Will oil shale turn into a boon or environmental mess?

For proprietary reasons, he isn't specific about the technology being developed by EnShale, but he said his company can produce crude from shale at a cost of $30 a barrel. A technology some like, which EnShale is not using, involves heating the oil while it's in the ground and extracting it that way.

Rather, the ore his company will be mining will come from underground mines, with only a little surface mining required during research and development. The process involves heating the shale to about 1,000 degrees, using a "closed-loop" system that recycles water. The spent shale after processing could go back underground or in huge trenches left behind by gilsonite mining operations, he said. And air quality has been a priority.

"We've been very careful to minimize emissions," Franson said.

He quotes Hatch's claims that greenhouse gas emissions from shale operations is small compared to production of some biofuels, including ethanol.

Franson knows there's no convincing some that his company can do it, let alone in a manner that's easy on the environment.

Case in point.

"Neither tar sands nor oil shale is the solution to our problems," said Sierra Club's Mark Clemens. "Shale oil is crap — it's worse than crap."

Translation: It's difficult and costly to get a final usable product from shale, and in the end it is "worthless" in Clemens' eyes. Worse, the process to turn shale oil into something desirable will be too polluting for air and water. "There's not even a dirty way of extracting oil from shale that's economically viable," he added. If so, Clemens said, Exxon would have done it back in the 1980s.

"It's always the next big thing," he said about renewed interest in shale and sands. Clemens singled out the recent meeting at the Capitol. "This is just another political charade being put on by our congressional delegation with no substance behind it."

Small oil companies say they can get commercial barrels of oil rolling out about as soon as they can get leases on federal land, which isn't happening right now because of a moratorium on leasing those areas for oil development. Hatch and Bennett want to change that, the sooner the better.

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com