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Roan what? Oil shale is the real environmental issue
It’s been far too long since I’ve blogged here, but here’s a crack at something I find perplexing:
The environmental community in Colorado was all atwitter about the Roan Plateau Thursday when Gov. Bill Ritter announced he’s resigned to some level of energy development there. The 73,602 acre Roan Plateau Planning Area north of Interstate 70 between Rifle and Parachute is but a thimble in comparison to the 359,000 acres the Bureau of Land Management wants to lease for oil shale not far away.
My email box was full of Roan press releases Thursday, but few people were keeping an eye out for the BLM’s Draft Oil Shale and Tar Sands Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, an anthropogenic global warming-doubting document outlining how small towns like Meeker could be urbanized, wildlife habitat could be completely destroyed and agriculture could be stamped out by industry.
The document proposes a complete and total change for the ecology, economy and aesthetics of northwest Colorado. Not only that, it discusses the development of remote and stunningly beautiful places in Utah, such as the Tar Sands Triangle near Canyonlands National Park, upon the boundaries of which drilling rigs are already punching holes.
The twitter over the tiny Roan Plateau upstaged the release of the oil shale PEIS, which proposes infinitely more profound environmental impacts to our region than even a strip mine atop the Roan ever could.
The Roan Planning Area is downright beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but the impact of oil and gas development there is quite objectively a mere kick in the dirt in comparison to the outright landscape and ecosystem-altering commercial oil shale development the BLM is considering.
Clearly, the fervor over the Roan is a line in the sand for environmental groups, who are essentially saying the energy companies have won the right to punch holes in the ground on so much land in northwest Colorado, penetrating the last unleased wild land in the Piceance Basin just isn’t acceptable.
But are opponents to Roan development going to be as vociferous about the impacts of oil shale development? We’ll wait and see.
Northwest Colorado will hardly seem any different than it does today if the Roan is developed incrementally according to the BLM’s plan for the area. If commercial oil shale happens, the Western Slope may never be quite the same.
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