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Show Oil shale bill av impasse in Senave, go ahead planned By Helene C. Monberg Vernal Express " Washington Correspondent Washington The House-passed oil shale bill is at an impasse in the Senate, but the Interior Department is still planning to go ahead with oil shale leasing in 1983, Interior Secretary James G. Watt has told the House Interior In-terior Committee. Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., who opposed the oil shale leasing bill which cleared the Senate Energy Committee in December, has not been able to getjogether with Sen. John Warner, R-Va., about potential changes in the measure. Basically, it authorizes a permanent oil shale program for leasing publicly held oil shale lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, with up to two leases per state allowed each entity. Hart told this correspondent in an interview on March 2 he was concerned the Comittee-approved bill would result in an unmitigated leasing "free-for-all," and he didn't want the Senate to consider the bill until he could work out some possible amendments with Warner. "Neither of us has been able to get together on the bill" under the pressure of other work, Hart stated. Hart is a member of the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, which have recently held nearly non-stop hearings. Warner is a member of the Armed Services panel and the Senate Energy Committee, which has also been busy meeting the mandatory March 15 deadling for budgetary recommendations to the Congressional Budget Committees. Nevertheless, their failure to get together on the oil shale bill sharply diminishes its chances of Senate action this year. But the Interior Department is proceeding as if this problem did not exist. "For 1983, we will continue work on the prototype oil shale leasing program and establish a permanent oil shale leasing program," Watt testified at a 1983 budget hearing of the House Interior Committee on March 1. "The first prototype oil shale leases since 1974 are proposed to be issued in 1983," Watt testified, and Interior can go ahead with such a lease without additional ad-ditional Congressional approval. But he also added, "the first lease sale under the permanent program is scheduled to be held in March 1984," on publicly held oil shale lands in the three-state area. That would take Congressional approval. ap-proval. How had Watt and Co. work on Senate action on the Committee-approved permanent leasing bill will determine whether it becomes law this year. The House passed a permanent oil shale leasing bill last year. Watt also testified, "We will continue our work on a tar sands leasing program with the objective of holding the first lease sale early in 1984." A tar sands leasing bill recently passed Congress, so there is no bar to the Administration going ahead with this program, so important to Utah, where 90 percent of the tar sands are located in this country. The Interior Department has programmed a $2,151,000 increase in leasing energy minerals in 1983, as compared with 1982. Of that amount, there is a $433,000 increase in tar sands leasing and a $221,000 increase in oil shale leasing. For 1982 Interior plans to spend $4,718,000 in oil shale leasing and $317,000 for tar sands leasing. In 1983 the comparable figures are $4,939,999 for oil shale leasing and $750,000 for tar sands leasing. The 1982 fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, and the 1983 fiscal year begins on Oct. 1, 1982. The budget is based on fiscal years. Meanwhile, one aspect of minerals activity in the West is being phased out, hearings of the House Appropriations Ap-propriations Committee revealed. The Department of Energy (DOE) presentation before the House Ap propriations panel which has just been published indicates the Administration plans to close out with uranium resource assessment a program which has been going on since the early 1950's. DOE got $10 million for this program in 1982, and it requested $3 million in fiscal 1983 "to complete the program's closeout activities." One of the DOE offices scheduled for closing is the Grand Junction office, i which had been the headquarters for I uranium assessment and evaluation activities thruout the West for almost 30 years. But the uranium resource assessment program has had it "because the major goals of the program have been achieved, and sufficient uranium resources have been identified that can support nuclear power growth well into the next century," cen-tury," the DOE stated in its budget analysis to the House funding panel. One of the reasons why there is no longer a need for this program is that there are no new nuclear power plants being built in the United States, and utilities have been announcing on a monthly basis that they are dropping plans for nuclear plants that are in the construction stage. TVA announced the termination of construction work on two of its nuclear power plants on March 3 because of their high cost and TVA's sharply lowered demand for power. DOE prior to shutdown of its nuclear assessment work in 1983 plans to make information available to the public "on virtually every uranium deposit in the United States gathered from industry over the last 30 years. ..The date from these surveys will have great value for use in exploration and assessment of natural resources in addition to uranium, and for environmental studies it will be an important asset for government and industry for many ' years," DOE said. |