Coming to a state near you?

By Tom Kenworthy

Before long the tar sands issue won’t be just about imports from Canada via pipeline.

Utah, which has never met a dirty fuel it didn’t love, has been encouraging efforts to develop a home-grown tar sands industry. Construction on a project located on state lands in the eastern part of the state could begin by the end of the year, according to a story in Environment and Energy Publishing’s Energy Wire:

“It’s not just something that’s up in Canada,” Utah Tar Sands Resistance member Raphael Cordray told E&E. “People don’t know it’s here in Utah. Our goal is to get the citizens of Utah to recognize that there’s a proposed tar sands site in Utah that could become the first commercial site in America, and what is at stake.”

Utah has about a third of the roughly 36 billion barrels of tar sands oil thought to be located in the U.S. Not all of that is estimated to be technically or commercially recoverable, however.  Tar sands contain a form of petroleum called bitumen that can be refined into gasoline. But the process is costly, energy-intensive, and on a life-cycle basis releases far more global warming pollutants than conventional oil refining operations.

U.S. Oil Sands, the Canadian based company that is working to develop the Utah deposits, has leases on about 32,000 acres of land in the state. The company was granted permits to begin production by the state in 2009. But it faces a legal challenge from an environmental group, Living Rivers, which fears tar sands production will harm Utah’s desert and mountain landscapes.

Meanwhile, supporters of another dirty fossil fuel, oil shale, have been making a political ruckus in a number of counties in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming — organized by a former Bush administration Interior Department official who now directs a Utah state office focused on energy development on federal lands in the state.

A number of county boards in the region have approved, or considered approving, a resolution taking the Obama administration to task for scaling back plans by the Bush administration to develop oil shale resources. Combined with efforts on Capitol Hill, this represents the beginning of an all-out election year push by Republicans to agitate for massive developments of dirty and impractical fossil fuels.

Oil shale – not to be confused with shale oil deposits like those in the Bakken field in North Dakota – is an energy developers’ pipe dream. Though oil shale deposits in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah may contain an estimated 1.5 trillion barrels of recoverable oil, it has never been proven to be commercially viable in the U.S.

Oil shale is a rock that contains kerogen and must be heated to very high temperatures to release a synthetic oil. It has “one-third the energy density of Cap’n Crunch!“ Shale oil is conventional oil trapped in reservoirs found in shale rock formations.

Development of oil shale could have a significant impact on already stressed western water supplies, according to a 2010 study by the General Accounting Office. And a recent report by Western Resource Advocates shows that oil shale development would take huge amounts of energy, would have emit large amounts of global warming pollutants, and would increase air pollution problems in the interior West.

Tom Kenworthy is a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund

The House push for oil shale is a terrible idea for the arid West.

by RL Miller, reposted from Daily Kos

On Feb. 1, the House Natural Resources Committee approved a three-headed monster of an energy bill: drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, drilling off the California coast, and expansion of oil shale drilling. But hey, the bill has the magic word “jobs” in the label, so it’s all good! The committee’s press release trumpets the quantity of oil shale lurking deep under the Green River formation (Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming) and the need for job creators’ certainty.

The committee doesn’t bother with the thirsty facts of oil shale mining. If drilling for easy oil can be analogized to sticking a straw into a lemon and watching juice seep up, obtaining oil from oil shale involves digging up fossilized lemons, reconstituting them with a lot of water – some estimates are 5 gallons of water for every gallon of oil – using vast quantities of energy to boil the watery dried out lemons, catching the vapor, distilling lemon juice vapor from water vapor, and dumping all that contaminated waste water somewhere. All these activities will be taking place in western Colorado and eastern Utah, not exactly known for their abundance of water.

The committee also doesn’t bother with the economics of oil shale mining. The technology isn’t in place for commercial oil shale mining and may never be. Oil shale, like nuclear fusion, has been “10 years away from commercial development” for much longer than 10 years; the Checks and Balances Project has compiled oil shale industry boosters’ promises (PDF) going back to 1916. Unlike Canadian oil sands (aka tar sands), oil shale has never been produced commercially in the United States.

