The Sirens Sing from Piceance Creek
Villa, Eilene Sug
The looting of the West for its oil shale and natural gas can ravage the environment and increase radioactivity The Sirens Sing from Piceance Creek EILENE SU G VILLA The oldtimers called it...
...Rather, they will rely on dilution of the gas with other nonradioactive gas to reduce the degree of radioactivity and, thereby, spread lower dosages of radioactivity among more people...
...Radioactivity can also escape from the well along with the natural gas in the form of tritium, or through naturally induced fractures...
...In the fall of 1973, residents of Broomfield, Colorado, drank radioactive water...
...They tell stories in the Piceance Creek region of early settlers discovering that the rocks encircling their campfires burned as readily as the fuel they planned to use...
...This land, as ornery and harsh as the men who named it, supports life by the most delicate of balances...
...Experts consider tritium so dangerous because of its ability to replace any hydrogen atom in a molecule...
...In the words of former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, "Unless you can develop an in situ [in place] process where you can get at the oil without mining shale . . . My God, that whole Western Slope of Colorado is one of the finest outdoor recreation playgrounds in the country...
...JESSE L. JACKSON (The Reverend Mr...
...Experiments on a small scale ended only last October...
...Once again, the conflict revolves around the question of whether environmental costs outweigh energy benefits...
...High on the list of such dubious solutions are shale oil extraction and the use of underground nuclear explosions to tap resources of natural gas...
...More taxes are promised on the already overburdened consumer, this time to allegedly pay for research and development of new energy resources...
...To keep this material in place, huge quantities of water must be used to wet down the spent shale...
...An AEC statement read: "No mechanism can be hypothesized whereby the surface-deposited radio activity can be incorporated into mobile groundwater...
...Because of such expansion the spent shale can no longer be returned to the mine, and disposal becomes a monstrous problem...
...It seems that the AEC failed to take into consideration the fact that air rising over the mountains tends to drop its burden of nuclear contaminants in the form of snow and rain...
...Much of the irradiated gas is destined for Los Angeles and other West Coast urban centers...
...On September 10, 1969, a fortythree-kilo ton nuclear explosive was detonated at a depth of 8,426 feet near Rulison, Colorado...
...U.S...
...Only through a thorough comprehension of the attendant sacrifices and alternatives can the public make wise decisions about the use of its public resources...
...When asked if the savings would be passed on to the consumer, a company representative smiled and said the company would charge what the market would bear...
...Spokesmen for the energy industry contend that environmental safeguards restrict the production of energy and, therefore, should be held to a minimum...
...Instead of the predictable tapering off of water production if no new water were entering the cavity, the Rulison well water production increased from nineteen barrels of water per million cubic feet to 250 barrels per million cubic feet...
...According to Carolyn Johnson, the last two payments can be written off, or subtracted by the company as a development cost...
...It readily combines with oxygen to create radioactive water...
...At the time of the Rulison blast, some women in De Beque, sixteen miles away, placed their hands on the street hoping to feel the tremor...
...The deposit contained within this shale is not oil, but a hydrocarbon called kerogen, which yields a liquid fossil fuel only upon destructive distillation...
...The companies have made no plans for cleaning up the gas by removing radioactivity...
...To date, no one has satisfactorily solved the water use and pollution dilemmas...
...The damage payments for fullfield development of 140 to 280 wells could total $14 million or more...
...As Johnson puts it, leasing is "a giveaway to the oil industry under the label of 'energy crisis.'" Should oil shale development become economically practical, the danger of a massive takeover of publicly owned resources for enormous private gains will be at hand...
...There are other dangers involved in nuclear stimulation beyond earthshock which are less perceivable and, therefore, more insidiously hazardous...
...There is only a shortage of the supply of oil and other fuel being allowed on the market...
...He said cost of production could be reduced to $1.18 a barrel, with enough oil in the Rocky Mountain states to last 140 years at the 1973 rate of petroleum use...
...Because oil shale seams of great thickness often lie close to the surface, strip mining usually is the most economically feasible way to mine the material...
...The state first made atomic history after receiving excessive amounts of fallout from the Nevada bomb tests of years ago...
...In a Draft Environmental Statement the AEC claimed that most (my emphasis) of the radioactivity will remain in the three zones of rock glass that have been resolidified from the molten rock created by the heat of the explosion...
...THE ENERGY FRAUD After considered judgment and weighing of the facts, we at Operation PUSH have taken the position that there is no energy crisis...
...The word "radioactivity" strikes a chord of apprehension in most news-following citizens of Colorado...
