In September 2008, the BLM released its long-awaited final Programmatic Environment Impact Statement (PEIS) on oil shale lands. In the 1400-page document, the agency identified 3 broadly different development scenarios and the potential consequences of each. The first option, Alternative A, was to take no action and leave things as they stand in Shale Country (including the 6 RD&D leases but no other development on federal land); Alternative B proposed opening nearly two million acres in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming to commercial oil shale leasing; and Alternative C advanced a more restrictive leasing program that would make roughly 830,000 acres available for development.
The BLM identified Alternative B as its preferred choice. As the statement's authors considered in turn the various consequences that the latter two plans might carry for the region's communities, economy, and environment, a breathtaking portrait of commercial oil development's consuming impact came into sharp focus.
The BLM predicted that the full development of a commercial oil shale industry under Alternative B will supplant nearly all other uses of the land, including recreation, ranching, agriculture, and all other oil and gas development. While oil shale development will bring thousands of new jobs to Shale Country, this displacement of traditional land uses is likely to cost thousands of jobs in existing industries like recreation. Where the balance lies in this exchange - whether an oil shale industry will mean a net gain or loss of jobs in the area over the long run - is a calculation that contains too many variables to figure with certainty.
Wildlife will assuredly lose habitat wherever development occurs, and the trappings of development may increase the animals' stress and alter their behavior patterns. Plants will lose habitat and are likely to face increased competition from nonnative invasive species. Fish will suffer from any drop in water quality or flow volumes throughout the region's waterways.
Depending on how much water the extraction process requires, the industry may need to buy up agricultural water rights, putting an end to irrigated farming in some areas. Water quality is likely to be degraded under routine industry operating conditions, and the risk of severe contamination of surface or ground water from spills, faulty procedures, and inadvertent pollution is ever present.
Air quality is also liable to suffer due to emissions from oil shale operations and associated population growth, but the BLM cannot say to what degree until companies are able to provide more detail about their production processes.
The large and rapid population influx will urbanize the small rural communities around the shale fields as "substantial demographic and social change" makes itself felt. Traffic congestion will increase on roads never designed for such volume. Property values are likely to decline in places near operations, particularly for ranches. In periods of extreme growth, community social structures may break down under the strain, producing a whole host of negative results that raise the specter of Gillette Syndrome, including rising crime, increased domestic violence, higher rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide.
The BLM's assessment of socioeconomic impacts concludes that "communities hosting these developments are likely to be required to adapt to a different quality of life, with a transition away from a more traditional lifestyle involving ranching and taking place in small, isolated, close-knit, homogenous communities with a strong orientation toward personal and family relationships, toward a more urban lifestyle, with increasing cultural and ethnic diversity and increasing dependence on formal social relationships within the community."35
It is a sobering assessment. What is a city government to do when confronted with the immense and complex impacts of full-scale commercial oil shale development? Which impacts should the communities of the Western Slope focus on mitigating if a new oil shale boom does come? What will these impacts mean for the energy companies trying to ensure that things are "done right"? No one can know the future, but even at this early stage it is clear that attention to certain social, economic, and environmental considerations might help moderate the trials associated with oil shale development.