Oil Shale Drilling is Not Worth it

The US Bureau of Land Management recently announced its decision to rescind authorization for drilling leases on and near the border of Utah’s scenic national parks. This decision came after negotiations with National Park Service officials who objected to noise, lights and air pollution near Arches National Park, Dinosaur National Monument and Canyonlands National Park, all in Utah.

This may sound like a victory for environmentalists and naturalists, but it is only temporary. These oil and gas drilling leases, totaling more than 50,000 acres, will still be auctioned off December 19, 2008. This perpetual game will continue until the oil companies get their way or (as is extremely unlikely) become as environmentally ‘friendly’ as their ad campaigns like to claim they are. The arguments against drilling will still be the same and will remain just as valid.

"This is the fire sale, the Bush administration's last great gift to the oil and gas industry," said Stephen Bloch, a staff attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "The tracts of land offered here, next to Arches National Park or above Desolation Canyon, these are the crown jewels of America's lands that the BLM is offering to the highest bidder," he said.

The pursuit of these shale oil drilling leases at this point in time should not even be taking place due to another often overlooked fact. Oil companies currently hold leases to 90 million offshore acres, mostly in the Gulf of Mexico, and upwards of 70 million of those are not producing oil. It is estimated that if all these existing areas were being drilled, U.S. oil production could be boosted by nearly 5 million barrels a day, although it should be noted that it is impossible to estimate production. Let’s keep this point in mind when we look at how much untapped oil is estimated to lie beneath the U.S.

There is a rumor, circulated amongst those who stand to benefit from this rumor being true, that says -- there lies beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. Those people who only see dollars signs where there is natural beauty want to desperately convince the rest of us that mankind will benefit more from the extraction of this oil, with its extremely expensive extraction, production and shipping processes, than we would from leaving this natural beauty unspoiled. They are playing a tune that only financial profiteers want to listen to.

Oil shale is a misnomer being neither shale nor oil, in fact an immature source-rock which has not yet generated any oil and needs to be heated at 600 °F to yield oil by pyrolysis. In fact they should be classified with coal and peat.

The process, which is both economically and environmentally unsound and irresponsible, would extend the oil era by decades, if useable oil could be extracted. This would increase the odds of significant global warming and is not my idea of taking responsibility for our future.

An example of the shale oil extraction process would be to extract tons of rock to the surface, heat and crush it to extract the oil, distill the product to separate out the contaminated by-products and the result is a low-grade form of synthetic crude oil. Where do these contaminated by-products go? Into surface and ground water, of course. There will also be erosion, sulfur gas emissions, and air pollution caused by the production of particulates during processing, transport, and support activities.

Another process called ‘in situ conversion’ involves cooking the rock at 650-700 degrees F. while still in the ground and would contaminate ground water from the hydrocarbons created. So, Shell oil, in 2004, received approval from Rio Blanco County, Texas, state and federal officials to conduct a $50 million, two- to four-year study of a groundwater freezing process in hopes of containing these produced hydrocarbons. The obvious problems here are 1) the process is creating hydrocarbons; 2) the resultant hydrocarbons will be hot enough to melt the ice and will therefore, eventually, contaminate the surrounding rock anyway; 3) this money could used for alternative energy research. Their mentality is that the consumer will cover the cost of all of this in the end, therefore the experiment will become cost effective. Thank God for consumers, right?

This is the type of mentality that needs to be reversed. How about putting consumers ahead for a change and come up with something that does not dip so deeply into our pockets nor destroys what we absolutely must have for survival: a clean and functioning environment?

Just because you have always made money burning fossil fuels does mot mean you must continue to do so. Branch out into other fields that are more friendly to us and the environment and will not eventually choke us all to death. I am certain that your entrepreneurial ‘gifts’ will find ways to make money off of the endeavor.

Drilling for oil on land results in rearranged landscape, wildlife habitat disrupted probably for decades, piles of barren, jagged rock where once stood unspoiled natural beauty, contaminated rivers and streams, large swaths of trees cut down or mountains leveled and open pits left in the wake of profit seekers along with unsightly roads crisscrossing the land to access these pits. Also, the waste generated from the extraction process will require land to be withdrawn from traditional uses for decades.

We in this nation have turned a page in some small regard, when we told the auto industry they cannot be bailed out for their irresponsible business practices. Let’s show the oil companies the error of their ways and face them in the direction of developing alternative energy sources. Also, while on the topic of telling corporations of our displeasure with their wasteful practices, there is a movement underfoot to stop the shipping of food over long-distances because of the adverse effects of the very act of shipping. Pollution and the amount of fossil fuel burned to get food from around the world to your local grocer is very wasteful. Likewise, shipping fossil fuel to local gas pumps is wasteful. The pollution released into the air surrounding our national parks is already taking a toll on those parklands. Producing additional pollution inside the parks by these trucks transporting oil through them would prove to be even more devastating.

The days of fossil fuels are numbered. Some businesses realize the financial liabilities associated with greenhouse emissions and yet they refuse to bow to the obvious. This point needs to be drilled to the point that these individuals abandon the destruction of nature’s beauty and the disruption of our food chain just for their personal profit.

This nation needs to collectively wake up to the fact that burning fossil fuels is killing us. Why should our health and welfare take a backseat to oil company executives profit? Whenever an oil crisis surfaces they like to tell us that the expense of extracting shale is now acceptable. The reality is that the destruction of nature is never acceptable. It is not the only alternative to “business as usual”.