Salazar takes on oil shale

Ken Salazar takes to the pages of the Washington Post this morning to argue against a "headless rush to oil shale."

To hear Bush touting Western oil shale as the answer to $4 per gallon gasoline, as he did again yesterday in the Rose Garden, you would think it was 1908 . . . or 1920 . . . or 1945 . . . or 1974. Every couple of decades over the past century, the immense reserves of the oily rock under Colorado and Utah reemerge as the great hope for our energy future.

Bush and his fellow oil shale boosters claim that if only Western communities would stand aside, energy companies could begin extracting more than 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil from domestic shale deposits. If only the federal government immediately offered even more public lands for development, the technology to extract oil from rock would suddenly ripen, oil supplies would rise and gas prices would fall.

If only...

Sometimes it seems that we are getting close to overcoming these barriers. But each time we near a boom, we bust. The last bust, the infamous "Black Sunday" of 1982, left Western communities holding the bill long after the speculators, Beltway boosters and energy companies had taken off.

This time, though, the technologies that companies such as Shell Oil are developing are far more promising. Thanks in part to a research and development program that Congress created in 2005, energy companies are starting to devise a way to heat the rock that holds the oil and force the oil up and out of the ground. Still, that oil would not come easily. It would take around one ton of rock to produce enough fuel to last the average car two weeks.

Furthermore, energy companies are still years away -- 2015 at the earliest -- from knowing whether this technology can cost-effectively produce oil on a commercial scale.

To reach the 2015 goal, we must avoid the pitfalls that have trapped us in the past: the speculation and hype, the shortage of water and power, and the failure to plan for environmental and social impacts. Unless development proceeds in a thoughtful and responsible manner, we risk another massive bust.

Salazar is exactly right. The oil companies know that oil shale development is far from a sure bet. Yet the President is out there every few weeks demanding that Colorado's wilderness be opened up for development. Colorado can't be left holding the bag again after George and his oil buddies experiment goes belly up. Let's slow things down and proceed at a pace in keeping with the development of the technology and techniques.

Karen Tumulty of Time blogs more on the subject.