The Salt Lake Tribune
July 23, 2008, Patty Henetz

 The Bush administration on Tuesday released proposed rules administering commercial oil shale development on public lands in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming to provide "critical rules of the road" for investors.
    The rules would govern lease management and royalty payments should extracting kerogen from rock for further refining into fuel ever prove economically feasible - an open question given the likelihood of carbon taxes, lack of available Colorado River water and a host of environmental protection restrictions.
    The rules proposed by the Department of the Interior are part of an election-year push by Republicans to support development of oil shale, which a Rand Corp. study last year said could yield as much as 800 billion barrels of oil.
    "As Americans pay more than $4 for a gallon of gasoline and watch energy prices continue to climb higher and higher, we need to be doing more to develop our own energy here at home, through resources such as oil shale," said Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne. "Instead, I find it ironic that we are asking countries halfway around the world to produce more for us."
    But even stalwart Republicans question the connection between pump prices and oil-shale development. During a news conference at the Utah Capitol earlier this month, Sen. Orrin Hatch said that while the companies hoping to develop oil shale "are our nation's energy Minutemen," they
    cannot bring down the price of oil today.
    Conservation organizations called the administration's move to develop rules a "false hope."
    "Instead of gambling our resources on unproven fuel sources, such as oil shale, we should invest in proven options that will reduce prices such as higher fuel economy standards, energy efficiency and renewable generation technologies," Chase Huntley, energy policy adviser for The Wilderness Society, said Tuesday.
    Oil shale development would require massive amounts of water that simply may not be available.
    In an April 8 letter to the BLM, Utah Public Lands Policy Coordination director John Harja said his office didn't understand if there were sufficient physical water, let alone water rights, "to support the scale of development contemplated and the effects this level of water demand might have on agriculture or wildlife [especially endangered fish] inhabiting lands and waters in the area."
    Harja said Tuesday that he had been in on meetings about the proposed rules, but that none of the issues raised in his letter were addressed.
    "It's a simple question," he said. "Where's the water going to come from?"
    Melting kerogen, a waxy substance in shale, is an old technology that poses significant threats to the environment. Kerogen can be further refined into diesel, jet fuel or naphtha.
    But no oil refinery in the United States currently is accepting kerogen for processing, and oil companies have indicated they are not interested in building new refineries in the country.