Oil vs. water causes big battle in the Rockies

A titanic battle between the West's two traditional power brokers – Big Oil and Big Water – has begun. At stake is one of the largest oil reserves in the world, a vast cache trapped beneath the Rocky Mountains containing an estimated 800 billion barrels – about three times the reserves of Saudi Arabia. Extracting oil from rocky seams of underground shale is not only expensive, but also requires massive amounts of water, a precious resource critical to continued development in the nation's fastest-growing region. The conflict between oil and water interests has now come to a head. On Oct. 31, Congress allowed a moratorium on oil-shale leasing to expire. That paved the way for the Bush administration to finalize leasing rules in November that opened 2 million acres of federal land to exploration. Oil shale companies acknowledge that the technology required to superheat shale to extract oil is unproven. They also concede that they are uncertain how much water would be needed in the process, although some experts calculate it would take 10 barrels of water to get one barrel of oil from shale. That water-to-oil equation has inflamed officials in the upper Rockies, who are raising the alarm about the cumulative effect of energy projects on the region's water supplies, which ultimately feed Southern California reservoirs via the Colorado River....