Urban Ecoist

Here’s the deal.  Sure, this website may be about urban ecology and its issues, but living in a city or even a suburb does not mean that we should not be paying attention to ecology in rural or wilderness lands.  It’s all a big circle, and even we city mice should know where our energy comes from and what that energy production entails in ecological and environmental terms. Not to mention, many city slickers end up in the wilderness areas of the American West on vacation. And who wants to spend their holiday anywhere near a gigantic mining operation?

Living in middle of New York or San Francisco does not allow you the luxury of burying your head in the sand — or the oil sand.

To be fair, oil shale is not the notorious oil sands, but oil shale (being neither oil nor shale) is not any better environmentally-speaking, but as Americans have a lust for oil that cannot be quenched, our Federal Government, in all its infinite wisdom, decided that mining for oil shale is feasible now that oil prices have gone up. In the past, the cost of producing oil from oil shale has been cost-prohibitive, but as crude oil prices have spiked, and talk of peak oil is being dismissed by our leaders, oil shale has moved from ugly step-sister to Cinderella.

Today’s post is about the newly announced Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) final rules to manage oil shale mining in the United States. Oil shale mining was part of that lovely Energy Policy Act of 2005. Thanks, Congress! Final rules mean that we are getting closer to having federal lands mined, or ravaged as in the case of mining for oil shale, in the Green River Formation that spans parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming (see map below, click for better detail).

It’s not so much that mining for oil shale is any worse than mining for coal, except that it is, as oil shale per unit of mass produces one-sixth the amount of energy as coal and one-tenth the amount of energy that the same unit of weight of oil produces. Which means that much more oil shale needs to be mined in order to produce the same amount of energy. And guess what resource is needed to mine oil shale that Colorado, Utah and Wyoming don’t have — water.

Yes, we need electricity and yes, we need our cars (I guess, as I sit here watching a documentary on super highways outside of Dallas, thinking to myself instead of spending 100 million dollars per mile in construction costs, why not build public transit infrastructure? But then I am not a Texan, and I think that kind of talk would get me ran out of the state if I were), but instead of mining for oil shale, let’s turn our sights to cleaner forms of energy that do not require herculean amounts of water and continue to saturate our atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

When will we learn…

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