Will oil shale turn into a boon or environmental mess?

As the oil industry sets its sights on oil locked in shale or tar sands, environmentalists and conservationists are paying more attention to operations like sands mining in Alberta, Canada, where the impact is comparable to what decades of mining have done to the east side of the Oquirrh Mountains in the Salt Lake Valley.

Utah has renewed its love affair with at least the idea of going after vast amounts of oil shale and tar sands. So, a big part of the discussions have become how it can be done here in an environmentally friendly way.

Some firms like Orem-based EnShale Inc. and its parent company, Bullion Monarch Mining, are confident they've got the environmental part down pat as they continue to develop a patent-pending technology to extract oil from shale.

"We're trying to be very, very green — as green as we can be," said R. Don Morris, president of Bullion Monarch.

He and EnShale president Rex Franson have their eyes on 667 million barrels of oil just under 4,500 acres of state land for which they already have leases. Depending on the nature of a future leasing program, they may someday go after federal land in pursuit of more shale oil.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne recently announced the Bureau of Land Management's publication of its "rules of the road," proposed regulations that private investors will look at while deciding whether to dig and drill in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.

Those three states, which share a 16,000-square-mile formation estimated to hold up to 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil, hold the most promise of higher yields of a commercially viable product. The Interior Department's proposed lower royalty rates for interested investors are meant to lessen the blow of start-up costs.

But at what price to Utah's landscape?

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he's seen the pictures from sands operations north of the border. Hatch said the oil industry will reclaim sites like those once they're through.

On a day recently when Hatch stood at the state Capitol in a meeting with oil industry officials to tout going after shale and sands in Utah, he said in an interview afterward that he has not personally been to Alberta to see what's happening there.

People like Hatch and Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, tout energy independence and lower gas prices as reasons for going after shale and sands, even though the impact at the pump wouldn't be felt until sometime after larger-scale commercial production could get going in about 2016.

But will swaths of the Beehive State end up looking like parts of Alberta and, if so, for how long?

"I haven't read anything to assure me that the technology exists to do it in an environmentally friendly manner that won't leave a mess," said Pam Miller, director of the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition.

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