Big Oil Steps Up

Louisville Gets Renewables R&D Center

By Richard Martin, 2-22-08

Gov. Bill Ritter’s drive to make Colorado a center of renewable energy got a big boost from the private sector this week when ConocoPhillips said it’s purchasing the former StorageTek campus in Louisville. Houston-based ConocoPhillips, the nation’s No. 3 oil company, will use the 432-acre campus as an R&D center focusing on “renewable energy and high-tech carbon-fuels recovery,” according to the Post.

Last September the oil company said it would partner with agriculture giant Archer Daniels Midland Co. on developing renewable transportation fuels from biomass.

“This will push the new energy economy for Colorado,” said an ebullient Ritter in announcing the $55.6 million purchase. “They are mining the intellectual capital and not the underground resources,” Bryan Willson, director of Colorado State University’s clean-energy research efforts, told the Post.

Coming at a time when CU just selected a traditional (and unpopular) oil-company executive who has expressed doubt about global climate change as its new president, the ConocoPhillips center is a huge addition to the energy technology and research capital being assembled on the Front Range.

In other energy news:

-- Putting together a unified strategy for the U.S. to achieve an energy industry that comes almost fully from renewable sources by the end of this century, reducing carbon emissions by 62% from 2005 levels, the editors of Scientific American put the cost at $400 billion, or $10 billion a year for the next 40 years. That’s a lot of money. For a little perspective, the Iraq war is costing us just under $200 million per day and will likely top $650 billion by the time the last troops come home.

-- Energy giant Schlumberger has quietly begun buying land for the production of shale oil on the Western Slope, signing a contract to buy land near De Beque, about 200 miles west of Denver, for a base for its North American shale-oil operations. Joining other big energy producers that have established operations in the Piceance basin, the world’s largest oilfield services provider will begin construction later this year on 375 acres.

-- After intensive statehouse negotiations, a bill to insure the quality of groundwater used for future uranium mining operations on the Western slope moved forward in the Colorado legislature. Companies including Powertech (USA) Mining Corp. plan to use in-situ leech mining, in which copious amounts of water are injected into the ground to bring uranium to the surface.

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