...All-out exploitation of natural resources will never solve our energy problems in any case if we do not put ceilings on demand, and it will only create new environmental difficulties...
...Jackson is president of People United to Save Humanity (PUSH...
...The formation contains an estimated 1.8 trillion barrels of crude shale oil, enough for everyone in the United States to own 8,000 to 10,000 barrels of oil...
...But now the lives of mule deer, elk, mountain lion, bear, and antelope are in danger...
...The AEC immediately issued a disclaimer of responsibility...
...The overburden (or material that must be stripped away to reach the shale) ranges from zero feet, where the shale is exposed on the surface, to 1,550 feet deep or more...
...Among the many alternatives to drilling for natural gas is a method described recently in the Chemical and Engineering News: "Methane from degasification of coal mines might provide a large new source of gas reserves . . . Some drainage holes produce gas as fast as commercial gas wells...
...A single day's operation of a 50,000-barrel-per-day retort would create an ash pile three feet high, three feet wide, and forty miles long...
...and the exorbitant increase in profits that the major oil companies made in 1973...
...One way to prevent it would be to follow the example of the Tennessee Valley Authority and make not only the oil shale lands but its products public property...
...the continued sending of 165,000 barrels of oil per week to Vietnam and Cambodia...
...These figures do not include water for revegetation or municipal use in the shale-processing community...
...Which means, in essence, that the taxpayer pays for the developing...
...According to Dick Ridley of Garrett Research and Development, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, his organization's process would require much less water for production and would create much less environmental disturbance in the way of spent shale than the processes of competitors...
...increases in the exportation of oil from the United States to Japan and Western Europe...
...it can enter the body through inhalation or by transference through the skin...
...One not-so-distinguished Congressman from Michigan has even managed to get passed a bill that will eliminate the busing of school children, under certain circumstances, on the grounds that this would serve to save a considerable quantity of gasoline...
...Due to the high elevation, the air provides a thinner shield against cosmic rays, and so Colorado has a high "background" radiation...
...Austral Oil Company, Colorado Interstate Gas Company, and the Rocky Mountain Natural Gas Company have applied to the AEC Regulatory Division for use of the Rulison gas...
...Project Gasbuggy, the first "stimulated" well, consisted of a twenty-six-kiloton nuclear explosion set off in the San Juan Basin near Farmington, New Mexico, on December 10, 1967...
...Many environmental issues were skirted, and economic questions were left unanswered...
...This conclusion is really quite inescapable from facts that are already public knowledge: Tanker ships in the ports of our country, loaded with oil, that have no place to unload...
...One month's operation could result in ash waste that would stretch from Rifle, Colorado, to Los Angeles, some 1,700 miles away...
...Where will all the water come from in such an arid area...
...Four-fifths of the high-grade shale deposits are in Colorado...
...According to the London Times, the new process in question "would involve a huge capital investment far beyond the capacity of Occidental, or the oil industry...
...Bureau of Mines told the committee a quarter century ago, had been worked out by the Bureau's experts and if put into effect could produce oil from shale for less than $1 a barrel...
...It is expected that it will be at least two years before the gas goes to market...
...The Rulison blast equaled 40,000 tons of TNT...
...Carolyn Johnson, the authority on oil shale matters for the Colorado Open Space Council, a coalition of environmentalist groups, said, "They simply did not do their environmental homework...
...The Rio Blanco experiment employed multiple explosives in the form of three forty-kiloton bombs...
...Damage claims alone would increase the total production cost of the natural gas enormously...
...hundreds of oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere that have been tapped, oil discovered, and then closed for future use...
...Many of these radioactive nuclides have a dangerous life of 550 to 950 years, while the life of a surrounding steel encasement is only an estimated twenty-five years...
...Obtaining the necessary water, and preventing irrevocable damage to the water sources, is perhaps the most crucial and limiting factor in oil shale development...
...After processing, the hot spent shale must be spread out to cool...
...A land that has rested peacefully for millennium after millennium may be ripped open and churned up to great depths...
...After mining, the tons of material must be processed...
...However, this statement failed to mention the potential for release of the radioactivity by diffusion from the glass, by leaching by underground water which enters the cavity, and through the eventual devitrification and deterioration of the glass...
...But when one considers the cost of making a nuclear explosive in terms of raw materials, man-hours and electricity, or the great amounts of natural gas wasted at the time of the explosion and later during the flaring, then perhaps nuclear stimulation is not economically sound...
...The dusty, sandlike, spent shale poses a great problem in terms of water and air pollution...
