Rio Blanco County – Standing on barren ground that holds one of the world’s richest but trickiest-to-access fuel sources, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairman Pete Domenici predicted that new technology will unlock that resource and lessen America’s dependence on foreign oil.
“In a few years, we will be able to tell the world we have unlocked this great, great reserve,” Domenici said during a tour of Shell Exploration & Production’s Mahogany Research Project in the remote hills between Rangely and Rifle. “There is great hope that it will work.”
Domenici, R-N.M., and committee member Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., were touring the project as they prepare for a Senate field hearing in Grand Junction this morning on oil shale development.
Salazar was more circumspect in his predictions for the future of oil shale, but he said the presence of the committee chairman in western Colorado and the field hearing signal strong interest in Washington in finding a way to economically develop an oil shale reserve that is equal to the national oil supply.
“There is great potential. There is also great risk,” he said.
Calling tourism the Western Slope’s “gold mine,” Salazar said any shale development must be balanced with the need to sustain that economy.
“We will not do anything in the context of oil shale that will endanger that,” he said.
Shell has been working since the 1970s on a way to heat the kerogen in shale rock underground rather than mining the rock and cooking it above ground – a method that proved so costly it led to the oil shale bust in 1982 when companies shut down massive shale projects in this area without producing oil.
Shell is building a football field-sized “freeze wall” in a test that Shell vice president Terry O’Connor said is a crucial component of being able to produce oil from shale. The wall of underground ice – as deep as 2,000 feet and as thick as 300 feet – would prevent underground water from reaching the electric heaters the company is lowering deep into the ground to melt the kerogen. The ice wall, created by circulating a cooling solution in pipes, would also prevent contamination of groundwater.
O’Connor said the company is ready to begin another field test of its heating method but cannot go forward until – and only if – the Bureau of Land Management approves research and development leases on federal lands where the shale oil is richest. Shell is being considered for leases for three variations of its patented technology.
The research leases for Shell and three other companies may be approved as early as this summer.
Domenici did not answer questions about how much water and energy might be needed for oil shale development. He said companies such as Shell wouldn’t be sinking huge amounts of money into such research projects if there wasn’t a strong belief that new technologies will finally make oil shale a usable resource.
“I believe they do have a technology that has great hope for the future – great hope,” he said.
