Utah Hot To Revisit Failed Foreign-Owned Oil Shale Project That Makes Zero Economic Sense
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The dire state of the Colorado River hasn’t stopped Utah officials from enthusiastically supporting policies to encourage Enefit’s oil shale production and all sorts of other thirsty, ill-conceived fossil fuel projects in the Uinta Basin in what some environmentalists have dubbed a “suicide pact.” These projects and priorities generally, and Enefit’s in particular, illustrate how a state, run largely by people who don’t believe in climate change, still presses ahead with carbon-belching fossil-fuel developments that, if successful, will only exacerbate the megadrought that has brought the Colorado River—and the West—to the brink of disaster. “The whole connection between water and climate change, and conventional energy development and climate change, is not front and center” in Utah, says Udall. “I’ve given talks to high-level people in Utah who refuse to acknowledge the relationship between climate change and the drought and the American West.”
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In 1974, the Department of Interior leased two large parcels of public land in the Uinta Basin that Enefit now controls to a consortium of oil companies that became the White River Shale Company. The Carter administration created loan subsidies and other supports to encourage oil shale mining, and construction began on a coal-fired power plant to support the future industry. In 1982, the White River Shale company pledged to invest $100 million into the operation and began the construction of a new mine in the basin. Just three years later, global oil prices collapsed, Ronald Reagan cut off federal subsidies for alternative fuel development, and the company officially abandoned the mine. But in 2005, Congress passed a bill pushed by President George W. Bush and Utah Republican senators Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett that declared oil shale an “important domestic resource” for national security and directed the federal government to accelerate its development.
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One need only look at Estonia, the world’s leader in oil shale mining, to see what would happen to a Colorado River watershed dominated by this industry. With 70 percent of the country’s energy supply from oil shale, Estonia accounts for the second-highest per capita CO2 emissions in all of Europe. The reason? Oil shale has about the same energy density as a potato. Getting useable oil from it requires heating a lot of rocks to extremely high temperatures, a process that emits between 25 to 75 percent more C02 emissions than conventional oil drilling. That’s why Enefit’s Utah development was met with stiff opposition from environmentalists, who see the project as a potentially catastrophic “carbon bomb.” In 2010, the late activist Randy Udall (brother of CSU’s Brad Udall) decried oil shale mining in Utah as “folly.” He told the Deseret News, “If someone told you there were a trillion tons of tater tots buried 1,000 feet deep,” he asked, “would you rush to dig them up?”
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Meanwhile, state officials have allocated millions of dollars to build infrastructure to increase fossil fuel production in the Green River watershed. Some of the funds have come from the Permanent Community Impact Fund Board (CIB), a pot of money created from royalties from oil and gas leases on public lands. The fund is supposed to help mitigate the impact of mineral extraction on local communities. The nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity reported in 2021 that over the previous two years, rural counties in the basin had asked the CIB for more than $60 million for such projects as upgrading water tanks, sewer lines, and fire hydrants—some needed because of the drought—but received none of it. Instead, since 2009, the CIB has spent millions on fossil-fuel infrastructure, like $34 million on a “road to nowhere” across the basin to service oil fields and a tar sand mine on state-owned land that has never—and probably never will—produce any commercially significant amounts of oil.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/05/utahs-suicide-pact-with-the-fossil-fuel-industry/