...They were actually thrown to the ground by the energy transmitted...
...But it ravages the land...
...Another method, called in situ fracturing and retorting, employs a process of cracking and heating the rock while it is in place...
...Energy Outlook, a 1972 publication, the chairmen of some large oil companies unite in advocating full exploitation of the country's natural energy resources, and advocate this ruthless policy: "In providing for the nation's future energy needs, prompt action is needed to eliminate serious delays that have been caused by environmental issues...
...there was no equipment to measure the tritium level of either air or water...
...But when one considers that a single "model" site produces enough spent shale to fill seven canyons, and fifty or more plants could fill 350 canyons, the massive scope of the problem becomes obvious...
...This should be a permanent committee of prominent and genuine experts in conservation, taxation, and technology of oil extraction, and the power needs and resources of the United States...
...In 1954 it was recognized that there may be no threshold to radiation, and so the terminology was changed from "tolerance doses" to "maximum permissible doses...
...The fresco-like cliffs await total effacement while the canyons face obliteration under a pile of dust...
...The AEC said that it expected no water to enter or leave the chimney region (where the blast occurs...
...If cheap and immediate energy is the citizens' only desire, the nation faces life in a wasteland...
...This waste, known as "spent shale," is nearly three times the volume of the original material...
...Regardless of the AEC and gas industry propaganda, many viable alternatives to nuclear stimulation exist for the development of natural gas sources...
...By monopoly, we mean the twenty largest oil corporations which control eighty-six per cent of the refineries, ninety-three per cent of the pipelines carrying petroleum products, and seventy-five per cent of the retail gasoline outlets...
...On December 14, Garrett executives conducted a presentation of the process before a small group in Denver...
...The human brain and female egg cells exhibit a proclivity for retaining water molecules and, thus, retaining radioactivity...
...We have been admonished to turn down the thermostats in our homes to sixty-eight degrees, eliminate Sunday driving, and adopt other forms of austerity...
...The radiation level is further increased by the high uranium content found in the rocks and soil...
...For these reasons there was a great deal of skepticism when the AEC claimed that no radioactivity would escape from the nuclear-stimulated natural gas wells other than through the process of "flaring" or burning of the gas to determine the production level of the wells...
...No legislation exists regarding the use of natural gas containing man-induced radiation...
...The most immediate radiation threat created by underground explosions is a radioactive hydrogen isotope called tritium...
...Prior to the blast, the AEC under stated the probable effects: "A few dozen minor seismic after-shocks could occur in the immediate emplace ment well area, and ground motion they produce might be perceptible to an observer if he were standing in side the evacuated area...
...Grand Junction, more than fifty miles away, shook noticeably...
...The only problem, aside from the huge amounts of radioactivity released, would be the absolute destruction of all the other valuable minerals found in the shale...
...Although care had been taken to reinforce buildings, the seismic damage claims from the Rulison blast alone cost $135,000...
...Bumper stickers bitterly advertise, "WELCOME TO COLORADO, PLAYGROUND OF THE AEC...
...The conventional method, called gaseous combustion, mines, crushes, and retorts (heats and processes) the shale...
...The fossil fuel shortage has brought Piceance Creek, along with a number of other fuel-bearing areas, into national prominence...
...In addition, I propose, as others have suggested, that the Congress act now to assign irrevocably those royalties and other income from the leasing of the oil shale which may be paid by private developers to investment in human needs and development and that we use the vast income from it to build up other natural and human resources of the nation...
...An estimated 260 trillion cubic feet of methane lies in coal beds between strip mining depth and 3,000 feet...
...It is a humbling experience to fly for miles and miles above a turbulent ocean of cliffs and canyons that have been floating under the indifferent sun since time began...
...The AEC and the natural gas companies criticize the alternative sources of natural gas—Canadian and Alaskan imports, coal gasification, and naptha and crude oil gasification—as being too expensive...
...Eilene Sug Villa is a free lance writer...
...The term "oil shale," actually a misnomer, was coined by pioneer speculators to create interest and perhaps develop a market for the "rock that burns...
...At a conservative estimate, a one-millionbarrel-per-day operation would consume 79,000 to 124,000 acre-feet of water per day...
...The Piceance tract that Standard and Gulf leased could yield $1 million worth of oil a day by 1979...
...Disposal areas must be found...
...oil companies are so eager to exploit the Rocky Mountain region that this January they submitted a total of $465 million in bids for the right to develop oil shale deposits on 5,120 acres of Federal land in the Piceance Creek Basin...
