Oil shale energy experiments set in West

[boise1]

Activists wary as Bush administration selects companies, techniques

Updated: 1:50 p.m. ET Jan. 18, 2006

SALT LAKE CITY - Heralding oil shale as “a domestic resource with staggering potential,” the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has selected the first companies likely to earn a chance to start exploiting federal lands in Colorado and Utah.

BLM Director Kathleen Clarke announced the bureau had narrowed a field of 16 contenders for experimental projects, choosing six companies that, subject to environmental reviews, could be awarded leases to work 160-acre parcels of federal land by summer.

Taking direction from President Bush's Energy Act, Clarke said the reserves contain a 100-year domestic supply of oil, although it's locked up in layers of hard rock and the technology for economically recovering it is still evolving.

Oil shale generally refers to any rock that contains solid tarlike materials released as petroleum-like liquids when the rock is heated.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10908599/from/RS.2/

[phantom power]

1. Super plan, Kathleen

Ignore, for the moment, the fact that burning oil into CO2 for another 100 years will doom us. Ignore, for the moment, the fact that nobody can afford oil extracted this way. What are our federal lands going to look like, if they spend the next hundred years cooking oil out of the rock?