Shock and Utah, tater tots, and April Fools Day in the tar sands patch

It’s been a week of press coverage - perhaps a run up to April Fools Day -  for Earth Energy Resources, the Calgary-based company that promises a green technology for extracting oil from tar sands (they actually call them tar sands!) and hopes to attract investors to try it out on a 62 acre plot – now permitted for extraction – in Utah.  Their web page highlights this remarkable technology , showcasing a graph with towers with tar sands going in one end, through a “shaker”, and then coming out as oil, clean sand, and clean water.  So let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that this works.  Why have they come calling in Utah when there is plenty of tar sands to put through the "shaker" right there in their ‘hood?  One thing you can say for the Canadian tar sands - they may leave a huge mess in their wake but you can get oil out of them, which may be more than what this site promises.

There were some pretty funny references made to the Utah tar sands play this week. One was that it might be better just to jack hammer up the roads in Utah and extract oil from the fragments. Another was a reference to Randy Udall’s quote about oil shale prospecting - “If someone told you there were a trillion tons of tater tots buried 1,000 feet-deep, would you rush to dig them up?”  The good news is that it has upped concern in the West about what is happening in the Canadian tar sands. The AP story said it well: Environmental groups have criticized oil companies working in Canada of laying waste to the boreal forests of northern Alberta to extract its vastly larger reserves of oil sands. Other than the Denver Consular for Canada, also quoted in the AP piece, the reaction is pretty uniform – not here!  No thank you!

In spite of the absurdity of some of these plots, we are all a little on the edge of our seats these days.  The climate bill being hammered together by Kerry, Graham and Lieberman (known in Washington D.C. parlance as KGL) is meant to appease enough sceptics to make it fly or at least make it more politically difficult to reject it. So it actually took me a moment to realize that David Robert’s piece “Shock and Utah” in Grist today was an April Fools spoof. It wasn’t until, too deep into the story than I care to admit, I spied a quote from a “NRDF” (nice play on NRDC and EDF) spokesperson, Czad Sak, that I realized for sure this was a spoof. 

So what did David Roberts have to say in his piece?  That KGL might send revenue raised from an increase in the gas tax, the rumor du jour about how the bill might handle transportation, to fund a $20 billion tar sands industry in Utah. We’re laughing. At least for now.