Getting your player ready...
SALT LAKE CITY — Petroleum companies’ plans to tap the Rocky Mountains’ abundant oil-shale reserves are “not ready for prime time,” a senior legal adviser to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told a Utah energy conference Wed nesday.
Steve Black said the Obama administration is taking a deliberate, cautious approach on making federal lands available for major oil-shale development because nobody has shown they can squeeze the oil out of hard rock economically.
“I don’t know when we’ll see commercial development on public lands,” Black told the Unconventional Fuels Conference, a gathering of leading researchers and small outfits with experimental oil-shale works. “It’s an industry that is not ready for prime time.”
