BY MICHAEL TOLL
On the far northern edge of the Colorado Plateau, flanking the eastern reaches of the Uinta Mountains, the Green River carves through Dinosaur National Monument, turning southeast through the Uinta Basin, a high-desert plateau in northeastern Utah dissected by steep-walled canyons. Before departing the basin by plunging through the Book Cliffs at Desolation Canyon, the Green River, home to the endangered bonytail chub and other imperiled fish, picks up the White River, a major tributary that drains Colorado’s Flat Tops Wilderness. Towering 800-foot cliffs line the White River — a favorite canoeing and rafting destination — along with broad, sloping terraces, buttes, pinnacles, and eroded towers. Thirty-some miles upstream from its confluence with the Green River, the White River is joined by Evacuation Creek, one of the basin’s few perennial waterways, just west of the Utah-Colorado state line. Here, in these rugged badlands, Estonian-owned Enefit American Oil Co. plans to turn nearly 15 square miles of undeveloped land into the nation’s first commercial-scale facility to strip-mine and process oil shale.
The plan is to produce more than 18 million barrels of processed crude oil every year for more than three decades, while guzzling a huge amount of water and spewing greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the air. The Grand Canyon Trust has been working for the better part of a decade to make sure that doesn’t happen.
MICHAEL COLLIER
Oil shale, long-heralded as the fuel of the future, is a sedimentary rock with a high concentration of kerogen, a precursor to oil. Because this rock was never buried deeply enough for pressure and heat to transform the kerogen into oil, producing oil from kerogen requires nature’s unfinished work to be carried out. Through a process called “retorting,” oil shale is heated to more than 700 degrees Fahrenheit to release a petroleum-like synthetic crude oil. A second process, called “upgrading,” further heats the synthetic crude oil together with hydrogen and other chemicals to reduce its sulfur and nitrogen content and to produce an easily transportable, refinery-ready petroleum product.
The United States has some of the largest reserves of oil shale in the world, concentrated primarily in the Green River Formation underlying parts of Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. For more than a century, oil shale has been touted as a potential source of unconventional fuel, and there have been several halting attempts at commercial prodution. Yet commercial production in the United States has never taken off because of persistent technical, economic, and environmental challenges.
Oil shale mining and processing require constant inputs of water, electricity, natural gas, and a means to move the processed oil to market. It’s a thirsty undertaking. Up to four barrels of water are needed for each barrel of oil produced from oil shale. Because of the huge amount of energy required to mine, process, and transport the oil shale and resulting crude oil, total carbon dioxide emissions — from digging the kerogen-rich rock from the ground, to heating, transporting, and refining it, through the point when it’s burned in the engine of your car — are up to 75 percent higher than those from conventional oil. And the mining and processing generate an enormous amount of often-toxic waste rock that can pollute surface water and groundwater. Back home in Estonia, the waste piles from Enefit’s operations are referred to as the “Estonian Alps” and are visible from space. Enefit’s operations there have severely contaminated the country’s precious water resources, and the company is gearing up to bring this brand of destruction to Utah.
State-owned Enefit, known as Eesti Energia in Estonia, is the largest oil shale mining and processing company in the world. To boost company profits, in 2011, Enefit set its sights on the Green River Formation. To gain a foothold, Enefit purchased all of the assets of the now-defunct Oil Shale Exploration Company, including more than 30,000 acres of landholdings in the Uinta Basin. The first phase of Enefit’s plans call for building a 320-acre industrial oil shale processing plant, strip-mining up to 9,000 acres of its surrounding lands, and running that oil shale through an on-site processing plant. The processing plant would include multiple retorting and upgrading units, an electric generating station, a wastewater treatment unit, numerous waste piles the size of small mountains, and much more. Enefit dubs its enormous proposed mining and processing complex the “South Project.”
Although the South Project would be located primarily on an island of private land, it will be surrounded by federal public land administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. So, back in 2012, Enefit applied for rights-of-way across these public lands to construct and operate a water supply pipeline, a natural gas supply pipeline, two electric transmission lines, and a pipeline to pump processed oil to refineries in Salt Lake City and beyond.
The South Project strip-mining operation would scrape up about 28 million tons of raw oil shale ore rock every year for more than 30 years. Processing that oil shale through the on-site retorting and upgrading plant would then churn out more than 18 million barrels of refinery-ready crude oil every year during those three-plus decades. That is nearly the same amount currently produced by every oil operator in the Uinta Basin combined. If the South Project processing plant gets up and running, Enefit would then move to use it to process oil shale mined from its other Uinta Basin landholdings and, potentially, from public lands nearby.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the South Project likely will harm human health and the environment. It would suck vast amounts of water out of a fragile desert river system and could force already endangered fish to the brink of extinction. The mine and processing plant will withdraw from the Green River up to nearly 10 million gallons of water per day, 3.5 billion gallons per year, and more than 100 billion gallons over the life of the project. For perspective, that’s about as much water as all existing municipal and industrial water users in the Uinta Basin combined.
