Peter Roessmann from Western Resource Advocates sent this link to their report on Utah’s moves into tar sands and oil shale development in email. From the summary:
At first blush, it is easy to fall for the seductive picture painted by tar sands and oil shale supporters. As some describe it, the United States possesses an untapped and unimaginably large reservoir of oil, laced in bitumen deposits or encased in rock and buried on federal lands around the vast Green River formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
The numbers seem staggering: It is estimated that Utah tar sands may contain 11 billion bar- rels of oil.2 Estimates of U.S. oil shale reserves range from a half a trillion barrels to more than 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. These resourc- es, the argument goes, would be sufficient to power our country for centuries, and, if developed, would allow us to thumb our nose at Venezuelan dictators and Middle Eastern oil cartels. Right under our feet, these “unconventional fuel” boosters tell us, the United States government controls the means to lower the price of oil on world markets, eliminate our dependency on foreign oil, and send the “peak oil” prophets packing.
It is a seductive thought, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, as the cautionary adage goes, “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” The more we research tar sands and oil shale, the more apparent it is that due to the relatively small amount of fuel that could be developed, these energy sources would not decrease in any measurable way our dependence on foreign fuel. Utahns, however, would pay an unacceptable price to pursue a commercial unconventional fuels industry that is still wildly speculative. Before any piecemeal approaches are considered, the cumulative, life-cycle effects of pursuing this industry should be evaluated — including water use, energy use, land disturbance, and the uncertain prospects of reclaiming the mining and processing sites.
Both tar sands and oil shale development present overwhelming challenges and drawbacks. For starters, there are not eleven billion barrels of oil under Utah’s rocky high desert soil. For tar sands, the raw material is a hard mixture of clay and bitumen that needs significant processing to become liquid fuel. In the case of oil shale, there are quadrillions of tons of rock under the desert that, in theory, could be heated (using lots of energy) and transformed into a murky liq- uid called kerogen, which still is not oil. Kerogen could then be upgraded and refined (using more energy) into something we could put in our cars, trucks, and airplanes. The laws of physics tell us that it will require a substantial amount of energy to transform tar sands or oil shale into a fuel that can be used in a car or truck. Any technology to do this would be unavoidably and unacceptably wasteful.
Another inescapable problem posed by commercial tar sands and oil shale development in Utah is the amount of water required to produce oil from bitumen or rock. In Utah, water is without a doubt the most precious — and limited — natural resource. As Don Christiansen, general manager of the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, says on page 20 of this report, “You just can’t get along without water. The human body just will not go on without water. It will go on without oil.”
More coverage from The Salt Lake Tribune (Brandon Loomis). From the article:
The Boulder, Colo.-based legal and policy group commissioned a Boston University geographer to analyze the energy return on investment for oil shale. He determined that most research indicates that, at best, making fuel from the rock would generate twice the energy content of what it takes to produce. That compares to a 20-to-1 ratio or better for petroleum.