Lawsuit: Take a Hard Look at Utah Oil Shale Project

 by Michael Toll, Staff Attorney

In the rugged badlands of Utah’s Uinta Basin, on the northern edge of the Colorado Plateau, the Green and White rivers cut lush corridors along canyon bottoms. Endangered fish like the bonytail chub, humpback chub, and razorback sucker patrol these precious waters, also beloved by river runners. Locked inside the rock formations the rivers cut around — some so colorfully striated they appear painted with an artist’s brush — lie rich deposits of oil shale.

It’s here, in this remote and wild corner of northeastern Utah, near the Colorado state line, that Estonian-owned Enefit American Oil aims to construct the nation’s first commercial-scale oil shale strip mine and processing plant.

Dubbed the “South Project,” Enefit’s oil shale development would transform nearly 15 square miles of wild land into a massive industrial complex, churning out 50,000 barrels of oil every day for the next 30 years or more, sucking over a 100 billion gallons of water from the Green River, and pumping greenhouse gas emissions into the air.

Although Enefit plans to start out on an island of private property, the company has its eye on expanding its mining operations onto thousands of acres of public land next-door. 

In order to build its oil shale complex in the desert, Enefit first needed permission from the federal government to build pipelines and electric lines across public land. In September, the government gave Enefit the green light. 

The law requires the government to take a hard look at the direct, indirect, and cumulative effects of a project like this, including weighing the impacts on water, air quality, and endangered species, but it failed to do that before handing down its approval last fall. So the Grand Canyon Trust, along with a coalition of environmental and public interest groups, sued two government agencies for violating the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. The lawsuit simply asks the government to take a step back and comply with the law. The fate of the Green River and its imperiled fish, among other resources, lie in the balance.

Who is Enefit?

Rock containing oil shale. MICHAEL COLLIER.

Enefit is a subsidiary of Eesti Energia, a state-owned company located in Estonia and the largest oil shale processor in the world. No one has successfully commercially developed oil shale in the United States, but Enefit believes it has the technology to finally make the elusive dream of profitably producing refinery-ready petroleum from oil shale a reality. 

In 2011, Enefit purchased the Oil Shale Exploration Company, obtaining all its assets, including the land where it now plans to build the South Project’s massive 320-acre oil shale processing plant and 9,000-acre mine. Enefit will run the oil shale it mines through its processing plant and pipe the resulting synthetic crude to petroleum refineries in Salt Lake City and beyond. 

In the long term, Enefit aims to expand its mining operations onto federal public lands next-door by vastly expanding its current oil shale lease from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). And, at the behest of the company, the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA) is also working to get a parcel of nearby federal public land transferred to the state for the express purpose of leasing it to Enefit for oil shale mining.

What would this oil shale project do to the environment?

Enefit’s South Project would dig up more than 28 million tons of oil shale per year, generating hundreds of millions of tons of waste rock and “overburden” — the industry term for the soils, plants, and layers of rock that lie in the way. 

It would also drain more than 3 billion gallons of water per year from the Green River in a region that averages fewer than 10 inches of precipitation annually. The total carbon dioxide emissions of the over 547 million barrels of oil produced over three decades — if you follow the lifecycle of the oil shale from mine to wheel — would be up to 75 percent higher than those of conventional fuels.

In 2012 and 2013, Enefit submitted applications to the BLM, the federal agency that manages the land around the project, to build about 19 miles of water pipeline, nine miles of natural gas pipeline, 11 miles of oil pipeline, about 30 miles of electric lines, and upgrade an access road across federal public land. The only purpose of these utility rights-of-way — their raison d'être — is to enable Enefit to build and operate its South Project mine and processing plant and transport the resulting synthetic crude to market.

While the BLM was reviewing the environmental impacts of the proposal, the Grand Canyon Trust and others submitted several rounds of comments informing the agency of the numerous errors and inadequacies in its analysis. Without addressing our concerns, on September 26, 2018, the BLM decided to grant Enefit the five utility right-of-ways it needed.

Why is a lawsuit necessary?

The BLM failed to take hard look at the massive environmental impacts approving the rights-of-way would trigger. The agency’s environmental analysis was limited, because, it claimed, Enefit refused to provide detailed information about the South Project. Instead of requiring Enefit to submit more information, the BLM shrugged, saying Enefit would build the South Project with or without the utility rights-of-way.

But without the rights-of-way, water likely would need to be trucked in and oil trucked out, at enormous expense. For example, Enefit would need to run one large tanker truck to the South Project about every 80 seconds, 24 hours a day, for 30 years or more, in order to obtain the quantity of water it would otherwise pump through a pipeline. Even the company has acknowledged that purchasing and trucking water to the South Project would almost certainly be both technically and economically infeasible. In effect, granting the rights-of-way to let Enefit build utilities across public lands is the “on” switch, allowing the South Project to move ahead. 

By failing to take a hard look at the South Project’s impacts, and by refusing to get more information from Enefit in order to do a more searching analysis, the BLM failed to satisfy the National Environmental Policy Act’s twin goals of fostering informed decision-making and informed public participation.

Additionally, because the South Project will massively deplete the Green River, the BLM was required to consult with the Fish & Wildlife Service about the impacts to four endangered species of Upper Colorado River fish (among other species) that could be affected by the project. But the Fish & Wildlife Service’s biological opinion failed to even mention, let alone analyze, the impacts to the four fish species, violating the Endangered Species Act.

What happens next?

Now the case goes to district court in Utah, where a judge will decide.