Oil shale development is suddenly getting national play. See this AP article. Utah's Congressional delegation is all for it. Colorado's is against it. Why is that? You would think that both states stand to benefit economically from shale development.
From the above mentioned article, the CO people are saying there are environmental issues with developing oil shale. I'm willing to dismiss these kinds of concerns when a New York senator raises them about a project in Utah, but when a Colorado senator raises them about a project in Colorado, it's worth looking past the partisanship and seriously considering the concern.
To extract oil from shale you have to mine the rock that holds the oil, put it in a big oven and heat it until the oil comes out. Then you can put the rock back. So I have a vision that large scale oil shale development means huge strip mines across eastern Utah - digging out the rock, bake out the oil, put the rock back.
This does not sound like a low impact project.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
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Hey Jarrod, It's Matt Whiting. I ran across your blog tonight and saw this post. There's lots of info out there on shale oil. As for the environmental impacts of processing it, think not just strip mining, but huge amounts of water and massive amounts of energy spent in heating the shale to "cook" the shale into "oil" resulting in huge amounts of air pollution. There's loss of wilderness as well, but more air pollution worming it's way down here and less water into the Colorado Basin are both big deals. Plus, economically it's going to be hard to get it going with the price of oil so unstable.
Just some thoughts...
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