The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has finalized plans to open some 1.9 million acres of public lands in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming to oil-shale development, a necessary step on the road to tapping the vast reserves. The technology for turning oil shale into usable crude oil is energy-intensive and heavily polluting, but the Bush administration has pushed to clear the way for exploiting U.S. oil-shale deposits in the name of energy independence; oil-shale deposits in the three states could hold up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil. However, the processes for developing oil-shale deposits are still largely in the experimental stage so the full extent of the process's impacts on air quality, water quality, and wildlife in the area are as yet poorly understood. Environmentalists and Democrats in the region criticized the BLM's plan as misguided and premature. "Finalizing an environmental impact statement without any clear understanding of the environmental, community, economic, and energy impacts of commercial-scale oil shale development is irresponsible, short-sighted, and premature," said Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter (D).
source: Post Independent, Rocky Mountain News, Denver Post
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Comments
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archigeek Posted 2:45 am
05 Sep 2008
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Wolverine Posted 5:11 am
05 Sep 2008
This is nothing new, but with the vast majority of people realizing the harms that global climate change is causing and will continue to cause, one would think that they'd reexamine their lifestyles, goals, and priorities. But nooooooo!
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wendigo Posted 6:02 am
05 Sep 2008
Funny how Republicans are all for states' rights, until a state (like Colorado) disagrees with their policies. Most Coloradans do not want more industrial development on public lands in Colorado, but it is being forced down their throats by this administration and the BLM.
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ImagesAndAdjectives Posted 2:12 am
09 Sep 2008
Why aren't the newspapers reporting the reality of the "800 billion barrels of oil" that they claim we could extract from western oil shale? How much would a barrel of that oil actually cost, after you consider how much energy is used to extract it? I read a report from Shell that the current technology for extracting it means heating the rocks to something like 700 degrees using metal rods, for a period of 3 years??! Link to this information is (http://www.dailyreckoning.com/rpt/OilShale.html)
Not to mention how it pollutes water. Or how many power plants they'd have to build in the middle of nowhere to supply the electricity for this! ARe these people really serious about oil shale as a viable energy plan?
I'm involved with the Transition Initiative in Boulder - the first official North American transition town. Our aim is to help communities become more resilient to energy decline and climate change through bioregionalism (produce and consume more locally).
Is my work in vain? Will people get behind ANYTHING, no matter how destructive and insane, just to fill up their gas tanks?
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kano Posted 3:43 am
09 Sep 2008
groundwater seepage is not a concern for well organized approaches as certain companies undertake the stict approach of lining all oil-shale pits with bidium clay. as water is absorbed into the clay molecules, they swell to create an airtight seal nationally recognized by the EPA as the highest standard of protection, and enforced at most treatment plants and industrial worksites.
margeret e: you are absolutely right! extracting the oil requires heating the shale to temperatures of 700 degrees, yet performed efficiently, this produces a tremendous amount of energy that can be collected as both liquid and gaseous fuel. temperatures above 850 degress can be problems however, as this causes the shale to decompose and potentially release noxious gases into the air. responsible strategies will not employ technologies w/ heating temps above 800 to avoid this risk.
something positive to consider about oil shale is this: a pit is dug and oil shale excavated. the pit lined with the clay, supplied with a collection drain, and then backfilled with shale and the pipes necessary to heat. reclamation can start immediately. when the process has been run to completion, all technology is removed horizontally from the pit. essentially, this leaves an identical pit (with rearranged rocks) as to what existed before, yet with appropriate vegetation species on top (which was not there). a pretty impressive approach i thought.
i am an avid reader of grist, extremely environmentally conscious, and yes--anti-bush. but i say this not to win support from fellow posters, but as a reminder that being pro-environment is about more than being against anything "oil" or party-line liberal. we all have a responsibility to be informed of the facts in order to understand which ideas hold up, and which don't (belive me there are oil shale approaches that DON'T). but don't immediatly discount an idea that comes from one side or immediatly praise an idea that comes from another. be informed. remember: at a certain point the world runs according to numbers, and no matter how evil or good an idea might be, not bush not, not gore, not anyone will support something that loses money (it's just reality)
so don't worry so much about all those inefficient ideas for energy, because long term if they don't produce more than they require, they won't survive. ( a GREAT example of this is biofuels, which is HORRIBLY inefficient and is a scary imbalance of resources to products. in my opinion there is nothing more evil--check out the water consumption) alternative energies to get behind are solar and wind, because these are for REAL, especially as soon as photovoltaic efficiencies increase and supply costs for polysilicon come down (solar).
anyway, don't mean to lecture and i hope no one takes this as promotion for oil shale, but its just a reminder that not all alternative energy is good because it's alternative, and not everything "oil" is bad because it's oil. stay out there, keep your ears to the ground, and enjoy.
