Oil and gas companies are tapping only about 28 percent of federal offshore sea floor they have leased and 56 percent of the onshore land they’ve leased is also sitting idle, the Interior Department said Tuesday.
Thirty years ago, Herb Bacon was working in the old U.S. Bank of Grand Junction when a man operating Exxon’s local oil shale project walked into the lobby with his usual pep in his step. Little did either man know it then, but two days later–on what is now known as “Black Sunday”–Exxon pulled the plug.
The Senate denied a bill on Tuesday that would have authorized up to 2 million acres of public land for oil shale exploration in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — not to mention open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other protected areas to drilling.
BOULDER — Pursuing oil shale production in the face of increasing water demands and climate change concerns is ill-advised, a new report from an environmental group here warns.
Chevron is giving up its experimental oil shale lease in Western Colorado. The company is one of only three companies holding a federal lease to research oil shale development in Colorado but officials say they would rather pursue other projects.
A bill designed to encourage oil shale development cruised through the House on Thursday evening. But a wind production tax credit didn’t fly, and now layoffs and abandoned projects loom.
Asked why he was Colorado’s lone congressional holdout in calling for the extension of the wind tax credit, U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn answered his “preference is to help industry grow by reducing federal regulations and mandates as opposed to carving out special interests in the tax code.”
Eight of Colorado’s nine congressional delegates are calling for the extension of the federal wind production tax credit to be added to the nation’s pending payroll tax reduction package.
The Bureau of Land Management proposed a sharp cut Friday in the acreage available for oil shale and tar sands leasing in the West, including a 90 percent reduction of potential land in Colorado.
Oil shale isn’t yet commercially viable but on Wednesday the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources passed Rep. Doug Lamborn’s bill to speed up its production in the West anyway.
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