Read more

Although China boasts of its green progress, the booming nation is also making major bets on North and South American tar sands, one of the most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet. This play for civilization-threatening energy comes even as the world’s nations jockey over the fragile international climate accords in Durban, South Africa:

On Monday, China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) closed its acquisition of bankrupt Canadian tar sands producer OPTI Canada Inc. CNOOC gets OPTI’s 35 percent working interest in Long Lake and three other project areas located in the Athabasca region of northeastern Alberta, split with Canadian operator Nexen Inc. The deal cost $34 million for OPTI stock and $2 billion in debt. [Reuters]

On Wednesday, CNOOC and Nexen formed a joint venture, giving CNOOC a 20 percent working interest in the Kakuna, Angel Fire, and Cypress deepwater exploration wells in the Gulf of Mexico. [BusinessWeek]

These dirty investments in North American fossil fuel projects are just the latest in a rapid string of deals to give China access to high-polluting carbon energy from the Americas. Over the last three years, China-owned companies have invested over $18 billion in tar sands, shale gas, and coal projects in Canada and Venezuela:

November, 2011: China signs a $6 billion deal with Venezuela to develop tar sands — $4 billion to the Chinese-Venezuelan tar sands company Sinovensa to increase production from 118,000 barrels a day to 1.1 million barrels a day in 2014, and $2 billion to Venezuela’s state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela for refining projects, drills, and equipment. [Channel News Asia]

October, 2011: Sinopec spends $2.2 billion to acquire shale gas producer Daylight Energy, which controls 300,000 acres of oil and gas property, at a 70 percent premium. [Bloomberg]

May, 2010: China Investment Corporation spends $1.25 billion on Alberta tar sands — $817 million for a 45 percent stake in the Peace River tar sands project owned by Penn West Energy Trust, and $435 million for a 5 percent interest in the company. [Penn West Energy]

April, 2010: Sinopec spends $4.65 billion to buy ConocoPhillips’ 9 percent stake in tar sands producer Syncrude Canada. [New York Times]

February, 2010: PetroChina spends $1.73 billion to purchase 60 percent of AOSC’s MacKay River and Dover tar sands projects. [CRI]

July, 2009: China Investment Corporation spends $1.5 billion to purchase 17 percent of Teck Resources, Canada’s largest metallurgical coal and copper mining company. CIC was recently granted a seat on Teck’s board of directors. [China Daily]

In 2005, PetroChina and Enbridge signed a $2 billion deal to help the Canadian tar sands company develop the Northern Gateway Pipeline, a project intended to deliver 400,000 barrels of tar crude a day from Edmonton, Alberta to the British Columbia port town of Kitimat, giving China access to direct tar sands shipping.

The pipeline has been unbuilt for years, facing stiff opposition and economic challenges. This Friday, Gitxsan First Nation announced it would become “the first aboriginal partner” for the pipeline. On Thursday, 130 native groups in Western Canada pledged to block the project. Enbridge has offered up to a 10 percent stake in the pipeline to first nations who sign on.

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today, the House Subcommittee on Energy and Minerals will debate a proposal to jump start oil shale production, which could be one of the dirtiest forms of energy in existence if it were to become viable. Subcommittee Chairman Doug Lamborn’s (R-CO) bill would codify midnight regulations on oil shale that the Bush administration passed just as it was leaving office in early 2009.

You’re not alone if you haven’t heard of oil shale, which should not be confused with the viable energy producer “shale oil.” In order to develop the oil shale, a type of rock, power plants must be built to heat the rock up to nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and produce crude oil that still needs to be refined. This takes a large amount of energy and money, as well as 3-5 barrels of water per barrel of oil produced, a dangerous issue in the parched West.

Politicians and oil companies have extolled the virtue of this “new” form of energy since the early 1900s, yet not a single barrel of oil from oil shale has been commercially sold. That does not stop today’s politicians and oil CEOs from using the same language as their decades old predecessors. In a field hearing this summer, the Checks and Balances Project developed a bingo card with old-timey oil shale phrases — all of which but one were used. You can follow along today to see if the same arguments are used yet again (click on the card for a larger version).

Oil companies and proponents of oil shale claim it can “solve our energy crisis,” and Lamborn recently claimed that it is “one of America’s greatest natural resources.” Yet, despite decades of experimentation and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, oil shale has never been produced commercially in the United States. Even the director of the Center for Oil Shale Technology and Research admitted that:

All of the major companies are doing oil shale because they think it’s an interesting and high-potential area, but they’re not in a hurry to make it productive…

Oil companies already have research and development leases on public lands, but they now seeking even more public lands on which to experiment. Lamborn’s bill continues to reward dirty fossil fuel companies for chasing what some have called “the petroleum equivalent of fool’s gold.” Throughout his career, Lamborn has received $126,962 from the oil and gas industry.

On Wednesday, House Natural Resource Committee Republicans held their 20th oversight hearing on how to drill more. In addition to oil shale, todays legislative hearing will feature bills to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and to mandate offshore oil and gas lease sales.