Lawsuit Contends Oil Shale Drilling Has Impact on Climate Change

In the Bush administration’s last days, the Bureau of Land Management opened 2 million acres of public land to commercial oil shale development. A coalition of environmental groups quickly sued, contending the regulations could harm endangered species.

This week, the plaintiffs formally added a new complaint to their case: They say the BLM failed to adequately consider the impact of oil shale development on climate change.

From a pure energy perspective, the land in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado holds much promise. Just a small fraction of it – a 1,200-square-mile area of western Colorado known as the Piceance Basin – holds about 1 trillion barrels, “as much oil as the entire world’s proven oil reserves,” according to a 2005 report on oil shale by the RAND Corporation.

“This resource base is extremely valuable," says Jim Bartis, a senior policy researcher at RAND and an author of the report. "A 6,000-acre lease would yield something like 12 billion barrels of oil. At a $100 a barrel, we’re talking a $1.2 trillion value here.”

The catch is that the oil is trapped in rock – shale – that needs to be heated to between 800 and 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit for the oil to be extracted. The process is energy intensive, water intensive, and, the lawsuit argues, contributes to global warming.

Over its lifecycle, from extraction to automobile tailpipe, a gallon of shale oil emits anywhere from as much carbon dioxide as a gallon of conventional oil to 50% more, Bartis says. "The reason it’s such a large range is associated with where you get the power and electric power to produce the oil shale – and whether or not you sequester the CO2 or not," he says. Other studies have reached similar conclusions.

Oil shale drilling is hard on the environment in other ways, as well.

First, it is extremely disruptive to local ecology, whether it is drilled the old-fashioned way – with giant surface mines that extend down more than 1,000 feet – or by heating the rock underground until the oil bubbles up from below.

“You’re talking about really restructuring the land [if the shale is mined],” Bartis says. “It could take decades before they start refilling in the land from the mining. So if you go the old-fashioned way, you have this traumatic change to the landscape.

"If you go the newfangled way, by heating if up underground, whatever is growing on that surface won’t be growing on the surface where you’re working, so there will be a one to two decade disruption of the local ecology on the surface where you’re drilling.”

Second, oil shale drilling uses a significant amount of water for dust control, cooling, upgrading raw shale oil, power production and environmental protection. Estimates for the amount of water needed to produce one barrel of oil range from 2.1 to 5.2 barrels of water per barrel of shale oil.

The particular area that the BLM opened up for commercial oil shale drilling has other potential environmental problems. Located in the Colorado River Basin, the oil shale could contaminate the underground water through leachate, mine drainage and spills. That could harm the Colorado River’s water quality.

David Alberswerth, Senior Policy Advisor at the Wilderness Society, one of the plaintiffs along with the Sierra Club, NRDC and other groups, says another concern is the amount of energy oil shale requires for extraction and refining:

“The problem we see is this: Oil shale is basically a fossil fuel. In order to extract that fuel from the ground, you have to have pretty intensive energy inputs, and most of that energy is likely to come from the production of large scale coal-fired power plants.”

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