Colorado is different. Our Rocky Mountain oysters aren’t seafood, our tourism industry heats up when temperatures cool down and our oil reserves aren’t like Texas’ liquid “black gold.” Ours are the shale rocks of Western Colorado.
Unfortunately, one thing in Colorado seems to be the same as everywhere else: People with an agenda like to tell just part of the story. Such is the case with the latest debate about oil shale.
Oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming could yield 800 billion barrels of oil for the global market. That is more than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia and certainly enough to help drive down gas prices in America. But political posturing has prevented us from even beginning to plan how we can utilize this resource.
Why aren’t we taking steps to utilize this resource to lower fuel prices, secure our economic future, cut back on $700 billion annually in overseas fuel purchases and send an important message to foreign producers that we are actually committed to energy independence?
Since December, Congress has prevented the Department of Interior from even issuing the proposed regulations under which oil shale development could eventually move forward. Instigators of this prohibition from Colorado’s congressional delegation want to continue the delay for another year, at least.
You’ve heard false claims that Interior is under a “frenzied rush” to “organize a fire sale” of development leases. It is ridiculous to consider the multiyear effort — started in 2004 and including congressional debate and the passage of a proposal, years of planning, studies, R&D and a draft environmental impact statement issued — as “frenzied.”
Most important, opponents conveniently don’t say that we are simply trying to lay the groundwork for how to offer this resource for development. Backers of this prohibition practically claim to be standing in front of drilling rigs, protecting the land.
Politicization of a responsible way forward shuts down this energy resource and ignores the reality that we still will need to utilize fossil fuels in the short term as we transition to alternative sources of renewable energy for the future.
Western communities understand both the potential and the realities of the oil shale resource in their backyard. They understand the water issue must be addressed and the infrastructure challenges they are already facing. They also know the benefits that booming economies and lease revenues from responsible development would bring.
We need to thoughtfully plan, carefully regulate and explore all options. In fact, affected counties have already been doing just that with the Bureau of Land Management for nearly five years.
It is strange that developing regulations for oil shale — a technology we have been exploring for decades — would be labeled as a “heedless rush” when the vast majority of Senate Democrats recently attempted to establish a wholly bureaucratic straitjacket of “cap and trade” for greenhouse gas emissions on the entire U.S. economy. This scheme would costs billions of dollars and had no workable examples.
Yet allowing Western land managers to move forward with the regulations for how to utilize oil shale is too dangerous? That logic makes sense only in the boardrooms of extremist environmental groups and foreign oil companies that are gleefully counting the hundreds of billions of dollars Americans are forced to fork over every year for energy.
U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard is a Republican and Colorado’s senior senator.
