The folly of long-term planning

This weekend I thought I might head up to Oil Shale City for a night out in the big town. After all, Oil Shale City has more than 300,000 people and it’s just between DeBeque and Rifle, where the town of Grand Valley used to be located before it was swallowed up by the city.

Unfortunately, unless I want to be entertained by roving bands of pack rats and coyotes I’m unlikely to find much in the way of entertainment in that area today. However, it sure sounded great when Cornell University’s planning department students designed the city in 1959.

This was because oil shale was the thing of which the future was going to be made and everyone was pretty sure they were right on the cusp of developing an easy way to extract petroleum products from shale.

Some people may remember that until 20 years ago or so there was still an occasional sign in the sagebrush advertising the coming metropolis. In 1961 there was an ad in the Aspen newspaper for commercial lots to get in on the ground floor of the development.

The Cornell students even constructed a model of Oil Shale City, the newspaper reported, that was hauled by a special truck all the way from New York, for display at the annual Grand Valley Chamber of Commerce banquet.

The key to all of this anticipation was an Atomic Energy Commission project referred to as “Operation Plowshare” that involved detonating nuclear devices below ground to fracture the surrounding material and release natural gas and oil.

None of this namby pamby water-and-sand thing we use now, but real he-man type work. However, it wasn’t until 1969 that the government was able to set off a 45-kiloton nuclear device, near Rulison.

Turns out that it worked pretty, well except for not being able to use the now-radioactive petroleum products the explosion freed up. There was some more testing of the type up in Rio Blanco, but darned if it didn’t have the same problem.

There are a couple of things to be learned from this, the first being that the fascination with oil shale as a source of energy isn’t something that just popped up in the late 1970s. It shows up periodically and sort of hypnotizes people when they look at the vast deposits of shale here in the West.

There have been significant strides in removing energy products from the rock, but the cost is pretty high and fairly resource intensive, although in the last few years new techniques such as utilizing microwave energy to heat the material have been promising.

However, it requires a great deal of electricity. Since our dominant political class is under the sway of groups who believe the only acceptable sources of energy are those generating about the same level of power per square foot as an equivalent number of hamster wheels, that seems unlikely.

The other problem is we keep discovering so darn much oil and gas and a lot of it not under the sandals of folks who want to kill us.

Remember the solemn pronouncements of “peak oil” just a few years ago — that we’d seen the top of the oil mountain and it was all downhill. Not true, as we continue to discover oil in quantities that make us wonder if we even completely understand how the stuff is created.

This trip down memory lane demonstrates planning beyond a couple of years is silly in ever more rapidly changing technical environments.

Once again we are entering the time when politicians and bureaucrats trot out grandiose schemes based on the same kind of thinking as our friends at Cornell — imagining exciting ends without understanding the boring means.

For example, imagining an expensive downtown events center, attracting thousands of people to events in an area that doesn’t seem to be able to support an old movie theater.

As citizens, we are better off to ask for smaller things that should have a measurable effect in the next year — not projected results in 10.

Remember, man plans and God laughs.

gj sentinal