Fourteen Grand Valley high school students saw dueling visions of the future of oil shale Tuesday night at Colorado Mesa University.
Oil shale, one expert said, is emerging from the “too-hard-to-do file.”
There’s a reason it’s in that file, said another expert, calling development of oil shale “thermodynamically insane.”
The former, Jerry Boak, director of the Center for Oil Shale Technology and Research at Colorado School of Mines, acknowledged oil shale is facing, as it always has, challenges from other forms of fuel that are more easily developed.
And the latter, Randy Udall, an energy analyst and promoter of sustainable energy, acknowledged the kind of invention that makes other forms of energy available might some day do the same with oil shale.
In any case, said a third expert, Jim Spehar, a former Grand Junction mayor and Mesa County commissioner, it “would be irresponsible not to be ready” for the growth that an oil shale boom would bring.
The three spoke at a symposium sponsored by the John McConnell Math and Science Center of Western Colorado’s Youth Policy Summit on the future of oil shale.
The Youth Policy Summit students were joined in the university’s student center by more than 130 people, many of them associated with industry and environmental groups.
Oil shale’s history reaches further back than the century over which it has been studied in western Colorado, Boak said. Even the most advanced in-situ techniques now being perfected on the high, sage plains of northwest Colorado were first tried in post-World War II Sweden, and mounds of spent shale still dot parts of the United Kingdom, he said.
The deepest and richest oil shale deposits in the world, however, lie beneath Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, where the Bureau of Land Management is overseeing five research, demonstration and development leases.
The bureau should be conducting baseline environmental studies on the oil shale region to better gauge the effects of development as it occurs, Boak said.
Udall, however, likened the development of oil shale to the pursuit of a mirage and noted human invention has pushed back, perhaps forever, the need for oil shale development.
“Hydraulic fracturing, human ingenuity and horizontal wells” that already are tapping vast domestic stores of natural gas and oil have relieved the energy industry of the need to develop oil shale, Udall said.
In five years, the production from the Bakken shale of North Dakota has outstripped 150 years of global oil shale production.
Oil shale long has been seen as “mostly a science project,” Spehar said, calling on industry and policy makers to take into account the potential effects of rapid development on rural northwest Colorado when making plans for oil shale.
