Josh Mogerman's Blog
Chuck D Would Probably Hate Oil Shale
July 23, 2008
Posted by Josh Mogerman in Moving Beyond Oil , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places
I hit the Pitchfork Music festival this weekend in Chicago. A blissful weekend of indie rock that included a stellar live performance from Public Enemy.
Chuck D, Flava Flav, Terminator X, and the S1Ws ripped through their classic album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” which includes a song that would be the perfect sound track for the Department of the Interior this week…
"Night of the Living Baseheads,” was PE’s angry reaction to the impacts crack cocaine had on their community in the early 90’s. Nothing good comes from burning rocks.
The connection? Tuesday the Department of the Interior announces their intention to draft regulations for a commercial oil shale industry on 2 million acres of public lands out west.
Not familiar with the weird, hair-brained scheme that is oil shale? Let’s review.
Apparently, there are chunks of the countryside where the rocks have some petroleum in them. The idea is that if you heat these rocks, literally, for years at a time…eventually they will ooze a low-grade oil that might be refined into gasoline.
I am not kidding. That’s the new Bush administration energy policy: slow-cook rocks. We will literally melt some of our most picturesque landscapes for gasoline. It sounds more sci-fi than Soylent Green, but that is the state of our oil addiction.
We don’t even know if this is even a viable option---but we do know it is very bad one for the environment.
How bad? Four times the climate changing emissions of standard petroleum products. And it really sucks up water…which is problematic considering the rocks in question sit in the thirsty states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. Water is actually more valuable than oil in that region. State leaders in Colorado and Wyoming have their reservations about moving forward with this until the environmental impacts are assessed and mitigated. Hopefully, they will recognize that there has to be a better way to deal with the energy crunch than swapping the water for oil (incidentally, it is estimated that a commercial oil shale industry would use well over twice the amount of water as the population of Denver every year---yikes!).
There is a better way. We can use the resources we already have more efficiently, such as doubling the fuel economy performance of our vehicles which would be the same as cutting gas prices in half. And let’s get away from this false choice of dirty oil or dirtier oil. As we say again and again, it is time to invest in clean, renewable energy.
Because nothing good comes from cooking rocks. Chuck D’s words hold true whether you are talking about crack or oil shale:
“How low can you go?”
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Comments
Green Mullet — Jul 30 2008 01:54 PM
Good one. Oil shale sounds like a bad idea. It doesn't "rock" at all. Do you have any links to more info on oil shale? I wonder how this process works. Has anyone else tried it? How does it compare to drilling for oil, since petro-fueled vehicles don't seem to be going away? I wonder where Obama and McCain stand on this.
- Green Mullet.