With $100-per-barrel oil prices, talks of finding and extracting the black gold wherever it can be found in Utah and elsewhere is raising radars for environmental groups.
Even though any large-scale tar sands and oil shale development in Utah might be years away, the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition already fears that oil projects in the proposed Argyle Canyon Special Tar Sands Areas would "leave vast areas of land sterile and ugly, use more water than is readily available in this arid region and would pollute both ground and surface water for many miles downstream."
The public comment period for the so-called Tar Sands/Oil Shale Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) ends Thursday. This part of the process is being used only to identify where leasing government-owned land for sands and shale development might take place.
"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.
Tanner grew up around mines and worked in the industry as a career. "I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly," he said. "There's ways of doing things correctly."
For Tanner, the closest method to his version of correct for tar sands and oil shale would still mean having to drill way too many holes and pumping hot water down them to release the trapped oil and then bring the product back to the surface. He said there isn't enough available water for that. There are also questions about removing mountain tops to get at it and where to store the leftover materials.
"That's total destruction," Tanner said.
Once a final environmental assessment is published, the Interior Secretary will meet with governors from Utah, Colorado and Wyoming to talk about whether there is sufficient interest and justification for moving forward with a leasing program, said Jim Kohler, chief of minerals for the BLM in Utah. He said rules would still need to be established that will govern leasing government land to drilling operations.
Kohler said predicting what environmental impacts may happen is premature.
"Until you have a specific proposal in front of you ... it's pretty hard to say what that development will look like," he said. Once a proposal to lease land for oil shale or tar sands development is brought forward, there will be another public comment period to consider details of the proposal.
In addition to the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition's early concerns over Argyle Canyon, the group stated this week that vast areas of Nine Mile Canyon are being proposed for tar sands leases. A Coalition statement depicted a worst case scenario in which part of the Nine Mile area will one day resemble Kennecott's Bingham copper mine operations, which is easily seen on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley.
Nine Mile Canyon is home to exposed panels of ancient Indian rock art. Energy development watchdogs say the rock art is already at risk of being destroyed by heavy truck traffic, which is associated with current and future proposed oil and gas development in addition to the tar sands and oil shale proposals.
In the past the returns have been too low and the costs too high to explore extracting oil from sands and shale. But the high price of oil these days has changed that.
A process known as "destructive distillation" is being used to get oil from sedimentary rock known as shale. Evidence of deposits have been found in parts of Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. The Interior Department states the Green River Formation, which is located in parts of three states. is estimated to contain over two trillion barrels of oil, more than the world's current known oil reserves.
Federal officials say there's another estimated 11.8 million known barrels of oil in the Uinta Basin area of Utah locked in oil sands or sandstone. Critics have the same concerns for getting the oil out of tar sands as with shale operations — water usage, environmental impacts, what to do with the waste.
Existing BLM resource management plans for six areas in Utah could be changed to accommodate oil shale and tar sands development. Changes will depend on what comes out of the PEIS, which the 2005 Energy Police Act directs the Secretary of the Interior to complete before deciding how to handle a commercial leasing program of federal land that has been identified for shale and sands projects.
"There's a lot of uncertainty," Kohler said. That includes the price of oil or advances with extraction technology associated with tar sands and oil shale. "Whatever happens, it will be a very, very expensive capital-intensive process to get at the resources and address environmental concerns."
E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com