Earth Equity News

Oil Shale: Viable Domestic Energy, or Dirty Fuel? By Jad Mouawad, NYTimes, September 30, 2008. "After months of bitter wrangling, a quarter-century ban on offshore drilling along most of the nation's coastline expired at midnight Tuesday tonight. But amid the rancor surrounding that fight, punctuated by cries of 'Drill, baby, drill' at the Republican convention, Congress is also allowed a moratorium freezing the development of oil shale to expire... In theory, the end to the oil shale ban, which has been in effect for two years, could open two million acres for development across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. As with offshore production, it will be up to the next administration to set the parameters on whether to expand domestic production. Backers of the program, including Senator Bob Bennett, Republican of Utah, have argued that developing these resources would help bring oil and gasoline prices down. There is potentially plenty of oil trapped in these sedimentary rocks -- though how much, no one quite knows for sure. Some estimates put the figure at 500 billion barrels, twice the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. 'What are you afraid of?' Senator Bennett said in The Salt Lake Tribune last week. 'You're afraid it might work. And it's very clear, given the price of $4 a gallon gas, that people want to find out.' but for its many critics, oil shale is a particularly nasty way of dealing with the energy crisis. To get hydrocarbons out of the shale, the sedimentary rocks must be heated to temperatures of 900 degrees by injecting steam. The process, which melts the oil and allows for its collection, uses vast amounts of energy and water. Critics also say shale production would emit four times more global warming pollution than producing conventional gasoline, and point to the environmental damage caused in Canada by producing oil from tar sands."