Strip-mining and processing more than 800 million tons of oil shale ore rock from nearly 15 square miles of undeveloped land will generate hundreds of millions of tons of waste rock, oil shale, and oil shale processing wastes. Wind and storm runoff will carry huge loads of sediment, salt, metals, and hydrocarbons from these stockpiles and scraped landscapes into nearby waterways. Those waterways are home to numerous fish, including four endangered species — the bonytail chub, Colorado pikeminnow, humpback chub, and razorback sucker. What’s more, Enefit’s natural gas and processed-oil pipelines will cross the White River and several of its tributaries.
An oil spill from these pipelines would pollute surface water and harm the fish species. Plus, Enefit’s plan to scrape layers of rock off thousands of acres of undisturbed lands will destroy a significant portion of the remaining critical habitat for two plant species proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act: the Graham’s penstemon and White River penstemon.
MICHAEL COLLIER
Then there are the questions of what the project will do to air quality and how it will contribute to climate change. During stretches of wintertime, the basin’s ozone levels have been among the worst in the nation, mostly due to oil and gas development. In fact, in 2018 the EPA designated the Uinta Basin a “nonattainment” area, out of compliance with the Clean Air Act’s national ground-level-ozone safety standard. Ground-level ozone is linked to decreased lung function and inflammation, and harms the central nervous system, cardiovascular system, and reproductive system.
The South Project’s near-doubling of the basin’s oil production would dramatically increase the region’s emissions of the chemicals that form ozone and other air pollutants. Plus, the combustion of fossil fuels to mine, process, and transport the oil shale and resulting crude oil, the refining of that oil, and the combustion of the end-product gasoline in your car, would dump vast amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The South Project would churn out 547 million barrels of oil over three decades, all with well-to-wheel carbon emissions up to 75 percent higher than conventional oil.
All told, the likely environmental and public health consequences of Enefit’s South Project are potentially catastrophic, and would open the door for Enefit to expand its oil shale mining onto public lands next door and elsewhere in the Uinta Basin. Nevertheless, in September 2018, despite years of work by the Trust to block the project, the federal government granted Enefit the rights-of-way it wanted. And that’s when things got interesting.
MICHAEL COLLIER
Under the National Environmental Policy Act, before granting the rights-of-way, the Bureau of Land Management was required to prepare an in-depth environmental review to analyze the human health and environmental impacts of the rights-of-way and the South Project. And, because the South Project would affect endangered species, the agency was also required under the Endangered Species Act to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to make sure that the oil shale development would not jeopardize any endangered species or its critical habitat. But both agencies failed to satisfy their legal duties. The environmental review and the consultation both failed to analyze the true impacts of the South Project, violating the legal mandate to foster informed decision-making and informed public participation, and the duty to protect imperiled species.
So, in 2019, the Trust, along with a coalition of environmental and public interest organizations, filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Utah seeking to overturn the approval of the rights-of-way. A central issue in the litigation is whether, as Enefit asserts, the company could build and operate the South Project even if the Bureau of Land Management denied the utility rights-of-way by securing alternative sources for the facility’s needed utilities. If so, the government claims a thorough analysis of the South Project’s environmental harms is not necessary. Yet the government simply took Enefit at its word, even though the technical and financial feasibility of such alternative utility supplies is dubious at best.
As just one example, without a right-of-way for a water pipeline, the company has said it would consider trucking water to the South Project site. But trucking nearly 10 million gallons of water per day would require running one large tanker truck, roundtrip, about every 60 seconds, 24 hours a day, every day, for more than 30 years. And those trucks would have to travel a narrow dirt road with sharp corners, steep drop-offs, and poor visibility. All told, Enefit’s ability to obtain water — not to mention natural gas and the transport of the South Project’s oil product — presents technical and financial obstacles that are likely insurmountable. In fact, the company’s past statements explicitly acknowledged the implausibility of many of the supposed alternative utility sources.
We hope for a ruling in the case in 2020 or early 2021. While this case winds through the courts, the Trust continues to advocate outside the courtroom to make sure Enefit’s egregious oil shale plans for the Uinta Basin never come to fruition.
Michael Toll is a staff attorney for the Grand Canyon Trust.
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