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Pangolin Posted 4:49 am
09 Sep 2008
Secondly there are at least two ways to get more energy out of the same area of land with less pollution know as wind and concentrated solar thermal power. Either of these methods gets us more usefull power per acre than coal mining and coal is more energy dense than oil shale.
Thirdly oil shale projects would require the diversion, use and pollution of huge amounts of already scarece fresh water on the lands involved.
Finally, in an era when we should be reducing fossil fuel use due to CO2 forced global warming and ocean acidification bringing new sources of fossil fuels on-line rather than implementing alternatives strikes me as bogglingly stupid.
All evil it is.
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ImagesAndAdjectives Posted 7:51 am
09 Sep 2008
Where is the electricity going to come from to power the rods that will heat rock to 700F for 3 years - in the middle of the arid desert of northwestern Colorado? (BTW, I live in Colorado, near Boulder).
Will new power plants need to be built in order to produce the electricity needed to heat and freeze mountains in order to extract the shale?
What about the combined effect of burning that much coal (to provide electricity to the mining) and then burning that much oil (up to 800 billion barrels) - what is the net effect on our environment for the next 5-20 years? Does anyone care?
If we're going through all this complicated processes to extract oil, that definitely means we're in Peak Oil. No more cheap, easy-to-get-to, gushes-out-of-the-ground light sweet crude. The oil that remains will get more expensive to extract, will require more and more energy than ever before, and will pose a greater threat to the environment if for no other reason than because it's being BURNED. Why aren't our politicians talking about Peak Oil?
Is our way of life really more important than our health and the health and well-being of our children and their children? Is driving a car more important than clean drinking water? Is it more important than healthy, abundant food? Is it?
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hapa Posted 3:02 pm
09 Sep 2008
here he is two months ago:
The efforts to turn Canada's tar sands and Colorado's oil shale into energy are really just efforts to speed up what would happen naturally over time. But we don't have time. So we throw excess energy at the problem, trying to cook shale in situ or use huge quantities of natural gas to increase oil production via the tar sands. We don't have much excess energy, either.
Both processes use tremendous amounts of energy for a small net energy yield (energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI). Yet free solar income rains down on the planet each day. The sun is eight-minute energy! We simply don't have an industrial system built to run off the modest amounts of energy we can convert from sunlight. We need a new system or a way to convert a higher percentage of sunlight into usable energy.
It's not the sort of thing you design on your kitchen table. It's the sort of thing that evolves out of necessity and experimentation. Its evolution obeys the same basic laws that govern the evolution of species...variation, mutation, adaptation. Australia has a wide variety of clever and well-managed companies working on different aspects of the problem.
But in the big picture, we think human beings are pretty good at adapting when they have to. The alternative is non-survival, which also goes by the name of death. True, civilisations seem to through a life cycle of their own. And perhaps this oil-based one is past its prime. People are quarrelsome and stupid. We may not adapt our way out of this problem before it overwhelms us. But it would be unnatural not to try.
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kano Posted 1:04 am
10 Sep 2008
http://www.ecoshale.com/
there is no mine, so you can forget the idea of a gigantic monster crunching rock and earth that will never be replaced, and interestingly enough, the process uses no water (except for that required to make the clay lining). thus, it will not require diversion of any water resources (which in my opinion, will be the subject to kick oil of the pedastal in future grist discussion platforms).
i agree with you. like i mentioned yesterday, i belive wind and solar are the best solutions for our future, but there has to be a bridge transition. the world can't switch in overnight, in one or even 3 years to alternative energy because to make the infrastructure changes that support our power demand on that scale requires time. it will be a process of 10-15 years (also because solar is a business supported by government incentives, without the revenue power to stand on it's own two feet).
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howardgw Posted 3:06 am
25 Nov 2008
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