DeGrow's Bleating Demonstrates His an Schaffer's Ignorance on Oil Shale

Like a couple of '49ers, Ben DeGrow and Bob Schaffer have jumped on the oil shale bandwagon pointing to Shell Oil's in situ process experiment as "proof" that oil shale development is ready for prime time. Only it isn't proof, and Shell is the first to admit it.

Let's look at the actual facts:

* Shell Oil only proved that the process is possible on about one acre of land. There is no proof that their freezing/heating process is scalable to commercial production levels.

* According to a RAND Corporation study, Shell's process would require 3 barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil. To put that in perspective, it's about a Lake Dillon of water every year for each million barrels of daily oil production.

* The process is also energy-intensive, requiring the ground around a drilling site to be frozen, and the ground within the site to be heated for several years. Several coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants would have to be constructed, each of which would have its own water requirements.

* Infrastructure to transport the needed water and power, refine the extracted oil, and treat the produced wastewater would have to be constructed.

Add to this that Shell is one of the leading opponents to commercial leasing because it will take at least five more years to even make the decision whether their experiments were successful. They, understandably, don't want to be forced into the land speculation business only to find the value of their holdings collapse if the process turns out to be unfeasible.

So ask Western Slope residents where they'll come up with 8-10 Lake Dillons per year of water, and where they'd like to have those coal power plants, railroad tracks, pipelines, refineries, waste processing plants, and high-tension wires placed. Because all of that will have to be figured out if (and only if) Shell can make its process commercially scalable. The only other option is strip mining, which has similar water requirements and produces waste of a larger volume than the shale that's mined.