$fracked utah rock formation$

$fracked utah rock formation$

#FRACKED UTAH ROCK FORMATION PLUS#

Mitt Romney (R-Utah) to local county commissioners - in supporting a project that picked up steam during the Trump administration. McKee is backed by the state’s entire political establishment-everyone from Gov. It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.” With the railway, he told me in an interview in February, “we’ve found a way to do this that’s viable.” “We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin. “This has long been an area in need of rail,” says Mike McKee, a former Uintah County commissioner who is retiring this spring as the executive director of the Seven County Coalition on Infrastructure, a quasi-governmental organization that has been orchestrating the railway. since the late 1970s, and promoters say it will bring jobs to a depressed rural area while helping liberate the U.S. The Uinta Basin Railway will be the largest freight rail infrastructure project in the U.S. “Such investments will soon be stranded assets- a blot on the landscape and a blight on investment portfolios.” “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness,” United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said in April when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most recent report. The railway, devoted almost exclusively to transporting oil, could allow oil production in the basin to quadruple at a time when scientists say the world has less than a decade to wean itself from fossil fuels or face irreversible catastrophic impacts from climate change. In December, the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB) signed off on a plan to build an 88-mile railway from the Uinta Basin to a rail terminal about 100 miles south of Salt Lake City.

$fracked utah rock formation$

All of those efforts have failed to get traction - until now. For decades, Utah officials have been hoping to remedy this problem, primarily by trying to build a railroad to service the mineral-rich basin, which also holds large deposits of phosphate, gilsonite (a form of asphalt), coal, and, potentially, rare earth minerals. Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them, for one basic reason: all those mountains that enchanted Powell 125 years ago.Įven today, only two main roads link the oil fields to refineries in Salt Lake City, and they’re often two-lane highways with steep grades that can be nearly impassable in the winter.

$fracked utah rock formation$

Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated three trillion barrels of oil shale.

#FRACKED UTAH ROCK FORMATION PLUS#

Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the U.S. Its relatively modest output of at most about 90,000 barrels of oil a day contrasts dramatically with places like the Permian basin in New Mexico and Texas, which will pump out more than 5 million barrels of oil a day this year.īut what the Uinta Basin holds is immense potential. Since the first significant oil well was drilled there in 1948, the Uinta Basin has become home to some of the most productive oil and gas fields in the mountain west. Much of that vista remains unchanged, except that now it’s blanketed with thousands of oil and gas wells, and in the winter, a thick layer of smog that constitutes some of the worst air pollution in the country. In the journal from his legendary 1869 expedition down the Colorado River, explorer John Wesley Powell called the remote Tavaputs Plateau in Eastern Utah “one of the stupendous features of this country.” The one-armed Civil War hero marveled at the Wasatch Mountains soaring above the Uinta Basin, the canyons carved by the Green River thousands of feet below, and the Uinta Mountains to the north, where, he wrote, “among the forests are many beautiful parks.” This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is republished here through the Climate Desk partnership.

$fracked utah rock formation$

Fracked utah rock formation