This sensible approach would allow federal agencies to determine the impacts of oil shale development on Western lands and waters before approving any operation. The leasing rules would define the industry’s environmental reporting requirements, establish royalty rates to guarantee a fair return to American taxpayers and ensure that environmental cleanup costs are considered. A major consideration is that oil shale development should avoid, rather than encourage, boom-and-bust cycles.

Such rules take time, and these regulations have not yet been finalized. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Land Management is on the brink of permitting a utility corridor for Enefit’s oil shale project without seeing a sufficiently detailed plan from the company on how it expects to develop mining.

In the absence of more information from Enefit, the agency cannot analyze the effects of the company’s oil shale operation. This would include fully accounting for everything from increased carbon emissions to the harm to endangered fish in the nearby Green and White Rivers to the withdrawal of water from the Colorado River Basin, water that is already over-allocated.

Without details like these, it is impossible for the bureau to determine whether the project is in the public interest. And there are still no revised commercial leasing regulations in place to guide Enefit’s future expansion on federal public lands.

These problems with Enefit’s Utah project also present an opportunity. There are reasonable steps that could bring the Obama administration’s wise approach to oil shale to fruition.

First, the Bureau of Land Management should delay its decision on Enefit’s pipelines until the company has provided a full development plan for its strip-mining and power-plant operation; this should include detailing the sources and quantity of water the project requires and the project’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Second, the administration must finalize commercial oil shale-leasing regulations so that companies like Enefit, the regulators and the American public know the rules of the game. These steps should be taken now, before a rise in oil prices prompts renewed interest in oil shale and makes speculative developments real and immediate threats.

These Western lands, the waters of the Colorado River Basin and our communities are the legacy that we who live in the West must safeguard. The Obama administration has been a climate leader; now the administration has a chance to cement that leadership on oil shale development. Decisively shaping oil shale regulation can be a key part of the president’s climate legacy.