Rusted Sky

After all, there's no REAL urgency, is there?

The politics of oil shale - Jun. 6, 2008

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- You'd think this would be oil shale's moment.

You'd think with gas prices topping $4 and consumers crying uncle, Congress would be moving fast to spur development of a domestic oil resource so vast - 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone - it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

You'd think politicians would be tripping over themselves to arrange photo-ops with Harold Vinegar (whom I profiled in Fortune last November), the brilliant, Brooklyn-born chief scientist at Royal Dutch Shell whose research cracked the code on how to efficiently and cleanly convert oil shale - a rock-like fossil fuel known to geologists as kerogen - into light crude oil.

You'd think all of this, but you'd be wrong.

Last month, the U.S. Senate's Appropriations Committee voted 15-14 to kill a bill that would have ended a one-year moratorium on enacting rules for oil shale development on federal lands (which is where the best oil shale is located). Most maddening of all - at least to someone like myself not steeped in the wacky ways of Washington - the swing vote on the appropriations committee, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., voted with the majority even though she actually opposes the moratorium.

"Sen. Salazar asked me to vote no. I did so at his request," Landrieu told The Rocky Mountain News. A Landrieu staffer contacted by Fortune doesn't dispute this, but notes that Landrieu did propose a compromise which Republicans rejected.

Arghh!

She was speaking of U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., who has emerged as the Senate's leading oil shale opponent. Salazar inserted the aforementioned moratorium into an omnibus spending bill last December, and in May he proposed a new bill that would extend the moratorium another year.

It's getting kind of plain that the folks in Washington don't believe there's any real problem. It IS, after all, an election year, and the only thing you do with problems (real or perceived) in an election year is make nice speeches about how you're going to solve them IF you get elected. Why in heaven's name would you do something to correct the problem?

Yeah, I know - because getting voted into office or staying in office is MUCH more important than anything else. And if it means the economy goes off the rails... well, so what?

J.