From: Vernal Express
The Uintah County Commission voted unanimously last week to create a countywide Energy Zone and develop plans for oil shale and oil sands extraction.
“We are updating (the county’s) general plan and upon approval will simultaneously be combined in the state legislature with Energy Zones to be discussed elsewhere in Utah,” said Mike McKee, county commissioner.
The vote added two general plan amendments, both intended to maximize efficient energy development in the county.
The Energy Zone overlaps township and range boundaries from south of the Green River to the Grand County line and east to west from the Colorado state line to Duchesne County.
It excludes private and tribal lands as well as national monument and forest lands.
Energy Zone lands are said to contain abundant, world-class deposits of energy and mineral resources along with prospects for renewable energy potential.
The second part deals with oil shale and oil sands technologies, which county officials have firsthand knowledge of to the extent they believe in the economic viability of the applications.
“Similar applicable technologies should immediately be applied today to oil shale and oil sands resources within Uintah County” the amendment reads.
Additional language calls upon state and federal agencies to fully comply with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 — “not the political vagaries of the day.”
“A general plan is more of a stratosphere type analysis of how we would like to see things governed within our boundaries; rarely does it deal with laser pointed issues of the day, but because of the concern over Secretarial Order 3310 (wilderness plan) and the 2011 oil shale Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, we have added a footnote of explanation,” John Stermer, county attorney, explained.
The danger here, according to McKee, lies in the PEIS, which would reduce the amount of available oil shale land for development by 75 percent.
He cautioned that under FLPMA land use plans of the Interior Secretary should be consistent with state and local plans, and not be counter productive.
The county filed against the Secretary of the Interior in March 2011 seeking relief from duplicate environmental process, vague wilderness policies and lack of coordination.
A final note written into the amendments states that Uintah County “is exercising its duty under our system of Federalism to try sound novel approaches to manage public lands within its boundaries.”
The words paraphrase those of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s metaphor for states as laboratories for policy experiments.
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