There are many reasons why a corporation, experienced in using rocks that are somewhat misleadingly referred to as "oil shale" to generate electricity in Eastern Europe, might be interested in Utah.

Utah has a lot of the stuff lying around. It has many public officials who are happy with non-renewable forms of energy that despoil the land, foul the air and produce boom-and-bust cycles in the local economy. They are keen to offer tax breaks to such operations.

Or perhaps the Estonian firm is just interested in Utah's oil shale deposits because it is in danger of being shown the door back home.

Estonia is among the world's dirtiest nations in terms of climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions per capita. That's to be expected for a nation that spent so long under the yoke of Soviet-style industrialism, which turned much of Europe into a carbon-choked mess.

Even by that standard, Estonia is considered a throwback, scrambling to meet the standards of the new sphere that it willingly joined, the European Union. The EU is pressuring Estonia to wean itself from oil shale, which will be difficult. The nation has long derived more than 90 percent of its power from that source, and what had been the obvious alternative — nuclear power — is currently in ill repute.

The process Estonia is being pushed away from basically involves stoking its furnaces with rocks. Not just any rocks, but rocks that contain a substance called kerogen. That's the stuff that is also marbled through the earth in eastern Utah and western Colorado.

But the process used in Estonia is generations of technology different from the long-hoped-for-but-never-realized trick of extracting the kerogen from those rocks and refining it into products that can replace motor fuels and other chemicals now derived from other oil. It is a process that, even if it works, stands to leave a huge scar in the earth and, unlike the simple rock-burning technology, consume huge amounts of water that Utah, unlike Estonia, is already short on.

That breakthrough, though, is exactly the promise made by Enefit American Oil, the subsidiary of the Estonian energy firm that tantalized officials from Utah's Uintah County. A delegation recently returned from a week's tour of Estonia, eager to help dig a mine and build a refining facility near Vernal that would supposedly produce 50,000 barrels of shale-derived oil per day, and employ maybe 2,000 people, by 2017.

Maybe. Or maybe we're being asked to invest taxpayers' money in a retro fuel source that has already been ruled too filthy for the world's rustiest rust belt.