Bush Administration Proposes ‘Fire Sale’ of Rocky Mountains for Oil Shale Development
On Tuesday, the Bush administration moved to accelerate oil-shale development across the Rocky Mountain West. Along with calls to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling, and open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, Tuesday’s release of proposed rules for shale exploration (pdf) by the Bureau of Land Management was merely another shot across the bow in the political blame game over $4-per-gallon gas.
The draft rules recommend reduced royalty rates for the extraction of oil from shale on 2 million acres of public property in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. While the government currently charges 12.5% to 18.8% for conventional oil drilling, oil shale development would be set at around 5%.
According to Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming could provide 800 billion barrels of oil, enough to meet U.S. demand at current levels “for 110 years.”
only…it will take about more water than there is out there (which would soak up the water supply for most of the SW US..Phoenix, .LA and Vegas as national sacrifice areas?
and….even if the technology existed to extract it (and leave big chunks of the western US tore up and polluted), what would we do in 110 years? and what would the people o the far future think of us for sucking up all the oil on the planet so we can go shopping?
