2 Million More Acres of Energy-Rich Land Off-Limits

Yep. That's the headline.

As noted in the above linked Investor's Business Daily op-ed...

Last Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed on a 285-148 vote the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009...a smorgasbord of 160 bills totaling more than 1,300 pages...[which]...locks up an additional 2 million acres to the 107 million acres of federally owned wilderness areas.

This bill, which also provides $1 billion for a water project designed to save 500 salmon in California, takes about 8.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 300 million barrels of oil out of production in that state, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

The energy resources walled off by this bill would nearly match the annual production levels of our two natural gas production states - Texas and Alaska.

Some of these parcels are in or near the Green River Formation, an oil-rich region in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming that's been called the "Persia of the West." This formation has the largest known oil shale deposits in the world, holding from 1.5 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels of crude. The Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory indicates 800 billion of these barrels are recoverable with current technology. In comparison with Saudi Arabia's oil resources, America's recoverable oil shale resources are nearly three times as large, according to a 2008 report by the Utah Mining Association. As the report notes, the West's oil shale provides America with the "potential to be completely energy self-sufficient with no demands on external sources."

Most of the locked-up lands are in Western states where there's enough oil shale to satisfy America's needs for the next 200 years. Modern technology can extract these vast resources from the earth with a minimal footprint.

Technology for shale-oil extraction is certainly further along than getting energy from switch grass or producing cellulosic ethanol. If we're going to stimulate anything, let's stimulate shale-oil production.

It took Moses 40 years to lead his people out of their wilderness to the Promised Land. The green lobby and its friends in Congress are leading the American people in the opposite direction.

We're sooooooooooooo screwed.