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This past weekend the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel ran opposing op-eds on the prospects of oil shale development in Colorado, and specifically on the Obama administration’s pending finalization of an oil shale leasing plan.  

The Obama plan is a solid improvement over an earlier plan put forth by the Bush administration.  It would help ensure that oil shale development–should it ever prove viable–happens more sensibly.  With finalization, future decisions about developing oil shale will have to recognize resources like our scarce water and the public lands of the Piceance Basin are too valuable and important to just hand over to industry without knowledge of what exactly we would be getting into.  Industry will have to be able to show what the impacts to those resources are likely to be before they are given permissions and permits to do so.  

The Sentinel columns are behind a paywall but are notable not only for the substance but for the authors. On one hand Colorado Department of Natural Resource Director Mike King–himself a western Colorado native.  On the other Brad McCloud the director of the suspiciously-named ‘Environmentally Conscious Consumers for Oil Shale’ also known as EIS Solutions, an industry-funded astrourfing PR shop.  

Of course significant questions still remain about potential impacts that might result from a commercial oil shale industry in Western Colorado. And King’s basic point is there is no reason to rush ahead, given both technologies and impacts remain unknown.  

This is because after a century of effort and billions in taxpayer subsidies to help “unlock” the secret of the ‘rock that burns’ and turn it into a commercial fuel source: zilch.  

Oh sure, there is talk as there has always been, and then another glitch, another setback, another delay. But with the Obama administration poised to finalize new leasing parameters and regulations for oil shale, the rhetoric has of late heated up. This is where the EIS Solutions op-ed comes in.  Mr. McCloud argues that the U.S. taxpayer is not making enough of the public’s resources available to industry, and not enough is the same as nothing in industry’s overblown rhetoric.