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Op-Ed Contributor

Protect the West From a Black-Gold Rush

Credit...Sarah Jacoby

Eldorado Springs, Colo. — In northeastern Utah, just across the border from my home state, Colorado, the Estonian-owned company Enefit American Oil is trying to make good on a promise that the federal government and private industry have been making in the American West for almost a century: squeezing oil from a stone.

Oil shale is sedimentary rock containing bituminous minerals that can be mined and processed to release petroleum products. Not to be confused with shale gas, which is a major American industry, oil shale has never been successfully commercially exploited in the United States, even though over half of the world’s known oil shale deposits are in the Colorado River Basin.

Oil shale mining does, however, have a track record in Estonia. Unfortunately, that record includes high carbon emissions, contaminated water, dirty air, poisoned farmland and heaps of mining waste so large they’ve been nicknamed the Estonian Alps.

The potential consequences of oil shale mining in the Colorado River Basin — a region where water, not oil, is our most precious resource — are similarly huge. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, oil shale also has a carbon footprint that is 23 percent to 73 percent greater than conventionally extracted crude oil.

For now, the decision about whether to allow commercial-scale oil shale mining in the American West rests in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management. In Utah, Enefit proposes strip mining over 9,000 acres and developing an oil shale processing operation intended to yield 50,000 barrels a day.

It’s asking the bureau to let it run three pipelines and a power line across federal land. If the agency says yes, Enefit could break ground on the first serious commercial-scale oil shale project in the United States as early as next year. That would open the door to oil shale mining nationally.

It seems that Enefit’s ultimate goal is to expand its extraction and processing operations onto federal lands. And if that happens, the company will be operating in a regulatory void.

In the early years of the Obama administration, the government wisely reined in the Bush-era fast-tracking of oil shale development. I was proud to work with the administration to reduce the amount of federal land available for oil shale development. Elected representatives and government officials devised a research-first program for companies and began drafting leasing regulations to define the rules of the game for oil shale mining in the West.

This sensible approach would allow federal agencies to determine the impacts of oil shale development on Western lands and waters before approving any operation. The leasing rules would define the industry’s environmental reporting requirements, establish royalty rates to guarantee a fair return to American taxpayers and ensure that environmental cleanup costs are considered. A major consideration is that oil shale development should avoid, rather than encourage, boom-and-bust cycles.

Such rules take time, and these regulations have not yet been finalized. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Land Management is on the brink of permitting a utility corridor for Enefit’s oil shale project without seeing a sufficiently detailed plan from the company on how it expects to develop mining.

In the absence of more information from Enefit, the agency cannot analyze the effects of the company’s oil shale operation. This would include fully accounting for everything from increased carbon emissions to the harm to endangered fish in the nearby Green and White Rivers to the withdrawal of water from the Colorado River Basin, water that is already over-allocated.

Without details like these, it is impossible for the bureau to determine whether the project is in the public interest. And there are still no revised commercial leasing regulations in place to guide Enefit’s future expansion on federal public lands.

These problems with Enefit’s Utah project also present an opportunity. There are reasonable steps that could bring the Obama administration’s wise approach to oil shale to fruition.

First, the Bureau of Land Management should delay its decision on Enefit’s pipelines until the company has provided a full development plan for its strip-mining and power-plant operation; this should include detailing the sources and quantity of water the project requires and the project’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, the administration must finalize commercial oil shale-leasing regulations so that companies like Enefit, the regulators and the American public know the rules of the game. These steps should be taken now, before a rise in oil prices prompts renewed interest in oil shale and makes speculative developments real and immediate threats.

These Western lands, the waters of the Colorado River Basin and our communities are the legacy that we who live in the West must safeguard. The Obama administration has been a climate leader; now the administration has a chance to cement that leadership on oil shale development. Decisively shaping oil shale regulation can be a key part of the president’s climate legacy.

Mark Udall represented Colorado in the United States Senate from 2009 to 2015 and in the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2009.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: A Black-Gold Rush Threatens the West. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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