Contents

Engineering a Boom

Shale for Sale

In 1968, responding to the tireless boosterism of energy companies and oil shale advocates and hoping to assuage the public's perpetual anxieties about the domestic energy supply, Stewart Udall exercised his authority as Secretary of the Interior to offer 3 federally owned tracts of oil shale land for lease. However, the boosters had overhyped the appeal of their potential product (or, perhaps, were just a few years too far ahead of their time). The limited private lands already available were sufficient for the inchoate industry at the time, and this offering attracted little attention from the big energy companies that provided most of the nation's oil. Even as domestic oil production began the final climb toward its peak, oil shale was still more trouble than it was worth to multinational energy companies awash in cheap free-flowing crude oil overseas.

Location of the 1974 oil shale leases...

Beginning in 1973 and stretching into 1974, the Arab Oil Embargo changed all that. President Richard Nixon responded to the embargo by outlining Project Independence, a plan to free the nation from foreign energy sources by the end of the decade. Interest in domestic energy sources surged, and boosters quickly portrayed oil shale as "an ace in the hole for national security."

When Interior offered 6 more federally owned tracts in 1974 - two each in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming at more than 5000 acres apiece, this time around those in Colorado and Utah attracted considerable attention. The site dubbed C-a (as in "Colorado tract A") in Rio Blanco County drew the most interest, receiving 7 sealed bids that averaged $91.6 million and topped out with a winning bid of over $210 million - at the time the highest per-acre price ever paid for a federal energy lease.¹⁵