A mix of water and oil
Re “Water, oil don’t mix in Rockies,” Dec. 28
Metaphorically speaking, oil doesn’t mix with anything except oil companies, oil money and oil dependence.
It already has been established that a lack of potable water is one of the biggest threats we face on this planet. So who stands to gain by using this resource to extract an outdated source of energy that destroys our ecosystem? I think we know.
Shell Oil Communications and Sustainability Manager Tracy C. Boyd states, with cavalier nonchalance, that “as long as we continue to be a nation hooked on liquid fuel, we need to look at anything we can do to tap the resources of energy in this country.” He should have added: “As long as Shell Oil can make huge profits.”
Maybe we should start focusing on the available renewable resources, in the hope that our shrinking water supply will last a decade or two longer. Water is something for which there really is no substitute.
Jeanne Kuntz
Los Angeles
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The amount of water needed to produce shale oil by the most mature technology -- underground mining and surface retorting -- is known.
The 50,000-barrel-a-day Colony oil shale plant would have used 6,150 acre feet of water per year, or 2.6 gallons of water for each gallon of oil. This water would have come from the upper Colorado River.
For perspective on this water use, consider one of the uses to which the water would be put if it flowed down the Colorado to the Imperial Valley and was used for irrigation. According to my calculations, the 6,200 acre-feet of water used by the Colony plant would irrigate 879 acres of alfalfa. The shale oil produced in a year would be worth more than half a billion dollars. The alfalfa would be worth about 1% of that.
This perspective -- 750 million gallons of oil versus 879 acres of alfalfa -- is more useful than the use of provocative but unquantifiable adjectives (“massive” and “prodigious” amounts of water).
John D. Lyon
Beverly Hills
The writer was executive vice president for oil shale, Tosco Corp., 1978-1982.