This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Entrepreneurs who are looking to cash in on a potential oil-shale boom in Utah had a little cold Colorado River water splashed in their faces Tuesday during a hearing on the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's plans to develop a broad environmental study to analyze shale and tar sands development.
While there are known technologies to mine and roast shale to extract a type of petroleum from vast resource fields in the Rocky Mountain West, no one is sure how much water would be required to make a go of it. But a Utah water official who attended the hearing said the state's share of the Colorado could soon be fully allocated, leaving in question how much if any would be left over to develop oil shale.
Todd Stonely, a planner with the Utah Division of Water Resources, was responding to an estimate from a former Utah state science adviser that 10,000 acre-feet of water would be needed to sustain a year of producing 100,000 barrels per day of kerogen, the waxy hydrocarbon that hasn't undergone the geologic heat and pressure necessary to create petroleum.
To put that in context, Stonely said, Mountain Dell Reservoir holds about 5,000 acre-feet of water and Little Dell Reservoir, 21,000 acre-feet. A reservoir planned to store water from the White River will be built soon; it will hold 100,000 acre-feet. Utah's entire allocation from the Colorado is 1.4 million acre feet.
Further complicating the water picture are questions regarding what oil-shale extraction would do to surface and ground water quality, said Rand Fisher of the Utah Division of Water Quality.
About 75 people attended the midday hearing in Salt Lake City, the first of seven such scoping meetings planned for Utah, Colorado and Wyoming through Jan. 20. The BLM must complete what is known as a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, an overarching study that would be the foundation for individual oil shale and tar sands development proposals.
The PEIS is a requirement of the Bush administration-backed Energy Policy Act of 2005 to further aid an oil-shale and tar-sands leasing program that aims to revive U.S. oil-shale and tar-sands development, which most recently went bust in the 1980s and has never proven economically feasible.
Shell Exploration and Production is now testing an oil-shale conversion process in Colorado that doesn't require strip mining, is more environmentally friendly and is economical at oil prices in the $25 to $30 a barrel range. The company won't begin large-scale production for a decade, if at all. While such production would probably require less water, it would still require huge amounts of electricity, most probably coming from coal-fired power plants at great cost.
The regions under study for oil-shale development are the Uintah Basin in Utah, the Piceance Basin in Colorado, the Washakie Basin that straddles Colorado and Wyoming and the Green River Basin in Wyoming. For tar sands, the planning includes sections of the Colorado Plateau in Utah.
Here's the Bureau of Land Management timetable:
l Scoping period comments accepted through Jan. 31.
l Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement is due this fall. More comment will be accepted afterward.
l Final PEIS due by spring 2007.
l A record of decision is due by summer 2007.