants.

The enviro blogosphere was largely underwhelmed by the piece, with earth2tech.com pointing out that the story failed to mention any of the companies such as PowerSpan or GreatPoint Energy that are doing truly groundbreaking research in the clean-energy arena.

Still, from a general-public perspective, the story should have served as major eye-opener. There needs to be much more mainstream reporting along these lines to educate people like the Intermountain Rural Electric Association board members and the rural co-op’s voters who backed the status quo last week, instead of choosing green candidates.

Or for that matter the proponents of using nuclear energy to power the oil shale industry on the Western Slope. How many truly “clean-coal-fired” power plants could be built for the billions it will take to get oil shale production up and running, with nuclear plants powering the industry to boot?