[REWahoo]

Some interesting snippets from this Fortune article on oil shale development on federal land:

"You'd think with gas prices topping $4 and consumers crying uncle, Congress would be moving fast to spur development of a domestic oil resource so vast - 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone - it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

You'd think politicians would be tripping over themselves to arrange photo-ops with Harold Vinegar..., the brilliant, Brooklyn-born chief scientist at Royal Dutch Shell whose research cracked the code on how to efficiently and cleanly convert oil shale - a rock-like fossil fuel known to geologists as kerogen - into light crude oil.

You'd think all of this, but you'd be wrong.

Last month, the U.S. Senate's Appropriations Committee voted 15-14 to kill a bill that would have ended a one-year moratorium on enacting rules for oil shale development on federal lands (which is where the best oil shale is located). Most maddening of all - at least to someone like myself not steeped in the wacky ways of Washington - the swing vote on the appropriations committee, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., voted with the majority even though she actually opposes the moratorium."

[NOTE: For those of you not familiar with Senator Landriew, she's the lady who did such a remarkable job in blaming everyone else for the Katrina response as the then Governor of Louisiana.]

The article has lots of political spin from Republican U.S. Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Wayne Allard of Colorado, but if the following statements are even close to being true, I'd support immediately ending the moratorium on developing this resource:

Senator Hatch: "...Corn needs about 1,000 barrels of water for the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil....On the other hand, the Department of Energy estimates that oil shale will require three barrels of water for every barrel of oil."

"...One acre of corn produces the equivalent of 5 to 7 barrels of oil. One acre of oil shale produces 100,000 to 1 million barrels."

Add the dramatic escalation in food costs, and this would to make a compelling case for focusing more resources towards oil shale development and less towards bigger fields of corn.