Westerners are tired of broken federal promises, but this week, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke righted a wrong that has festered for two decades. He released $18 million in Anvil Points funding owed to Western Slope communities. Collective regional thanks are due Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, a native of Rifle who knows firsthand the complex problems of communities surrounded by public lands – and decided it was time to do something about this one.
The funding came from oil and gas leases, a trust fund established to clean up the old Anvil Points oil shale research site. Excess funds not needed for the cleanup were supposed to be returned to Colorado, but were withheld during the entire eight years of the Obama Administration.
Anvil Points is the center of oil shale history. The first modern retort technology was developed there in the 1920s, successfully recovering oil using direct combustion. That required a batch process, fully loading the retort for each firing, then dumping it. In 1951, the Bureau of Mines at Anvil Points developed a gas-fired technology to solve that problem, under the “Synthetic Liquid Fuels” program. In 1962, the Colorado School of Mines leased the site for technology experiments. It was managed by Mobile Oil, which achieved a capacity of 350 tons a day, with an 85 percent yield. Still, there were problems dealing with small shale sizes, and especially with the large amounts of gas it contained.
Development Engineering, Inc. (DEI) advanced a system to overcome those difficulties, using a design originally invented to turn limestone into cement. DEI leased Anvil Points in 1972 and formed the Paraho Project, a consortium led by Atlantic Richfield (fresh off its development of the largest oil field in America at Prudhoe Bay), and including nearly all the majors: Exxon, Chevron, Gulf, Mobile, Phillips, Shell, Standard, Sunoco, Texaco, and others. Paraho’s “skyline” at Anvil Points included a 60-foot high retort and 75-foot reactor. By 1975 Paraho was producing 10,000 barrels a year, which the Gary Western Refinery near Fruita turned into jet fuel, gasoline, and heating oil for the Navy.
In 1978 the new Department of Energy made oil shale development a major national priority. That’s when the Carter Administration declared Western Colorado a “national sacrifice zone.” The 1980 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Anvil Points authorized mining, construction and operation of a full-size commercial module, “a 365-acre lease tract with 4700 barrel per day production capacity.” That document anticipated the consumption of 122 acre feet of water a year, and said “Land disturbance during the 18-month construction period is projected to cause 600 to 80,000 tons of sediment loading in the Colorado River…”
I have often been called a pack rat, but sometimes copies of old documents like that are still instructive. That EIS called for wastewater and spent shale to be disposed in a designated dumping ground (already used by various experimental projects over the years), eventually leading to the cleanup issue.
As is often said about oil shale, the rest is history. Anvil Points Research Facility was decommissioned in 1984, already in “cleanup” status, but nothing was done about it for 15 years.
In 1998 Congressman Joel Hefley successfully transferred the Roan Plateau (including Anvil Points) back to Interior, and established the Anvil Points cleanup trust fund. The money would come from an initial oil and gas lease sale, and subsequent royalties on natural gas production on the Plateau (it generated over $1 million a year).
Once the Interior and Energy Secretaries certified to Congress that the environmental clean-up was completed, and that infrastructure costs had been recovered, then the lease receipts remaining, and those collected afterwards, would be distributed under existing law. That means half to the federal government and half to the State – and thus began the broken promise. That certification was signed in 2008 by Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, but the State’s share of the surplus was inexplicably withheld ever since.
Rep. Bob Rankin already persuaded the Colorado legislature to adopt a distribution formula, so the finally-released state funds will now return directly to the counties where they were generated, 40 percent each to Garfield and Rio Blanco, 10 percent each to Mesa and Moffat.
Zinke and Bernhardt have also fulfilled earlier commitments to Oregon ($20 million) and North Carolina ($4 million). Lots of leaders talk the talk (a handshake is a contract; my word is my bond; a deal is a deal), but talk is cheap. It takes actual money to keep such promises, and leaders who understand that.
A version of this column originally appeared in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel March 16, 2018.
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