"At least there's no tar sands mining in the United States." We've all heard the horror stories from Canada. The Alberta tar sands project is among the most environmentally destructive projects in the world: strip mining and pulverizing rock, heating it to 700 degrees, gobbling up water, consuming far more energy than is created, manufacturing four times as much carbon emissions as conventional oil, and spewing poison into the earth, water, and sky.
However, a tar sands project, the first of its kind in the United States, is happening here in the eastern Utah desert, not far from Moab, Arches National Park, and Dinosaur National Monument. It's about to break ground...unless you speak up.
Under eastern Utah, western Colorado, and southwestern Wyoming lurks oil-bearing shale and sand ("tar sand" and "oil sand" are synonymous). An industry white paper (14 pg pdf) claims that Utah has 25-32 billion oil equivalent barrels (about 55% of the known tar sand resources of the United States), compared to Alberta's 1.7 trillion oil equivalent barrels. Further, "the United States has the largest, richest, and most concentrated deposits of oil shale in the world," and (note the careful wording; "recoverable" is not the same as "proved")
America’s recoverable oil shale resources are:
Nearly three times as large as Saudi Arabia’s proved oil reserves (267 billion barrels)
Approximately 35 times current U.S. oil reserves (22 billion barrels)
More than 100 years of projected U.S. oil imports (12 million barrels/day
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 directed the Secretary of the Interior to complete a programmatic environmental impact statement for a commercial leasing program for oil shale and tar sands resources on public lands with an emphasis on the most geologically prospective lands within each of the states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. The lengthy final document can be found at the Oil Shale and Tar Sands Information Center. Buried deep within 14,000 pages of bureaucratese is a list of horrors, which even the BLM acknowledges would completely displace all other uses of the land:
If the BLM’s preferred tar sands development scenario goes forth, air in the region could be contaminated with carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and other pollutants, while air close to the site could be contaminated with benzene, toluene and formaldehyde, according to the report.
More than 100,000 acres of wilderness-quality land could be industrialized, construction of reservoirs would alter natural streamflow patterns, hydrocarbons and herbicides could cause "chronic or acute toxicity" in wildlife and habitat for 20 threatened or endangered species could be lost, the report says.
Who could possibly want to wreak that havoc on the environment?
Meet Earth Energy Resources, a privately held Canadian firm.
We are very excited to report that on September 19, 2009, Earth Energy Resources received approval for its Notice of Intention to Commence Large Mining Operations from the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining. This is the first oil sands production permit to be granted in the United States and represents a very significant milestone for the Company and the US domestic oil sands and oil shale industry.
Leaving aside the general folly of expending a lot of energy to produce a little bit of energy -- one writer estimates as much energy in a baked potato as in oil shale -- and the Alberta apocalypse, why is this a bad idea for the state of Utah? Two University of Utah researchers have already found that condensable hydrocarbons pose a longterm risk to the aquifers associated with the thick oil shale deposits in Utah. Another University of Utah researcher on social and economic factors has concluded that Canadian economics won't apply to Utah; development has less economies of scale and is in a mountainous region, among other reasons. The Utah oil is also chemically/geologically different from Canadian oil, being harder to separate from water. Nearby national parks are already threatened by air pollution from coal plants. And Grand County's facility devoted to disposing of dirty water from oil and gas wells already emits too much hazardous air pollution. It's even more frustrating when better alternatives can be found in the state, as Utah Clean Energy's new study shows.
Who's going to stop this? Not Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT), a staunch advocate of oil shale; he delivered the keynote speech at a 2009 heavy oil conference. Not the Utah state legislature, which has spent the last few months trying to make each bill stupider than the one before it. Not Uintah County, heavily dependent on oil and gas. Not the Utah Division of Oil & Gas, which has already made Earth Energy very excited.
It's up to us.
* Next Wednesday, the Utah Department of Natural Resources will hear
an appeal by the Sierra Club and Southern Utah Wilderness Association to the state permit. The meeting runs from 8 AM to 6 PM at 1594 West North Temple in Salt Lake City.
*
Dirty Oil Sands, a network of environmental groups, has information on the Alberta devastation.
* It's not clear whether the EPA needs to provide an air quality permit.
* For bureaucratic reasons, the Vernal field office of the Bureau of Land Management has been doing all the work and notifying residents of Uintah county, leaving residents of Grand County (including Moab) out of the decision making process. Their voices need to be heard. Likewise, the Earth Energy project may draw commuters from Grand Junction, Colorado, so Mesa County needs to hear about the impact on it.
And for reasons unclear to me, the Earth Energy Resources project has been flying under the radar. The project needs to be brought into the open. People, not only in the affected counties but across the West, need to ask whether they want an Alberta-type project in the western United States.