New West Blog News

'The Dirtiest Fuel on the Planet'

Oil Shale Ban Dropped

By Richard Martin, 10-02-08

Squeeze here, really hard

Along with the ban on offshore drilling in U.S. coastal waters, the Congressional moratorium on leasing federal lands for oil-shale exploration expired last night at midnight. Which will have a larger impact on America’s energy future is debatable.

Environmentalists are alarmed about the oil-shale slowdown ending, because they fear it will open the door for taxpayer funding for “the dirtiest fuel on the planet” (as the Natural Resources Defense Council put it) to be exploited at huge expense and with great damage to environment in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, where the world’s richest deposits of kerogen lay trapped in rock deep underground.

“This would really be the final triumph of the fossil fuel lobby,” Wesley Warren, director of programs at the N.R.D.C., told The New York Times.

The Bush Administration plan for oil-shale development comprises “basically 20-year leases for very low payment rates, so it’s a big taxpayer rip-off,” added Dave Alberswerth, senior energy policy advisor for the Wilderness Society, in an interview with the Colorado Independent.

The rhetoric is misguided, for a couple of reasons. No. 1, oil shale R&D is going forward regardless: the moratorium did not affect a (taxpayer-funded) Bureau of Land Management R&D program on oil shale exploration and extraction, proceeding on five parcels in Colorado. Plus, the “the oil companies themselves own thousands of acres of private lands with billions of barrels of oil trapped in the shale,” notes the Independent, and are proceeding with efforts to figure out to get the oil out in a cost-effectively. They’re nowhere close, yet, but that’s hardly a reason to put oil shale off-limits for good.

Second, the Bush Administration has only three months to put forward leasing regulations. Taxpayer rip-off or not, those plans will almost certainly be abrogated by a new Administration – particularly a Democratic one.

So the dispute over the expiring moratorium – which was instituted by Democratic Senator Ken Salazar, of Colorado, last year – is largely symbolic. For technological, economic and environmental reasons, oil shale will not be developed in the next decade; but halting R&D on the possible future exploration of these resources, which could one day yield hundreds of billions of oil, would be as short-sighted as banning new nuclear plants.

“I just think when you say no then there’s no chance to use the technology,” Democratic Wyoming state Sen. Bill Vasey, the chairman of the board of Americans for American Energy, told the Independent.

Energy is not a zero-sum game; continuing R&D on oil shale development doesn’t necessarily take money away from renewable-energy programs. If there’s private money willing to explore oil shale, it should be freed up, not frozen. 

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