06-18-08
What I heard today in President Bush’s push to extract Western shale
oil was this: Let’s subsidize Big Oil to turn Southern California into
a desert and huge swaths of the West into polluted, rubbled, waterless
wasteland. A pitch once confined to Internet investment schemes got a
White House imprint. so did offshore drilling in California and
Florida, as well as Alaskan wilderness. His proposals are
are best a failure of imagination, and not one drop of new oil would
flow for at least three to five years. The shale oil push was plain
ridiculous, a scheme that would draw off clean water and leave behind
polluted, useless wastewater in a region already stricken by chronic drought.
There are good reasons, despite the Internet pitches, that no oil company produces a commercially viable fuel in the U.S. from oil shale.
What
comes from mining oil shale isn’t oil, but a precursor of oil that has
to be turned into a synthetic fuel with energy-intensive processing.
The open-mining process, if the shale is shipped for processing, is at
least as destructive as coal mining, and uses far more water. If the oil
precursor is extracted on site, that means high-energy hot water or
steam injection and likely massive groundwater pollution. The water
required to extract shale oil ranges from somewhat more than regular
oil drilling to much, much more: in Estonia, where shale mining is
commercial, the process takes 25 barrels of water for every barrel of "oil." The
waste left behind amounts to about 80% of what has been extracted. Even
with $135 oil, the landscape and water table cannot be fully restored
and groundwater loss may never be repaired. Extraction of shale oil
also produces many times the greenhouse gases of even regular oil
drilling.
There are all kinds of schemes on paper for "cleaner"
shale oil extraction. There are no clean commercial mines, or low-water
plants. Here’s what Utah environmentalists think of a federal proposal to lease shale contracts on public lands:
"I don’t believe there’s any way they can do it without total
devastation," said Steve Tanner, chairman of Nine Mile Canyon’s impact
research committee.Sand and shale development would involve drilling many holes and
pumping hot water down them to release the trapped oil and then
bringing the product back to the surface. Tanner said there isn’t
enough available water for that.The development also could require removing mountain tops to reach the
oil and would raise questions about where to store the leftover
materials. "That’s total destruction," he said.
Since oil companies aren’t developing U.S. shale tracts they already
own, what was Bush really doing? It think he was just using the figure
"800 billion barrels of recoverable oii" to pretend that the U.S. can
mine its way to energy independence without developing a cleaner,
renewable energy future. It’s political tricksterism, not a real
idea.