Reactions to last week’s decision by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the former senator from Colorado, to reverse the last-minute Bush Administration ruling to open Western public lands for oil share exploration ranged from outrage (”part of a pattern of decisions by the secretary that are detrimental to all sources of domestic energy” — Kathleen Sgamma, government affairs director for the Denver-based Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States) to exuberance (”an important step forward in protecting America’s western lands from oil shale development”) - the National Resource Defense Council. Both extremes are overstated.

For one thing, Salazar is only postponing the lease sale, not canceling it. The Obama Administration said it “would offer a new round in the near future,” the Dow Jones News Service reports.

What’s more, the decision will hardly cease R&D on oil shale development. Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Bureau of Land Management granted 160 acres of public land to energy companies for experimental R&D projects on new technologies to extract oil from shale deposits. The companies hold those leases for 10 years. “Shell was granted three of the leases, and the Mahogany Project is well underway on one of them,” noted Hal Herring of NewWest.Net .

There’s plenty of oil shale under private parcels, as well: “the oil companies themselves own thousands of acres of private lands with billions of barrels of oil trapped in the shale,” reports the Colorado Independent, and are proceeding with efforts to figure out to get the oil out cost-effectively.

“We’ve been acquiring land and associated water rights for a long time,” Shell spokeswoman Tracy Boyd told the Denver Post. “We’re just situating ourselves so that when the time comes, we’ll have the resources we need.”

In fact, the real sticking point in developing shale oil resources is not the land - it’s developing the technology and getting access to the water. A commonly cited estimate is that it will take three barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil from shale. Given that water in the Colorado River basin is already overused, and fiercely litigated over, the chances of oil companies getting their hands on those volumes of water seems unlikely (Shell has said that the 3-to1 ratio is overstated.)

Even if enough water is available, it may take more energy to produce oil from shale than the resulting fuel can produce. Shell is testing an in situ heating process that vaporizes the hydrocarbons, which in turn drain from the stone into reservoirs where they can be collected and pumped to the surface. As the vapor cools and condenses it produces usable petroleum. Up to 60% of the available oil in the shale can be recovered by this method, says Shell.

But that operation could consume huge amounts of electricity, according to energy analysts like Randy Udall, who has drawn on research from the RAND Corporation. Chevron, meanwhile, which also holds an experimental lease from the BLM, is working on a chemical process that would use “supercritical carbon dioxide” as a solvent to separate the kerogen fuel from the shale. If it works, that technology could deliver a double-benefit by sequestering large amounts of CO2 underground. It’s not unlike the process that removes caffeine from coffee beans - at a much vaster scale.

All of this remains speculative, and commercial production from oil shale is still at least a decade away. That doesn’t mean that R&D on public lands should be halted. It does mean that the flap over Secretary Salazar’s latest shutdown is largely symbolic.