Ghosts of ‘Black Sunday’ hover over BLM’s cautious oil shale move

Wednesday’s move by the BLM to proceed with more oil shale leases for Exxon Mobil and two other companies conjured up memories for some of the “Black Sunday” bust of May 2, 1982, when Exxon laid off 2,200 oil shale workers on Colorado’s Western Slope. Businesses failed, banks foreclosed, whole towns virtually cleared out, and it reportedly was not uncommon afterward to see a car with an “Exxon Suck Rocks” bumper sticker, referring to the technology that heats shale rock and sand to extract organic kerogen and convert it into synthetic fuel. Never quite perfected, the process that led to Exxon’s Colony boom of the early 1980s was mothballed in a bust of epic proportions. This time will be different, an Exxon spokesman told the Colorado Independent Thursday. Back in the late 1970s and 80s, in the wake of the OPEC embargo that sent shudders through the global energy market, Exxon predicted that by the year 2000 it would be extracting up to 8 million gallons of oil a day from arid landscape of western Colorado. By some estimates, there is more oil trapped in the rocks of the Green River Formation of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming (1.5 trillion barrels) than can be found in all of Saudi Arabia. t getting to it is problematic. Even after nearly 30 years the process is not commercially viable, and conservationists say even the research and development proposed by Exxon and other companies is a waste of time, money, coal-fired electricity, and – most importantly – water...more