With gas at $4 a gallon, Americans are looking for quick relief for their gas pains.
It’s not oil shale.
At least not now.
Of course, you would never know that judging from the rhetoric coming from Republicans, who want to leverage the 800 billion barrels of energy locked tight into the Rocky Mountains into a winning campaign issue.
When the Bureau of Land Management this week released its draft regulations for commercial oil shale leasing in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, Democrats, including Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, decried the move as “premature, unnecessary and irresponsible.” Republicans then accused those Democrats of standing in the way of lower gas prices.
If only it was that simple.
For decades, oil shale has been promised as the answer to our energy needs. Once the price of oil got too high, many figured it would finally be financially feasible to go after oil shale, one of the largest untapped sources of energy in the U.S.
Yet after all of these years, there’s still no way good way to extract the product from the rocks.
We think the U.S. needs to move forward with oil shale research, but so many important questions still need to be answered:
What technology will be used to extract it?
How much water will shale production require, is it available, and who loses water if the shale industry needs it? Oil shale development could require massive amounts of water that’s not even available.
How much energy will be needed to extract shale, and how many coal-fired plants will be needed to provide that electricity?
The BLM doesn’t need to grant new commercial leases for those questions to be answered, which is why Ritter called the rules premature and unnecessary.
Even Shell Oil, a leader in exploring oil shale, says it won’t be ready for commercial leasing until probably 2015. Extraction of commercial quantities of oil, according to a quote in The Post, will come almost a decade after that.
Again, that’s hardly short-term relief for high gas prices.
But it’s election season, and Republicans are looking for an issue. Even Rush Limbaugh went after U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar on Wednesday for “standing in the way” of cheap gas.
“Even with $4 a gallon gasoline, Salazar and his fellow Democrats are still preventing America from using our own resources to lower gas prices and create new jobs,” Limbaugh was quoted as saying.
Look, if Sen. Salazar was standing in the way of lower gas prices, we’d be among the first to shove him aside. It’s just not true.
Technology is standing in the way of commercial oil shale development, but we’re confident it won’t always be that way.
And since it’s a resource that can’t be tapped tomorrow, we see no reason to rush the rules for its extraction.
