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Show ris CAPITOL ffiOQ WATCHDOG V By Bill Hendrix 'Unsticking Utah tar sands Utah posseses over 90 percent of the mineable tar sands in this country. These deposits are estimated to contain at least 25.1 billion barrels of oil 10.8 billion in the Uintah Basin and 14.3 billion in the central southeast portion of the state. And yet, to date, the Department of Interior has no Federal lease program for the development of this resource: For the past 15 years our good neighbors neigh-bors to the north, in Canada, have been using tar sands as an additional source of crude oil. It has been pumped into the Canadian national pipeline from the Athebasca tar pits of northern Alberta province by the large multi-national oil companies since the mid 60's. Through a process of super heated water, the. oil is separated from the sand and the synthetic crude is sent on to the refinery to become gasoline, diesel or other petroleum products. Experimentation at the Utah univeristies and within private industry has resulted in development of several separation techniques for Utah tar sands. Using these processes, scientists have discovered ways of removing the oil from the sand. This is of little value, however, without a federal lease to allow the development of this resource trom public lands. What is needed is a lease policy that covers hydrocarbons other than coal, and oil shale. Under this program hydrocarbons, such as tar sands, would be leased competitively, except where there is an existing oil and gas lease. A provision for those who hold oil and gas leases should, be made to allow an exchange of leases to include tar sands. A program that allows expanded acreage that one person may hold should also be implemented in the tar sands lease program because of the nature of the resource and its location. Current federal lease restrictions on land control would make tar sand mining uneconomical without expanded ex-panded land used. This is a resource that is available today to help relieve the oil shortage. The technology exists to extract the oil rich tar from the sand. The time has come to develop this resource for the benefit of the nation. Utah has all but ten percent of the nations tar sands. The unfortunate fact is that this resource is so located that the federal government has, up until now, had little interest in developing a lease to recover tar sands from one or two states. |