Special to Colorado Energy News by Peter Roessmann, Western Resource Advocates

In your report Studies Highlight Potential, Peril of Oil Shale  from July 7, there are a few errors that are often repeated about oil shale:

“Oil shale research and development has been slowed under the Obama Administration, but it has not halted. Earlier this year Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the former senator from Colorado, reversed a last-minute Bush Administration ruling  to open Western public lands for oil shale exploration.”

The Obama Administration temporarily halted proceeding with Round II oil shale leases, but Sec. Salazar is now moving forward with formulating rules on completing these additional leases. All of the six Round I leases are still open to proceed with whatever research they hope to do.  However, on the Round I leases, just about no substantive research is being conducted because the lease holders aren’t far enough along in developing the technology to implement there.  This is an issue of technology and not governmental interference.
 
The second half of the above paragraph is also incorrect.  It is well known where the oil shale is, the depth of the resource, the concentration of kerogen per ton of rock, and the stratification within the formations.  Exploring for oil shale is not an issue. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel placed a freeze on all Bush-era “midnight regulations”, halting implementation of commercial oil shale leasing regulations put in place by the Bush White House, pending agency review.  The whole point of the RD&D program was to establish commercial and technical feasibility and assess environmental risks.  The BLM’s efforts to develop a second round of oil shale leases of 640 acre plots essentially put the cart before the horse to fast track commercial-scale leasing in advance of knowledge necessary to make good decisions about oil shale.
 
If you read the Center for the American West’s report, they take great pains to outline the chronology of oil shale development in the U.S.  There have been three major oil shale booms in this country, all spurred by aggressive federal policies that in the end led to the collapse of any nascent industry and the loss of personal and corporate investments.  The initial RD&D program was hoping to get it right this time by first making sure that the technology was there and commercially viable before proceeding.  Rahm Emmanuel’s action simply put the horse back in front of the cart to make sure RD&D proceeds without instigating a land rush by developers who lack the means to develop the resource in the first place.
 
Another error in the report is the statement:
 
“And experimental R&D projects on new technologies to extract oil from shale deposits continues not only on thousands of acres of privately held land but on 160 acres of Bureau of Land Management land granted to energy companies under the Energy Policy Act of 2005.”
The Round I oil shale RD&D program issued 6 lease parcels each 160 acres in size, five in Colorado and one in Utah.  Shell has three 160 acre parcels, Chevron one, AMSO one and OSEC has the sixth parcel in Utah.  That’s a total of 960 acres of federal land, that can be expanded greatly once the initial testing proves viable.
 
Your report also incorrectly connects tight natural gas deposits with oil shale:
 
“Underscoring the industry’s belief in the eventual potential of shale deposits, BG Group, the U.K.’s third- largest natural-gas company, paid $1.06 billion this week to acquire its first U.S. shale gas project”
Shale gas deposits such as the Marcellus, Barnett, Fayetteville and Haynesville gas plays have nothing to do with the Green River oil shale deposits.  Transposing these two very different resources in the story is misleading. 
 
In the last paragraph, the article says:
 
“Some impartial perspective on oil shale is certainly welcome, given the outlandish forecasts, and near-hysterical opposition, that the resource has generated to date”

I beg to differ.  Those opposed to oil shale have relied upon RAND Corp., Department of Energy and BLM studies to use as the baseline for information.  These organization have hardly been using hyperbole.  The fact is the energy industry has not been able to, or keen on the idea of, releasing hard evidence of their water use estimates, energy requirements, groundwater impacts, disposal of produced water/ waste rubble, on-site upgrading requirements, infrastructure requirements or even the scale of their operations.  
 
Hyperbole enters the picture when oil shale proponents discuss the magnitude of the resource, its ability to create energy independence for the US and the ability of the nation to take advantage of the resource now.  A sizeable portion of western oil shale deposits are of poor quality and will never be commercially viable, and without the technology there is no viable industry to develop this resource and move toward national energy independence any time soon. TRacy Boyd from Shell has scoffed at the idea that the US could produce 1.5 million barrels per day from oil shale deposits, an amount similar to Canadian tar sands production currently, by 2036.  For a nation that consumes nearly 20 million barrels of oil per day, that’s hardly taking us on the road to energy independence.

Peter Roessmann is the Media and Marketing Coordinator for Western Resource Advocates.