BLM Oil Shale

From: The Wall Street Journal

Peak oil enthusiasts have had a rough few years. When the price of oil was racing towards its all-time peak in the feverish summer of 2008, Malthusianism was all the rage — even the usually unruffled International Energy Agency seemed to be worried that supply couldn’t keep up with demand.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers a few months after that kicked off a sharp correction in oil prices. But they bottomed out at around $40 a barrel and then resumed their climb, breaking back above $100 as the Arab Spring gathered steam in 2011.

Anton R. Dammer, the former Director of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves in the Department of Energy testified a few months ago on the progress of oil shale development in the United States.  Mr Dammer concluded in his testimony:

“The United States is in no better shape with regard to oil independence then we were at the time that EPACT 05 passed and worse than at the time of the Arab Oil Embargo of the 70’s. We are grateful for a strong and reliable trading partner to our North but we are still dependent on the import of close to half our daily oil requirements. We still consume roughly a quarter of the world’s oil supply and we remain reliant on an increasingly unstable and often hostile world oil market for our energy security.

Editor’s Note:  The story posted below is another example of the failure to rely on scientific data when assessing oil shale’s impact on water quantity.  Please refer to the CRE’s analysis on the nexus between water and oil shale below, as provided in the CRE’s comment to BLM on the oil shale PEIS: 

From: Bloomberg Businessweek

A small company that holds a federal lease to extract petroleum from oil shale reserves in western Colorado is taking a new approach to withdrawing crude oil from solid rock — one that it hopes will avoid groundwater contamination.

The process is “basically the same as steaming vegetables,” said Alan Burnham, chief technology officer for Rifle, Colo.-based American Shale Oil LLC.

Within weeks, the company will send a pool of oil down a well and blast it with hot fuel gas. The boiling oil will heat up an underground zone about 50 feet wide and 50 feet deep to more than 600 degrees.

From: Reuters

OPEC oil producers are not worried about the shale revolution. They might need to re-run their numbers.

The United States imported 4.5 million barrels a day of OPEC crude last year, 20 percent of the cartel’s exports and about half the country’s import needs.

But thanks to new technologies like hydraulic fracturing now sucking away on North American soil, the continent is already self sufficient in natural gas, and is eyeing an even bigger landmark — OPEC-free oil supplies.

Attached is a letter from CRE to the Bureau of Land Management discussing the agency’s compliance with BLM, DOI and OMB open government/transparency guidelines.

I am writing to bring to your attention a violation of the Open Government and Transparency Initiative championed by the White House and implemented by the agencies through guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Specifically, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is refusing to release to the public the public’s own comments on the agency’s draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for Oil Shale. BLM requested public comments on the draft document in a Federal Register notice on February 6, 2012.

From: Denver Post

WASHINGTON — Congress adopted a Rep. Jared Polis amendment Wednesday that pares $25 million in federal research funding into oil shale development and puts that money toward deficit reduction.

The amendment was a rare victory for Polis, since he is a Democrat and the House is controlled by the GOP. None of Colorado’s four Republicans voted for it. The other two Dems, Diana DeGette and Ed Perlmutter, voted for the measure.

“We shouldn’t be throwing good money after bad on oil shale research that won’t produce energy for the foreseeable future,” Polis said, in a statement. “Dumping another $25 million of taxpayer money into oil shale research makes no sense when there isn’t commercially viable technology that will turn it into oil.”

From: Forbes

Everyone has heard about the Bakken shale, the huge expanse of oil-bearing rock underneath North Dakota and Montana that billionaire Harold Hamm thinks could yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come. The Bakken is a huge boon, both to the economic health of the northern Plains states, but also to the petroleum balance of the United States. From just 60,000 barrels per day five years ago, the Bakken is now giving up 500,000 bpd, with 210,000 bpd of that coming on in just the past year. Given the availability of enough rigs to drill it and crews to frack it, there’s no reason why the Bakken couldn’t be producing more than 1 million bpd by the end of the decade, a level that could be maintained for halfway through the century.