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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (125755)	7/17/2005 3:13:43 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793964

Is an oil-shale industry in West’s real interest? gjsentinel.com Sunday, July 10, 2005 If they stopped to think about it, perhaps the growing number of federal lawmakers covetously eyeing northwestern Colorado’s Piceance Basin as a potential domestic version of Saudi Arabia might realize there are good reasons why it is not. A congressman need not be a geologist to understand that in much of Arabia, any old Tom, Dick or Mohammed needs only to punch a hole in the desert sands and — abracadabra! — there is sufficient underground pressure to provide the high flow rates requisite to drive copious amounts of black gold to the surface. That same non-geologist/congressman should also be able to understand that extracting the two trillion barrels — yes, that’s two trillion barrels — that are estimated to be locked away in western shale deposits (the resource is actually more similar in nature to limestone, but that’s another story) is quite a different matter altogether. Two trillion, of course, is an awfully big number. Two trillion is 2,000 billion. Or, putting it in the only terms that a good portion of Congress is likely to understand, two trillion barrels of shale oil is roughly eight times all of the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia or enough oil to fully meet the United States’ current demand for petroleum well into the latter half of this century. Thus, given the estimated size of the West’s vast shale oil deposits, perhaps Rep. Jim Gibbons of Nevada and Rep. Chris Cannon of relatively nearby Provo, Utah, and other lawmakers like them can be forgiven their rev-those-engines enthusiasm for yet another crash shale-oil development program with the federal government acting as the leading accomplice. At least credit Cannon for understanding that commercial-sized oil-shale developments are not the stuff of which rest lightly on the Western landscape. In an interview with The Daily Sentinel last week, the Provo lawmaker minimized the functional utility of the 160-acre oil-shale research and development tracts that the Department of Interior is proposing to make available to the nation’s current generation of Exxons, Texacos, Unocals and the like. “It’s got to be a huge operation,” Cannon quite correctly told reporter Gary Harmon. Unfortunately, few Coloradans — and that includes virtually all of the state’s public officialdom ranging from local county commissioners, to the governor’s office, to the state’s nine-member congressional delegation in Washington D.C. — seem to have little clue as to how huge the operative word “huge” is with respect to commercial-sized shale-oil operations. One rule of thumb that any young reporter covering the natural resource beat quickly learned a quarter century ago was that one ton of good-quality oil shale, rich in the crude hydrocarbon commonly known as kerogen, potentially could yield about one barrel of shale oil. (There are 42 gallons in each barrel.) Note that the preceding rule of thumb is predicated on one ton of “good quality” oil shale. There are thousands of acres of shale deposits in the Green River formation straddling northwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah that are more than 15 feet thick and yield as little as 15 to 20 gallons of oil per ton. Imagine, if you can, the development of a 1-million-barrel-a-day commercial oil-shale industry existing between Rifle and Vernal, Utah. That’s the number that was routinely bandied about as feasible back in the unlamented days of President Jimmy Carter’s Synthetic Fuels Corp. The “conventional” process of developing oil shale historically has contemplated a massive mining operation combined with an above-ground retorting process which essentially “cooks” the kerogen out of rubblized bits of shale. Even the dimmest-bulb booster of a major regional commercial oil-shale industry can do the math on this one. A 1-million-barrel-a-day oil-shale industry potentially may have to be built on an entirely new 365-million-ton annual hard-rock mining industry. Heck, Colorado’s booming coal industry “only” amounts to roughly 40 million tons of production a year, a level that is limited primarily by the state’s railroad infrastructure. And where is the water to support a major regional oil-shale industry to come from? According to another old rule of thumb of the natural resource reporting beat, it takes roughly three barrels of water to process one barrel of shale oil. And that’s only the half of it. I still recall a Sentinel editorial in the early 1980s which characterized as “moondrift” a notorious Exxon “white paper” which maintained that this region could support a 1-million-barrel-a-day commercial shale-oil industry. It’s still moondrift, even with oil at $60 a barrel. However, even if Exxon knew what it was talking about a quarter century ago, is a major oil-shale industry in the West’s best interests? Seems to me that the answer is obvious.

To: KLP who wrote (125755)	7/17/2005 3:19:22 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 793964

There’s reason enough to protect Roan Plateau gjsentinel.com Sunday, July 17, 2005 Many folks who have followed the dispute over management of the Roan Plateau were taken aback, we suspect, by the recent comment of Jamie Connell, Glenwood Springs field office manager for the Bureau of Land Management. During a meeting in Rifle last week between the BLM and cooperating agencies working with the federal agency as it develops a final management plan for the Roan, Connell said the BLM needs valid reasons if it is to oppose gas drilling on 34,000 acres of public lands atop the plateau. “So far, we haven’t heard that in all the comments we got,” Connell said. “Other than they said it’s a place they want to see protected.” Really? With nearly 75,000 public comments — the vast majority of them admittedly form letters, but many detailed individual letters — more than a few specific reasons to avoid drilling on the top of the plateau were mentioned. Here are a few reasons to oppose natural-gas drilling on top of the plateau: A strain of Colorado cutthroat trout exists in streams on the plateau that is not only one of the purest strains of the species found in the state, it has also shown a unique ability to survive in warm waters and nearly dry streambeds. Peregrine falcons and golden eagles live there. There are native grasses on the Roan Plateau that are found in only a few other areas, which could provide an important seed source for revegetating other lands. There are small pockets of old-growth Douglas fir on top of the plateau. Gas drilling and associated activities may have significant impact on air quality. The East Fork of Parachute Creek contains a spectacular, 200-foot waterfall and unique hanging gardens. Recreation on the plateau is growing, from hiking and horseback riding to car camping and all-terrain vehicles, in addition to the big-game hunting. The latter activity could change drastically if, as the BLM draft plan says, the agency’s preferred alternative “could cause the BLM portion of the Planning Area to suffer approximate declines of 33 percent in deer ...” A 2002 BLM report suggests multiple areas of environmental concern that warrant special protection. This corner and many other voices representing a variety of interests, believes these and other concerns offer ample reason to leave the top of the plateau free of gas drilling, especially when it is surrounded by a vastly larger region of public and private land that is already leased and being developed. BLM officials may disagree. They may not see the reasons raised by the public as sufficient to block drilling on top of the Roan. They may argue that all of those potential impacts can be adequately dealt with while still allowing gas drilling. But it is inaccurate to suggest that those opposed to drilling on the plateau offered no valid reasons to prohibit drilling other than they see it as a pretty place that ought to be protected.