Enefit: A Half-Baked Nightmare for Utah

(The BLM is seeking public input on Enefit’s planned utility corridor project. All comments must be submitted by Aug. 1, 2012. Visit our Facebook page for more information on how to submit a comment).

StopEnefit

Tell the BLM to STOP ENEFIT!

Enefit, an Estonia oil shale company, aims to start mining oil shale in Utah in the coming years. But the odds are stacked against it—and if allowed to proceed, it would wreak havoc on the resources we all depend on. Utah Tar Sands Resistance is working to protect our lands and waters from oil shale and tar sands mining, for the sake of our own health and the wellbeing of all generations to come.

Human Health Violations:

v    Oil shale requires massive amounts of water, and in the west, we don’t have water rights to give away. The Colorado is the most endangered river in America.

v    Water rights would have to be seized from farmers and communities.

v    The Colorado would likely become polluted with dangerous compounds that seep into the watershed.

v    Toxic substances would be carried by pipes, threatening our water sources and farmland.

Devastation of Our Wilderness Heritage:

v    Oil shale mining would utterly devastate huge tracts of wilderness. Hundreds of thousands of acres of BLM and state lands are at risk.

v    This would jeopardize the livelihoods of people in communities throughout south and eastern Utah who rely on tourism for their regional economy.

A History of Failure:

v    Oil shale has a hundred-year track record of failure in the U.S. It has never come close to becoming commercially viable.

v    Oil shale is an entirely different resource from shale oil and shale gas, which are pockets of oil or gas trapped within shale rock. Oil shale is not even oil—the word “oil” is a misnomer. It’s an “immature precursor to oil and gas,” as the Colorado School of Mines says.

v    This low-grade, waxy material, called kerogen, requires energy-intensive upgrading to turn it into fuel.

v    Enefit only produces energy used for electricity in Estonia, not transportation fuel. Enefit must create an entirely new technology to mine oil shale in Utah—and experts from Estonia say commercial production would not be feasible for at least several decades out, if ever.

v    “The test results are not promising,” the company said in an internal document.

v    A wave of bad press in Estonia is barraging Enefit’s plans in Utah, saying it requires tremendous governmental subsidies to even make it viable—just like oil shale mining in Estonia. Enefit’s foolhardy attempt to make oil shale viable would devastate our lands and health, and we refuse to bear the financial and human health expenses.

Join the effort to stop dangerous oil shale and tar sands mining!

Read More:

Estonian Public Broadcasting, “PM Backs Minister as Skepticism Emerges Over Utah Oil Shale Venture”

Checks and Balances Project, “Eyes on Enefit: Financially Unstable and Unprofitable, and Not Ready for Prime Time”

Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, “The Public Health Consequences of Utah’s Energy Policies

Western Resource Advocates, “The Basic Facts of Oil Shale and Tar Sands”

Aug. 16-19 – Tar Sands Healing Walk solidarity campout at PR Springs

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Utah Tar Sands Resistance and friends will be walking between threatened and damaged sites in the PR Springs area, calling for healing of the abused planet Earth. The walk is inspired by and in solidarity with the Tar Sands Healing Walk, a First Nations-lead action in Alberta Canada in July 2013.

“It is time when people from the four directions come together to walk for justice, for peace, for freedom, in recognition of the great spirit and mother Earth,” says the narrator on this video about the Healing Walk. “Not only are we in an ecological crisis, we are in a moral and human crisis.”

Alberta tar sands–with poisoned people, vast eco-destruction and unimaginable dumping of climate change gasses–are a scary forecast for what we would see in Utah…except that you and we are going to stop the industry in its tracks and overthrow the fossil fuel economy! 

It could all start with a camp out, August 16-19.

Watch the Facebook event for updates and details as they emerge:  https://www.facebook.com/events/178859648958025

To prepare for your first trip to PR Springs, please read http://www.tarsandsresist.org/camp

Utah children visit PR Springs & speak out against tar sands

On June 22nd, 2013, as part of the 4th Annual Global Earth Exchange, and #FearlessSummer, a group of Utah children traveled to PR Springs, the site of the first proposed Tar Sands mining project in the United States.

They created a work of art in appreciation for Mother Earth, made entirely of objects found around the mine, and spoke in opposition to the Tar Sands.

UTSR Global Earth Exchange

(Photo by Steve Liptay)

UTSR Danger Mine Site

(photo by Steve Liptay)

EnviroNews (VIDEO): Families Camp Out in Protest to Save the Pristine Tavaputs Plateau From America’s First Approved Tar Sands Operation

(Reposted with permission from EnviroNews)

(EnviroNews Utah) – Tar sands, oil sands, asphalt, and bituminous sands. These names all represent the same type of fossil fuel, a fossil fuel so difficult and energy intensive to mine and process that past attempts to harness it’s dirty energy in the United States have resulted in bankrupt companies and abandoned test sites that have scarred the land with barren eyesores without a plan for recovery or restoration.

The massive Athabasca strip mine in Alberta, Canada has put tar sands on the map in the last few years via the mounting pressure surrounding President Obama’s upcoming decision on the 4th and final leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline that, if approved, will serve to open the flood gates for poisonous and carbon-loaded bitumen crude on an unprecedented scale. It is also known that much, if not all of the product moved through KXL is set to be sold abroad to countries such as China, leaving the U.S. holding the bag in what is now being called the “All Risk, No Reward campaign”.

Despite all of the recent heat surrounding the simply massive Alberta oil sands conundrum, plans to strip the land of all life in pursuit of even more of these deadly bituminous sands quietly continue, largely under the radar of the mainstream media. But this isn’t the everyday yukky stuff from Canada that you’re used to, rather, these burnable rocks are set to be plundered right from your backyard. At least if you live in the Western United States.

In a stunning move the BLM has opened approximately 850,000 acres for exploration and development of the technique, a technique that is so riddled with carbon emissions that world-leading climate scientist James Hansen, formerly of NASA, has been sounding the alarm, warning that it will be “game over for the climate” if these dirty extraction plans are realized.

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Solidarity Action Campout — bring your whole family!

tavaputs country-small It’s time for another UTSR campout at the proposed site of the first tar sands mine in the US and this campout is more exciting than usual.

About 100 people will be attending the Canyon Country Action Camp in Green River, Utah. The intention of the action camp is to build local organizers to fight tar sands and protect Tavaputs Country and the greater Colorado River Basin, so that’s so awesome.

They’ve asked us for support at PR Springs–the location of the tar sands test pit–up on the East Tavaputs Plateau so that Canyon Country Action Camp participants get to meet some of our rad’ folks up on the plateau.

So, bring your high spirits of resistance, your kids, your elders, all your loved ones!

Details are still being worked out–as usual–but expect that we’ll leave Friday July 26 or Saturday July 27 and stay until Monday July 29.

It’s rugged out there! For more information to prepare for a trip to Tavaputs Country, go to http://tarsandsresist.org/camp

For updates and to RSVP, go to https://www.facebook.com/events/137246013148666/