The federal Bureau of Land Management wants to make it easy for the fossil fuel industry to siphon oil out of the Rocky Mountains – but it's not clear whether this would work, and it could be an environmental disaster if it does.

On Tuesday, the BLM proposed cutting the royalties it charges on oil shale from about 15 percent to five percent. According to Department of the Interior chief Dirk Kempthorne, shale deposits in the Rockies could yield 800 billion barrels of oil. That's enough to meet current U.S. oil demands for a century.

But as the* Red, Green and Blue* blog explains, nobody knows if commercial oil shale development is viable; even fossil fuel giant Shell is getting cold feet. And if oil shale works out, extracting it will require from 100 million to 300 million gallons of water per day – enough to meet the daily water needs of about two million Americans. And if there's one thing the western United States is already short of, it's water.

As if that wasn't enough, there's the greenhouse gas issue. Should we really be making it easier and cheaper to run America on oil for another 100 years?

Image: Doc Searls

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