Oil Shale News

From: Fars News Agency

A Vernal attorney is suing Uintah County over a closed session it held with oil shale industry officials and leaders of other counties in March to discuss a resolution opposing a proposed federal clampdown on leasing of public lands.

Sandra Hansen filed a complaint Monday in 8th District Court on her own behalf, asking a judge to nullify the resolution that the county subsequently passed and to instruct the county not to conduct more meetings in violation of the open-meetings law.

From: Town Hall Finance

By: Lincoln Brown

According to E&E Times, last week, the House killed funding for oil shale research in the 2013 energy and water spending bill. Had the funding been left in place 25 million dollars would have been allocated for oil shale R&D. It was a close vote, 208 to 207, but the funding was eliminated.

People in Parachute, Colorado remember all too well the Black Sunday on May 2^nd 1982 when Exxon suddenly closed its oil shale development there. Over 2,000 people found themselves out of work.

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.

From: CNBC

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Exxon Mobil Corp <XOM.N>, the world’s largest publicly listed energy company, warned on Tuesday that too much government regulation could undermine a rapid global expansion of gas output from a range of unconventional sources.

Helped by a boom in shale gas, Exxon Mobil has become North America’s largest natural gas producer, but energy firms face pressure for tighter regulation of the industry over concerns about the impact of drilling on the environment and also public concern that U.S. gas prices could rise if the gas is exported.

From: Trend

Jordan has finalized a deal to construct an oil shale power plant, becoming the first Arab state to try to tap into the alternative energy resource, the country announced Saturday.

The power station comes as part of an agreement reached on Thursday between Amman and Enefit, an Estonian-Malaysian firm currently carrying out exploration in the country’s central region. Experts believe it has the potential to yield up to 38,000 barrels per day, dpa reported.

Under the multimillion-dollar deal, the Estonian firm is to construct a 450-megawatt power plant by 2016, the first of several planned projects to tap into Jordan’s estimated 40-billion-tonne oil shale reserves.

From: The Daily Sentinel

Two oil shale research-and-development proposals in Colorado have moved a step forward with today’s release of a draft environmental review of them.

The Bureau of Land Management released a preliminary environmental assessment of proposals by ExxonMobil Exploration Co. and Natural Soda Holdings Inc. for research, development and demonstration leases in Rio Blanco County.

“It’s the next step in our evaluation of whether or not we issue these leases,” said BLM spokesman David Boyd.

From: The New American

A stretch of largely vacant federal lands in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado may hold more recoverable oil than all the rest of the world put together. That is what Anu Mittal, Director of Natural Resources for the General Accounting Office, informed the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment in her written testimony on May 10:

The Green River Formation — an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale. USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions.

From: Denver Post

When I look through my faded, fraying family albums and look at the generations of mamas, papas, brothers and sisters who have made a life for themselves in the West, I often imagine the difficulties and challenges they have confronted.

I have often wondered how, for hundreds of years, our ancestors were able to overcome those obstacles, sustain our families and provide for children.

It is then I realize that what helped my ancestors survive and establish a proud heritage here in the West is the exact same precious resource that sustains my family and the lives of millions across the West today: Colorado River water that cuts across vast swaths of our the West.

From: The Republic

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Gov. Matt Mead has told the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that he disagrees with the agency’s proposal to reduce the amount of land in the state available to possible oil shale research and demonstration projects by placing sage grouse areas as well as potential wilderness lands and areas of critical environmental concern off-limits.

The BLM proposes to cut the acreage available for the oil shale projects and research from 2 million acres approved by the Bush administration in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah down to about 460,000 acres, of which nearly 175,000 are in Wyoming. The agency is working on a draft environmental study and intends to make leasing decisions by this fall.