Utah Oil Shale Project Makes No Sense
An Estonian state-owned company wants to use public lands to provide infrastructure to a massive and dirty fossil fuel operation
In the high desert of the upper Colorado River Basin — just across the state line from Colorado in Utah — an Estonian company is seeking a right-of-way across federal public land to facilitate a plan to strip-mine 14 square miles for oil shale.
With climate change impacts already being felt in the Colorado River Basin, which is already stressed from river declines, this is exactly the wrong plan: a massive and unprecedented operation that would use 100 billion gallons of water from the Green and White rivers to produce a synthetic oil whose carbon footprint vastly exceeds conventional oil’s.
Enefit is asking the Bureau of Land Management to grant rights-of-way through public land to build pipelines and other infrastructure without requiring the company to first provide details about pollution, water diversion and climate impacts. This project would be the first oil-shale production facility in the United States and could open the door to similar projects.
The Center for Biological Diversity, where I work, and more than a dozen other environmental groups recently filed a formal protest calling on the BLM to deny the rights-of-way, arguing that the project is not in the public interest.
With the effects of global climate change already accelerating, the details of the proposal itself should be enough to kill it. Here are a few:
· Enefit would build a half-square-mile complex that would use natural gas to superheat shale rock and extract and ship up to 50,000 barrels a day of synthetic crude oil for 30 years, well beyond the point that we should be putting fossil fuel combustion in our rearview mirror.
· It would strip-mine up to 28 million tons of rock per year and produce up to 750 million tons of potentially toxic waste during its term.
· The process would remove up to 100 billion gallons of water from the Green and White rivers, which feed the already over-allocated Colorado River.
· It would increase air pollution in northern Utah, which is already among the worst in the country.
· And it would introduce to the United States an extraction and refining process that creates up to 40 percent more carbon pollution per unit of energy than conventional oil, even more than that created by notoriously dirty tar sands, all at a time when the world needs to move to cleaner, not dirtier, fuels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Add to all this the fact that Enefit refuses to disclose its engineering plans to the BLM. But we already know enough about this proposal, based on the company’s own documents, that it is crystal clear the feds should not award a blind permit for this project. It goes against everything we know needs to be done to decrease, not increase, our reliance on fossil fuels and preserve the scarce and critically important water of the Colorado River.
Foreign-owned Enefit has already demonstrated a lack of concern for the environment in its own backyard. The parent company, Eesti Energia’s, track record in Estonia should be fair warning for U.S. regulators, as one of the Baltic state’s citizens eloquently wrote in an op-ed published in the Salt Lake Tribune that cited an alarming legacy of environmental damage caused by oil shale extraction the company performed there.
The soon-to-be-ending Obama administration has a mixed record on fossil fuels, especially on public lands. Here is a golden opportunity for the president to back his Paris commitment to fight climate change. Denying a permit for Enefit to use our public lands for this dirty, unnecessary fossil fuel production scheme is truly a no-brainer.
Randi Spivak is Public Lands program director with the Center for Biological Diversity.
