The Garfield County commissioners reportedly back a scaled-back federal plan for oil shale development in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, as long as it leaves as much acreage as possible open for exploring and perhaps eventually extracting the still unproven form of fuel.
Opponents of oil shale development in western Colorado, Wyoming and Utah participated in a “fly-in” to Washington, D.C. this week to push for increased federal oversight of the still-unproven form of energy that would consume huge amounts of water and conventional power.
For decades, Royal Dutch Shell – Europe’s largest energy company – has been known in Colorado as the king of oil shale research, spending an estimated $200 million on an experimental and controversial extraction process that has yet to be proven commercially viable. But Shell and its American subsidiaries have increasingly been moving into natural gas drilling in the United States, including a well permit pulled in southern Colorado that has touched off a firestorm of debate over state versus local control of drilling operations and just how much public input should be allowed.
A caravan that environmentalist and renowned climate-change writer Bill McKibben calls the “largest collective act of civil disobedience in the history of the climate movement” will roll through Boulder and Denver next week to protest the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast of Texas.
Hard to imagine in a year when snowpack up until recently has been more than 200 percent of normal in the Colorado River Basin and its major tributaries on the state’s Western Slope, but the long-term prognosis for the river that provides water to more than 30 million people in the Desert Southwest is not good. A new interim report released this week by the federal government, Colorado and six other states along the river suggests that “by mid-century the average yield of the Colorado River could be reduced by 10-20 percent due to climate change.
A representative of an organization whose research on oil shale production has been cited for years testified before Congress Friday that “decisions made by the federal government may have a profound impact on the residents in the northwestern quarter of Colorado …”
Apparently global climate change can have the disquieting effect of causing mild dyslexia among pro-business energy bloggers like Brian McGraw, who on globalwarming.org last week mistook oil shale for shale oil.
While critics on the right have accused the Obama administration of moving too slowly on the still-unproven potential of oil shale on Colorado’s Western Slope, observers on the left say the White House has been pushing too fast on an agenda promoting Wyoming’s Powder River Basin coal and tar sands oil production in Canada.
Observers of the century-long quest to extract oil from the shale rocks of Colorado’s Western Slope are fond of saying “oil shale is the fuel of the future … and always will be.” Never commercially viable because of the costs and resources needed to heat and extract the kerogen trapped in the rocks, an estimated 2 trillion barrels of shale oil remains locked up – perhaps forever.
Dr. Jeremy Boak, a leading expert on oil shale technology at the Colorado School of Mines, says the Obama administration is dragging its feet on oil shale production in the United States much the way the Bush administration stalled on climate change policy. “It’s curious to hear the same sort of arguments being made by this administration that were made by the Bush administration for not doing anything on climate change,” Boak told the Colorado Independent. “We’ve got to have all the answers before we can move.”
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