Officials looking at shale prospects

As the price of conventional oil lingers at around $70 a barrel, Washington leaders are taking a renewed interest in Utah's vast amounts of untapped oil shale.

Sens. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Ken Salazar, D-Colo., are expected to visit the Vernal area on June 1, along with Sen. Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

The group's field trip will include sites in Utah and Colorado where petroleum is contained in rock deposits under federal lands.

In Utah alone, an estimated 300 billion barrels of oil could be extracted from shale, which must be mined and then processed.

"We don't know how much is recoverable," said Dave Tabet, energy and minerals program manager for the Utah Geological Survey. "It depends on whether you want to make money or lose money doing it."

Currently, no one in this country is processing oil shale, and it's still considered expensive to do so. But high prices on imported oil and the United States' reliance on foreign sources are changing attitudes.

The Bureau of Land Management has whittled down to a few, the number of companies nominated to do research and development into ways to use oil-shale deposits. But it could be six to 15 more years before a commercial product is available to consumers, Tabet said.

Even if oil prices come down in that time, he added, the United States might do well to mine and process oil shale.

"It provides us with a domestic resource," Tabet said. "I think the country needs to have a diversified source of energy."

Hatch told the Associated Press he wants to move fast on driving down the price of oil by increasing domestic supplies.

"We have more recoverable oil in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado than there is in the Middle East, and this field hearing will help us learn how to tap into this resource as quickly and responsibly as possible," he said.

Tabet also noted that one of the largest users of oil, most of which is from foreign sources, is the Department of Defense, which he said has been looking into alternative fuel sources.

Companies interested in mining shale will have to go through a tough permitting process and pass muster with the Environmental Protection Agency, according to Tabet.

"It certainly wouldn't be any more damaging than any mining going on today," he said.

If a decision is made to dig for shale in Colorado and Utah, Tabet said it could force a decision on whether to go after natural gas, oil or shale, because they can't be extracted at the same time. In Utah, companies have plans to drill about 600 more oil wells in the coming years, he added.

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com