On May 2, 1982 Colorado was left reeling when the oil shale boom went bust. Now the federal government wants us to trust it again?
www.oilshalefacts.org

The BLM recently released its final plan and rules for commercial oil shale and tar sands leasing on our public lands. These plans are intended to analyze the likely environmental, economic, and social impacts of oil shale development. Since research and development of new technologies will not be completed for years, the analysis in this document cannot fully anticipate all potential impacts. The commercial leasing plan also proposes to amend nine BLM Resource Management Plans (RMPs) and puts in place the necessary framework for a commercial leasing program that might begin as early as 2009. The plan details the extensive impacts to air, water, wildlife, communities, and special places in western Colorado as well as Wyoming and Utah.

The BLM plan proposes that industrial oil shale production will monopolize 319,710 acres of public land and 41,940 acres of split estate lands spread between the Glenwood Springs, Grand Junction, and White River BLM Resource Areas in Colorado. The assumptions made in the plan are based on a commercial industry production estimate of 250,000 barrels of oil a day, the creation of a dozen new coal fired power plants, and the use of 15% of the water of western Colorado, as well as other direct and non-direct impacts. 

In 2005, Congress gave the BLM arbitrary deadlines to promote a federal research and development program – on public lands – to identify the costs and benefits of promoting oil shale as a domestic fuel source. The corporations permitted to participate in this federal program have yet to move past the initial stages of this process. Companies want to transform oil shale into petroleum using complex, highly experimental, and unproven processes. The leader in oil shale production technology, Shell Energy, has said  it won't know if commercial production is feasible until 2010 at the earliest. It would take several more years to scale up production to industrial levels. Research and development of these new technologies have hardly commenced and neither the public nor the BLM know the full range of environmental and social impacts of the proposed development.

Nevertheless, the BLM is rushing to complete the planning process by amending relevant RMPs and advancing development of a full-fledged federal oil shale leasing program by drafting commercial leasing regulations – all without a clear understanding of the technologies that will be used. The document involves a lot of guesswork and vague analysis of unproven technologies and unknowable impacts. The idea that future analyses will be based off this document is frightening. —Akin to building a skyscraper without a foundation, this preliminary document establishes unsound groundwork for an immense industrial transformation that may forever change the character of western Colorado.

Oil shale development is likely to occur in the Piceance Basin, a region already facing development of up to 50,000 new natural gas wells in the coming years. The potential increased impacts to local communities would be astronomical. Colorado has been burned by the irresponsible and romantic allure of oil shale before. Public land managers must have a clearer understanding of production processes and specific impacts before sacrificing hundreds of thousands of acres of the public domain to an industry that's burned us before. 

Oil shale developers don't even know if the technology works. What's the rush? The BLM should wait until companies conducting research and development activities have proven their technologies rather than wasting time and money on a speculative analysis of untested and unproven oil shale extraction techniques