THE admission that the United States faced a critical shortage of fuel to run the most affluent society on earth came in 1973 when President Nixon outlined Project Independence to make the nation self-sufficient in energy. Two years later, President Ford asked Congress to rush the plan along by supplying six billion dollars in guaranteed loans, four and a half billion for price supports on oil and coal, and six hundred million in construction grants. These federal funds, reaching a total of $11.1 billion, were part of an appropriation bill sent to Congress on behalf of the Energy Research and Development Administration. The purpose of the appropriation was to subsidize private companies—mostly Eastern conglomerates and combines of conglomerates—in building an oil shale industry and in more than quadrupling the nation’s coal production by 1985.
It was obvious that the brunt of a successful Project Independence would fall on Colorado. The U.S. Geological Survey had estimated that the Colorado Rockies contained seventy-five percent of the nation’s shale oil reserves and tens of trillions of tons of coal in convenient areas, which, because of its low content of sulphur, was suitable to use in plants to manufacture gas and as a substitute for oil in driving the generators of electrical utilities. President Ford had indicated his attitude toward the effects of such massive extraction of resources by vetoing two bills passed by Congress to control the strip-mining of coal.
The original ERDA appropriations bill of 1973 and adjusted versions of it were stalled in Congress when 1976 began. But the mere thought of an economic takeover of the state and removal of its mineral wealth by the rest of the country in an effort to solve a national crisis by programs that might or might not work brought Coloradans to a crossroad. It forced them to make up their minds at last about the basic conflict running through their history—the conflict between their wish to preserve their beautiful land for the joy of it and their need to mar its beauty by exploiting its resources for material gain. They had seen already unpleasant changes in their way of life brought by federal spending in the state of two billion dollars or so over thirty years since World War II. Some of the spending had unexpected results, as in the case of irrigation systems that became primarily systems selling hydroelectricity to meet the excessive cost of the systems. What would happen if many times two billions of dollars were dumped on Colorado in a single decade? And the billions would not be spent by Coloradans familiar with this special environment—resident leaders in the style of William Gilpin or John Evans or General Palmer. The money would be spent by out-of-state entities controlled by absentee boards of directors subject to change overnight.
Oil shale in northwestern Colorado is a rock filled with a mineral called kerogen, which becomes a refinable synthetic oil when heated to a temperature of nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The oil has the properties of crude oil (petroleum) but it is composed of a different set of hydrocarbons. Shale oil had no commercial value until 1973, when the Arab oil embargo boosted the world price of crude oil to more than ten dollars a barrel. Some experts on shale oil say that their product can compete with crude oil at ten dollars a barrel. Others have put the competitive price far higher—twenty or thirty dollars a barrel.
Oil shale is found over some forty square miles of Colorado’s Book Plateau in Rio Blanco and Garfield counties. The sparsely populated area is marked by sandstone and shale outcrops, and it is covered with scrub oak, juniper, piñon, grass, and sage. The rolling country rises to a divide at around seven thousand feet of altitude. From the divide, creeks drain north into White River near the town of Meeker (population, 1,600). Creeks running south drain into Colorado River near Rifle (population, 2,500). The area was beloved by the White River Ute Indians for its profusion of wild life before the Meeker Massacre of 1879, and it is famous among hunters today for its wild horses, elk, bobcats, and an enormous wintering herd of deer numbering around thirty thousand.
The distance from Rifle on Colorado River to Meeker on White River is forty-two miles. Halfway between them the highway crosses a small west-running stream called Piceance (pronounced “pee-ance”—a Ute word meaning “tall grass.”) It was along this creek in 1930 that the nation’s richest oil shale deposits were discovered, mostly on federal land that came later under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior—some 800,000 acres containing an estimated 600 billion barrels of shale oil (the total reserves of crude oil in the entire United States are put at a maximum of 400 billion barrels).
In 1972, the Department of the Interior announced that two five-thousand-acre tracts of Piceance oil shale land were ready for leasing as prototypes for the development of the new energy industry. Two years later, according to an article by Sylvia Lewis in Planning Magazine, one of the twenty-year leases was purchased for $210 million by Standard Oil of Indiana and Gulf Oil Corporation under the name Rio Blanco Oil Shale Project. The purchase was prompted partly by a tremendous rise in crude-oil prices accompanying the Arab oil embargo. A second lease was sold for $117 million to a combine headed by Atlantic Richfield Company, which had been operating a shale oil pilot plant on Parachute Creek near Rifle for some years. Others in this second combine—called the Colony Development Operation—were Oil Shale Corporation, Shell Oil Company, and Ashland Oil Company. It was the plan of the combine to open in 1978 the nation’s first commercial shale oil plant on Piceance Creek at a cost of $600 million to produce fifty thousand barrels of synthetic oil a day.1
When Congress refused to guarantee loans for private oil shale development at the start of 1976, Atlantic Richfield and Oil Shale Corporation withdrew from the Colony plan, putting construction of the proposed plant in jeopardy. The Rio Blanco project was suspended also, but smaller companies proposed operations on Piceance Creek in large enough numbers to draw predictions from Interior officials that a 500,000-barrel-a-day production in Colorado was possible by 1985. But many oil men were less optimistic. They pointed out that such a production was a drop in the bucket of U.S. daily oil consumption. Realizing that, Congress might never be willing to provide the huge subsidies that the shale oil firms wanted to protect them from disaster if world prices for crude oil dropped below the necessary competitive price level. Oil officials had in mind also that roasting oil out of shale was an inefficient process, using more than a third as much energy to heat the shale as the oil contained. And they were oppressed by fears that improvements in solar heating or nuclear power could end the energy crisis before they could pay for their plants.
