Beneath the lush, green hills of eastern Utah's Uinta Basin, where elk, bear and bison outnumber people, the soil is saturated with a sticky tar that may soon provide a new domestic source of petroleum for the United States. It would be a first-of-its kind project in the country that some fear could be a slippery slope toward widespread wilderness destruction.
With crude prices surging beyond $100 a barrel, and politicians preaching the need to reduce America's reliance on foreign supplies, companies are now looking for more local sources. One Canadian firm says it's found it in the tar sands of Utah's Book Cliffs.
Alberta-based Earth Energy Resources Inc. aims to start with a roughly 62-acre mine here to produce bitumen, a tar-like form of petroleum, from oil-soaked sands. For decades, other Utah operators have used oil sands as a poor-man's asphalt, and Canada has been wringing oil from the ground for years, but nobody has yet tried to produce petroleum from U.S. soil on such a scale.
And it could be just the beginning. The company has over 7,800 acres of Utah state land under lease, with plans to acquire more, and estimates its current holdings contain more than 250 million barrels of recoverable oil.
"This is not just a 62-acre project that will last seven years. We are looking at a 30,000-acre project that will destroy the environment in this area over many years," said John Weisheit, a Colorado River guide and founder of the Moab, Utah-based environmental group Living Rivers.
Weisheit worries that shortsightedness and the rush to feed America's insatiable appetite for oil could trump reason at the expense of other precious natural resources.
The Bureau of Land Management says Utah has an estimated 12 to 19 billion barrels of oil buried in its tar sands, mostly in the eastern part of the state, though not all of that would be accessible.
Weisheit says if Earth Energy is allowed to mine the land, he fears others may not be far behind.
"We used hear that it's not lucrative to extract oil from tar sands unless oil prices were above $60 barrel," he said. "But now that prices have risen, we're definitely seeing companies take advantage of the situation."
Living Rivers is challenging this project's approval and contends it would dig up fragile topsoil, destroy limestone plateaus formed over thousands of years and pollute groundwater downstream that flows into the Colorado River. The group claims the Utah Division of Water Quality didn't accurately assess the potential for widespread environmental damage from the PR Springs mine. A hearing is set for May 25.
So you have a Canadian company investing in tar sands oil production in the U.S., and local environmental groups trying to prevent this. I think I can hear the NAFTA Chapter 11 briefs being written already.