...Investigation by health authorities and the Environmental Protection Agency revealed a startling fact: With millions of dollars worth of sophisticated manufacturing equipment in the Dow plant, there was not one liquid scintillation counter to determine tritium levels...
...But the high bidding should have surprised no one, although Interior Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton professed to be surprised...
...refineries that are operating below capacity...
...The name has changed, perhaps to accommodate a less verbally graphic citizenry, but Colorado's Piceance Creek Basin today remains as untamed and majestic as it was in the days of those irascible prospectors...
...Oil shale contains virtually no oil as such, and so differs from oil sand, where the oil literally gushes from the ground...
...Eighty per cent of this land belongs to the Federal Government—that is, to the American people...
...These nuclear explosions were conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission and several oil and natural gas companies to free gas deposits locked into tight gas-bearing formations...
...The rush to make the announcement may have been due to Occidental's desire to compete with the Tosco II process of Colony Oil, a major contender in the shale oil land-grab leasing procedure which began with the bidding on the Piceance Creek Basin tract in January and will continue until June...
...Presently, there exists much evidence to the contrary...
...Much of the concern arises from the methods proposed to tap the gas field...
...For Piceance Creek Basin contains hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fossil fuel—some of the world's richest deposits of oil shale and natural gas...
...With this type of track record it is not surprising the AEC has such a bad reputation among the citizens of Colorado...
...The development of these resources, using present technology, would signal the destruction of this Colorado wilderness...
...Occidental's process, it is claimed, is much cheaper than conventional methods...
...Colony Oil and many other oil companies have suggested dumping this material in the canyons found in the area...
...The oil accumulates in pools to be tapped and piped to a refinery...
...The permissible exposure level for uranium miners was reduced by two-thirds from 1957 to 1971...
...It should be the function of this committee to carry on a constant effort to alert the public to the issues and to bring to bear a concentrated representation of the general interest of the people of the United States to obtain a proper resolution of the oil shale question...
...Montrose, eighty miles away, felt the shock...
...One square mile of land in the Piceance Creek Basin could contain forty-two million tons of alumina from which aluminum is extracted...
...At the Rulison well, one billion standard cubic feet of gas were flared into the atmosphere...
...Unless you leave it in the ground, can you do anything but turn it into a wasteland...
...Hence eventually this radioactivity could reach the drinking water...
...Their 1973 profits were up an average of sixty per cent over the previous year...
...mobile water has entered both the Gasbuggy and Ruli son wells...
...Yet, the facts are that home owners only use nineteen per cent of all the energy used in this country and that there is more energy wasted by industry and commerce than is used by home owners...
...After processing, the once relatively compact and solid shale becomes granular and sand-like...
...The Atomic Energy Commission has offered the use of its fifty-kiloton nuclear devices to fracture and heat the shale...
...In light of all the accompanying hazards, the nuclear stimulation of natural gas and the extent of the radioactivity of gas so produced require much more study than these problems are likely to be given...
...The drinking water was heavily contaminated with tritium or radioactive hydrogen from the nuclear materials-producing Dow plant nearby...
...Tremendous energy in the form of quakes results as the shattering of the earth's crust takes place...
...supply of bauxite, the present source of commercial aluminum...
...The more scientists learn about the harmful effects of radiation, the more they recommend lowering the permissible exposure levels...
...The bonus payment, or money paid the Government, is spread out over a five-year period...
...And—on top of the seven million already unemployed—hundreds of thousands of additional workers in the plastic, auto, steel, airlines, and other industries are being "furloughed," which is merely a cute euphemism for fired...
...Tritium need not be ingested...
...As the Piceance Creek Basins of the country are ravaged, and more natural gas is produced by nuclear explosions, the lesson may be learned too late: that raising the economic standard of living temporarily may lower the "quality of life" forever...
...In the so-called energy crisis, we see operating the law of monopoly rather than the law of scarcity...
...The presence of hydrogen and water in all life makes tritium a particularly hazardous substance...
...The oil shale area is also a large saline zone abundant in nahcolite (baking soda), halite (common salt), and dawsonite (a potential source of aluminum...
...This may explain why a potentially effective method for low-cost underground distillation of oil from shale—a method that would avoid the problems of mining the shale and SEVEN YEARS AGO I propose the establishment of a National Citizens Watchdog Committee on oil shale...
...Each succeeding explosion was reported to be more technically advanced than the preceding one...
...This method, an oil shale technologist who had been with the U.S...
