Oil Shale: Viable Domestic Energy, Or ‘Dirtiest Fuel on the Planet’
By Jad Mouawad
September 30, 2008, 10:40 am
A ban on the development of oil shale — rock from which oil is melted and extracted for energy use — is about to expire.
After months of bitter wrangling, a quarter-century ban on offshore drilling along most of the nation’s coastline will expire at midnight tonight.
But amid the rancor surrounding that fight, punctuated by cries of “Drill, baby, drill” at the Republican convention, Congress is also allowing a moratorium freezing the development of oil shale to expire today.
In theory, the end to the oil shale ban, which has been in effect for two years, could open two million acres for development across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. As with offshore production, it will be up to the next administration to set the parameters on whether to expand domestic production.
Backers of the program, including Senator Bob Bennett, Republican of Utah, have argued that developing these resources would help bring oil and gasoline prices down. There is potentially plenty of oil trapped in these sedimentary rocks — though how much, no one quite knows for sure. Some estimates put the figure at 500 billion barrels, twice the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.
“‘What are you afraid of?’” Senator Bennett said in The Salt Lake Tribune last week. “You’re afraid it might work. And it’s very clear, given the price of $4 a gallon gas, that people want to find out.”
But for its many critics, oil shales is a particularly nasty way of dealing with the energy crisis. To get hydrocarbons out of the shale, the sedimentary rocks must be heated to temperatures of 900 degrees by injecting steam. The process, which melts the oil and allows for its collection, uses vast amounts of energy and water.
Critics also say shale production would emit four times more global warming pollution than producing conventional gasoline, and point to the environmental damage caused in Canada by producing oil from tar sands. The Natural Resources Defense Council calls it “the dirtiest fuel on the planet.”
One energy analyst, Randy Udall (the brother of Representative Mark Udall of Colorado, a Democratic candidate for the Senate), was quoted on the Web site of KCPW, a Salt Lake City public radio station, as saying “there is three times more energy in a ton of Captain Crunch than there is in a ton of oil shale. Oil shale has the energy density of baked potatoes.”
Even with oil prices hovering around $100 a barrel, the process is also expensive, and is unlikely to take off without government support. So, just as Congress is considering extending tax incentives for renewable fuels (without much success, so far), the Senate has included incentives to produce these dirty fuels.
One provision of the Senate bill, which was stripped out in the House version, would provide large tax credits for infrastructure investments to produce oil out of shales and tar sands.
More than 25 years after the collapse of the synthetic fuels program, oil shales could make a comeback.
“This would really be the final triumph of the fossil fuel lobby,” said Wesley Warren, the director of programs at the N.R.D.C. He added, “It was a bad idea then, and it is a bad idea now.”
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/oil-shale-viable-domestic-e...
