Comments from [ Bill }Ritter and various state agencies covered 60 pages and echoed some of the concerns expressed over the past year by environmental groups, water utilities and Western Slope local governments. They fear oil shale production will require vast amounts of water - equal to what the Denver region uses in a year - and the electricity of as many as 10 large coal-burning power plants.
While we have no idea where the Rocky or Bill Ritter got the water use estimate, but we do know where the ten coal burning power plant estimate came from.
Not long ago we wrote a critical review about a paper by Mark Udall's brother Randy that we found to be full of obviously false arguments. We called the piece "We've decided it is in the DNA" refering to the whole Udall family's record of lying about the environment.
After deciphering the intent of Randy's plea that the gas produced by the in situ process be shipped away so that he could argue that there would be a need for ten coal fired plants we wrote:
Randy Udall admits in this single paragraph that one third of the energy production of the Shell Oil process will be in the form of natural gas. Then he goes on to pretend that the natural gas produced by the process can't be used, and that instead, much less efficient coal electrical plants must be used.
This makes about as much sense as requiring the residents of the island of Kauai, Hawaii, which gets more annual rainfall than any other location in the United States, to rely on desalinization for their drinking water.
This isn't a silly argument. It is an inane argument. Unfortunately, many of today's environmentalist's arguments are just that-inane.
Now Randy Udall's on-its-face false argument has reportedly made it into a formal state input to the BLM. We are not well served when Bill Ritter and his band of merry environmentalists are caught red handed crying wolf. There should be red faces in Denver.
