Washington (Platts)--20Dec2007
The US Bureau of Land Management plans to devote 1.9 million acres of
public land for possible commercial oil shale development leasing, the agency
announced Thursday.
Deposits of oil shale on public lands in the immense Green River
Formation of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming would fall under general leasing rules
laid out in a new draft environmental impact statement, to be published in the
Federal Register on Friday.
"The federally owned portion of this resource is more than 50 times the
country's proven conventional oil reserves and nearly five times the proven
reserves of Saudi Arabia," BLM said in announcing the environmental statement.
According to BLM Directory Jim Caswell, the land that will be made
available under the proposal could yield the equivalent of as much as 61
billion barrels of oil, and as a whole, public lands hold the equivalent of
1.23 trillion barrels.
Leasing for individual projects could begin after BLM makes a call for
applications, and the bureau would require companies to perform an
environmental assessment, as well as propose a mitigation strategy, as part of
the application process.
In the possible oil sale development area, about 360,000 acres would open
up in Colorado, 630,000 acres in Utah and 1 million acres in Wyoming. The
total land available would include about 960 acres BLM previously leased for
experimental research and demonstration projects in Colorado and Utah.
The proposal would also open about 430,000 acres to tar sands
development. Wilderness areas and other protected conservation areas would be
excluded from both oil shale and tar sands leasing.
The public will have 90 days to comment on the proposal, beginning on
Friday. The full draft environmental impact statement is available at
http://ostseis.anl.gov , and comments can be submitted electronically.
--Derek Sands, derek_sands@platts.com
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