The same nationwide group of conservationists who had shown their power in the Echo Park dam fight now went to Congress against the development of shale oil whether it was processed by roasting the shale in retorts above ground or by the untested method of treatment—“in situ”—underground. Among other complaints, they argued that the enormous mining activity and its pollution would destroy the celebrated wildlife of the Piceance Basin. Meanwhile, in Denver the Colorado Open Space Council was maintaining that the production of a barrel of shale oil left behind a ton of sterile black solid that had to be dumped somewhere. Any considerable production of oil would created dumps covering hundreds of acres each year. Salt leaching from the dumps could contaminate the creeks near them and damage agriculture and municipal water supplies downstream.
The Open Space Council estimated that the projected industry would cause a tripling of the population of the Book Plateau area. Town and county officials would find it impossible to provide the hospitals, schools, sewers, and other facilities needed by a modern community, while the slow-moving state legislature was reaching firm decisions on such controversial issues as severance taxes to give the state some control over the activities of shale oil developers on federal lands. In the view of conservationists, a critical shortage of western-slope water would come with the plants on Piceance Creek and with the hordes of people creating mobile-home ghettos around Rifle and Meeker. The state was far behind already in both state and intrastate water commitments because of the demands on Colorado River made by its hydroelectric power plants—requiring high reservoir levels to operate—to say nothing of the perennial demands of the water-purloining Front Range cities of the Eastern slope. The Colorado Water Conservation Board was warning that at least two hundred thousand extra acre-feet of water annually would be needed for the Book Plateau area if shale oil production met expectations. It could be obtained only by buying water rights from farmers on Colorado River and removing their irrigated fields from food production. Such action was bound to be bitterly opposed in a state that had been based primarily on agriculture since the decline of mining at the turn of the century.
Those who opposed a large Colorado shale oil industry were critical of the coal aspects of Project Independence also, though they recognized that coal-mining was traditional in the state and not merely experimental and short-term as in the case of shale oil. Coal was found in huge quantities everywhere. A popular and cheap method of extracting it was strip-mining—scraping off and pushing aside the thin layer of topsoil to get at the beds of coal beneath. As 1976 began, strip-mining was an expanding enterprise in the Yampa River valley around Oak Creek, Hayden, and Craig, and in the Four Corners region of the southwest below Durango. Yampa valley coal was sold to fuel power-generating plants that supplied electricity to customers in and out of the state. Southwestern coal was sold to two vast power plants on the Navajo Reservation and to two proposed gasification plants in northern New Mexico. The shortage of water was hampering the growth of strip-mining and power generation in both regions, creating demands by the coal operators for still more dams and reservoirs involving White and Yampa rivers in the northwest and branches of the San Juan in the southwest, to be followed by the withdrawal of land that they irrigated from agricultural use. To environmentalists, another paramount issue was the need for laws requiring strip miners to restore the top-soil to its original productive condition after the coal was removed.
In contrast to these mining plans to disturb the environment were the measures to preserve it that had been proposed ever since the conservationist pioneering of Theodore Roosevelt and Enos Mills. A principal catalyst in their promotion through the years was a group called the Colorado Mountain Club, the members of which spent their weekends all the year around scrambling over, photographing, mapping, and analyzing every nook and cranny of the fifty-odd peaks rising above fourteen thousand feet and all the other 1,143 summits of the Colorado Rockies above ten thousand feet.
Some comment on this club is in order because of its influence on many aspects of life in today’s Colorado, including the elevated status of women. The club was founded in 1912 by four women and three men, and it has adhered ever since to principles established by Julia Holmes on Pikes Peak in 1858 and by Isabella Bird and the Philadelphia lecturer Anna Dickinson, both of whom ascended Longs Peak in 1873—principles emphasizing that whatever men can do, women can do at least as well if not better. One of its members was Dr. Florence Sabin, who became a famous specialist in the cure of tuberculosis and the creator of the state’s health code. One club heroine, Mary Cronin, was the first woman (in 1921) to have climbed all of the state’s fifty-one peaks over fourteen thousand feet. (The U.S.G.S. keeps finding more; the present total is fifty-three.) Another heroine was Agnes Vaille, who died of freezing in a blizzard on top of Longs Peak on January 12, 1925, after climbing the east face, one of the most difficult ascents in the Rockies even in summer.
