Posted on 12/05/2017 8:23:21 AM PST by bananaman22
On Monday, President Trump announced his plan to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent, while also cutting Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by half, a move that could open up Utah to more oil and gas drilling.
More than 90 percent of the Bears Ears territory is thought to overlap with oil, gas and coal reserves, according to Bloomberg. Last year, EOG Resources, a prominent shale producer that is well-known in other shale basins, such as the Permian, is one of the few companies chomping at the bit in Utah. Last year, the shale driller won an approval from the state to explore on land near Bears Ears. A handful of other companies have lined up the rights to exploration.
Nevertheless, it’s not as if Utah will resemble West Texas anytime soon (or ever). Utah is remote, and the lack of oil and gas infrastructure would make large-scale production costly. Plus, some oil companies have been there before. There are some old oil and gas wells within the Bears Ears monument, wells that were drilled years ago but were abandoned. “Historically, in say the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, there was some drilling out in this area, but nothing significant was found,” John Rogers, Associate Director of Oil & Gas at the Utah Division of Natural Resources, told Inside Energy in September. “So all the wells out there have been plugged and abandoned…Now, on the fringe, up to the north, there are some people leasing. Within the monument, nothing.”
(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...
My recollection from the Clinton era sequester of the Grand Staircase monument was that the primary resource being cut off was a terrific coal reserve. It doesn’t take much beyond a truck and a shovel to exploit those, so I was never expecting a “shale boom” out of there, but rather an expansion of mining.
That’s okay.
It’ll be there when we need it....................
That is my recollection too.
And how well developed was fracking technology back then?
I don’t really understand the article, because it sounds like the wells that were drilled were standard wells. Sounds to me like most of the oil is trapped in the shale, so they need to come in and frack. That’s when the boom starts.
This prediction coming from the same geniuses they came up with the term “peak oil”.
Limited minds dream of small things.
Sinkmaster and hitlery did this for a political (obviously) reason. It was because the second largest deposit of hard coal was in Indonesia, and he promised to close off the Escalante area to leave Indonesia the virtual sole producer. I’ve been to Escalante area. The Grand Staircase is the only thing of any real note. The rest is just miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.
There’s a lot of energy in those rocks and canyons. But it’s a drive to any collection, transport or processing point, and extraction won’t be simple. Plus environmental restrictions will be thick as Hillary’s hips.
Just as well. We get too many transplants as it is.
I think the article is saying that none of the supporting infrastructure is in place (pipelines, pumping stations etc), so no one will bother trying to frack in those areas. They’d have no way to get the product to the refineries.
But, of course, when people like J Paul Getty and others went to the Middle East with the crazy idea that there might be oil under the sand, there was at that time none of the supporting infrastructure in place (pipelines, pumping stations etc).
And yet it worked out.
I also think is there enough oil in Utah to be economically extracted even with fracking technology? The Bakken, Permian and Marcellus fields are vast in size and that may make fracking to extract out oil and natural gas a lot more profitable.
What some people fail to see is it isn’t just what is there, it isn’t the federal government anymore; cutting back gives Utah to decide what we want to do with ‘our’ lan. The Navajos have a say in matters now where before they were ignored, I for one, being a Utah born and raised, am glad Our President did what he did...
Fracking has opened up vast stores of deep petroleum and natural gas reserves, much of it not from compressed and compacted swampland, but of another source, deep abiotic kerogenesis. Methane and various hydrocarbon compounds are being formed continuously at great depths, in something called the Mohorovicic Discontinuity - The Moho. The boundary between the rocky surface shell of the earth and the molten interior, at a depth of a couple of miles or so down to perhaps 20 miles, a continuously operating combination of heat, pressure and catalytic activity changes trapped carbon dioxide and water molecules into various different hydrocarbons, the released oxygen combining with silicon and other metallic elements, forming a great volume of the expelled magma and plasma from volcanoes. Some oil, or more exactly, kerogen, the mixture of hydrocarbons in crude oil, is formed by biological action, or thermolytic decomposition of other organic material, but the presence of kerogen predates the appearance of life on earth.
Me three.
As I recall further, this was a payoff for Clinton’s Indonesian buddies who controlled large low-sulphur coal reserves there, that coal out of Grand Escalante would compete with.
Here’s an article I just found on that.
http://laissez-fairerepublic.com/indocoal.htm
***a terrific coal reserve***
Back in the 1970s, two mine-mouth power plants were planned for the area.
Tom Steyer is heavily invested in Indonesian coal.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were several attempts to find ways to release the oil from oil shale. This was in Western Colorado. I believe they eventually gave up. If the energy is really needed, a way will be found.
IIRC it is an extremely high grade of coal, clean burning and low sulphur Riady seems to have chosen Clinton back in the 80's for future high office.
Just search Clinton Riady for articles on scandals involving the two. Riady pleaded guilty in 2001 to conspiracy to defraud the United States through illegal contributions to Clinton's campaigns. He was barred from entry into the USA but, in 2009, was giving a waiver. mmmm
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