...Some answers to the energy problem may not be worth the irreparable damage they will create...
...In Colorado, the demands of the energy "crisis" clash with the public interest in another way...
...The piles of waste absorb water like a massive sponge which later hardens to an almost cement-like consistency...
...John Hutchins, Manager of the Colony Development operation of Atlantic Richfield Corporation, states another water-related problem: "Oil shale development in Colorado will be limited by the water situation because surface water draining from spent shale also has to be controlled to prevent pollution...
...The Green River formation of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah offers the most attractive oil shale area known at this time...
...In the U.S...
...Attention has focused on Piceance Creek Basin because therein lie Colorado's finest shale lands...
...The Rio Blanco test alone cost six million dollars to conduct...
...His comments are excerpted from an article in the Chicago Tribune...
...Part of the Project Plowshare program is "nuclear stimulation" or blasting for natural gas, a method that can risk human lives...
...The thickness of the shale seams there varies from a few feet to several hundred feet in depth...
...Unfortunately, even with the conventional non-nuclear methods of shale processing, no way has yet been perfected by which to recover these other valuable minerals mixed in with the kerogen...
...But oil company claims must be carefully scrutinized...
...If the gas from the Rulison well does not sell then, the fate of nuclear stimulation looks quite bleak to its backers, and the AEC loses an area in which to employ its bombs and expertise...
...Company representatives do not like to discuss this aspect, or the fact that the $1.18 per barrel production cost does not include this capital investment...
...Deep beneath the Piceance Creek Basin lies one of America's largest natural gas fields...
...The National Academy of Science's National Research Council has recommended that Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 (both products of nuclear explosions) be isolated for at least 660 years and possibly as long as 1,000 years to make them biologically harmless...
...Chairman Armand Hammer claimed Occidental has developed a method which, within three to five years, could produce large quantities of oil with little or no environmental damage...
...Industry has been known in the past to conveniently "forget," if not actually suppress, cheaper technologies in favor of more expensive ones so as to command a higher price for the end product...
...Project Plowshare is a program developed in 1957 by the Atomic Energy Commission to develop "peaceful uses for nuclear explosives...
...The people should be made aware of the multiplicity of factors involved in the development of energy resources...
...Water pollution can occur as well if water should seep through the mine into the groundwater aquifers eventually leading into the Colorado River...
...In geologic terms, oil shale is not shale at all but organic marlstone of no known commercial use in its natural state...
...Federal lands are leased to the highest bidder providing he offers at least the established minimum amount...
...This represents more than one-and-a-half times the entire U.S...
...The looting of the West for its oil shale and natural gas can ravage the environment and increase radioactivity The Sirens Sing from Piceance Creek EILENE SU G VILLA The oldtimers called it Pissants Creek, high country as vast as the blue sky that frames it...
...Seventy per cent of all energy used, is used by commerce and industry and nearly a third of that is waste...
...But this Colorado high country —and how we use or misuse it—constitutes a prime example of the dangers of hasty "solutions" to the energy crisis...
...The Department plans monthly bidding sessions through June for the leasing of another tract in Colorado, two tracts in Utah, and two in Wyoming, each of them about 5,000 acres...
...The Occidental Petroleum Corporation in California recently announced a development in the experimental field of on-site processing of shale...
...Draining off such massive amounts of water will aggravate the existing salinity problem of the lower Colorado River...
...The oil companies propose several different methods of extracting the kerogen from the shale...
...Prior to the explosions, few people knew what to expect in terms of ground motion and shock transference...
...This refining process consists in part of heating the crushed shale to temperatures of about 90Q degrees Fahrenheit to release the hydrocarbons from the other components...
...Standard Oil of Indiana and Gulf Oil made a successful joint bid of $210.3 million, which the Department of Interior accepted...
...Oil shale does not give up its energy easily...
...Rio Blanco, the latest and most sophisticated stimulatibn program to date, took place near Meeker, Colorado, in the Piceance Creek Basin...
...The Seven Trillion Dollar Oil Battle" by former Senator Paul H. Douglas in The Progressive, October 1967 disposing of spent shale after processing—which was described before a Congressional committee in 1950, appears to have been ignored by the oil industry and the Government ever since...
...The American taxpayer may ultimately pay for much of the cost of oil shale ventures, including the environmental costs...
...An Environmental Protection Agency official said that while standing twelve miles away from the Rulison detonation area, he saw the earth actually rise up in a wave six inches high...
...But little mention was made of the fact that Occidental's method is still in its infancy...
Vol. 38 • April 1974 • No. 4
