The withdrawal came as the Grand Canyon Trust and the owners of the Bonanza coal-fired power plant near Vernal entered into a settlement agreement regarding water rights that may have gone to the Enefit project. Oil shale is essentially petroleum embedded in sedimentary rock. Separating the petroleum from the rock makes it more difficult and water-intensive than traditional oil drilling.
“The good news is that the Bush-Cheney nightmare vision of strip mining thousands of acres of wildlife habitat on public lands to produce the most carbon-polluting gasoline in the world appears to finally be ending,” said Ted Zukoski, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement on Enefit’s lease relinquishment. “Enefit was the last company holding an oil shale research lease on BLM land that hadn’t expired or been relinquished.
Other companies still hold shale leases from the state Trust Land Administration, but no shale operations are under development on those lands.