As conservationists, members of the club have always maintained with Henry Thoreau that the optimum environment was a blend of wilderness and civilization. To alter an environment drastically for reasons of convenience or greed disrupted the harmonies of nature of which man was a part. The club has contended that by preserving the wilderness, people accepted their relationship to nature’s complex organism and their duty to protect it for the general welfare.
The club advocated preservation long before 1920, when a young Forest Service employee in Colorado Arthur H. Carhart persuaded the Department of Agriculture to designate Trappers Lake and its White River environs as a tract to be kept roadless and undeveloped—the first federal application of the idea (roads and development were permitted in national parks). Thereafter, preservation had made little headway until the 1950s when it gained momentum under pressures applied by the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society during the Echo Park dam controversy. The result was the passage by Congress in 1964 of the National Wilderness Preservation Bill, setting aside in the national forests fifty-four wilderness tracts (no roads or motors permitted) totaling 9.1 million acres, and thirty-four primitive areas (open to limited mining and lumbering) totaling 5.5 million acres.
The preservation bill was backed in Colorado by thirty-five conservation groups working together through the umbrella organization, the Colorado Open Space Council. As recommended by the council, seven wilderness areas had been set aside by January 1976 in Colorado national forests—the Mount Zirkel area along the Continental Divide on the west side of North Park, the Rawah area in Roosevelt National Forest at the eastern edge of North Park, the West Elk area northwest of Gunnison town, the Maroon Bells-Snowmass area above Aspen, the La Garita area above the old silver camp of Creede, the large Weminuche area on the Continental Divide above Pagosa Springs, and the Flat Tops area south of Trappers Lake. In addition, three national forest primitive areas were created—Gore Range-Eagles Nest, Uncompahgre, and Wilson Mountains.
After the end of World War II, Coloradans managed to correct many inequities, which had accumulated through the century as products of the state’s ethnic diversity. By January 1976, discrimination exercised by native Americans on immigrants from abroad had vanished. English, Irish and Poles, Swedes, German-Russians, and Jews had fused in the national melting pot. Though the three bands of indigenous Ute Indians in the southwest had lost their vast hunting grounds, they were self-governing and secure on the farms and ranches of their reservations, and their leaders were coping with the dilemmas brought upon them by the encroachment of their white neighbors.
At the start of the new century, the blacks of Colorado, some 150,000 of them in the Front Range cities, were forced no longer to endure the segregation and dreary tasks to which they had been confined for nine decades after 1859. Opportunities for education and worthwhile employment had increased to the point where complete equality seemed likely in another decade. Meanwhile the Chicanos, those 200,000 descendants of the state’s first settlers, had made remarkable progress economically and socially while retaining their distinctive Spanish-Mexican culture. They had achieved representation in all the professions and businesses and their men and women had won high positions in the various state governments.
The women of Colorado could be proud of their accomplishments since that dismal January day in 1876 when the chauvinistic males of the constitutional convention had refused to grant them suffrage. In January 1976, at the opening session of the state legislature, no less than thirteen elected female assemblymen and three female state senators were present in the senate gallery as new stained-glass portraits in two windows were unveiled. One of the portraits memorialized the late Emily Griffith, the Colorado teacher who founded in 1916 Denver’s Opportunity School as a division of the city’s public school system. This school has continued to offer education at a nominal fee to people of any age who feel a need to learn. The second portrait honored the late Virginia Blue, who became the state’s first woman treasurer in the 1960s. Not present at the unveiling but there by proxy was the young Denver lawyer Patricia Nell Schroeder, the first Colorado woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Colorado had its problems in January 1976. Racial tensions remained in spite of some successes in dealing with their causes. There was too much smog around Denver, too much pollution of the rivers, too many people crowding into cities along the Front Range, not enough water to go around. Out on the eastern plains dry-land farmers, who had prospered of late through the use of the new circular sprinkling systems, were worrying about the sinking water table of their underground supplies, called aquifers. Uncertainties about the future of shale oil and strip-mined coal made it hard for towns on the western slope to plan ahead. Completion of public works like the Frying Pan-Arkansas water diversion project and the second bore of the 8,941-foot Eisenhower Tunnel under Loveland Pass were threatened by skyrocketing costs.
But Coloradans were not dismayed as they faced a new century. They knew that problems had always been around—mining and rail problems, labor troubles, depressions—and these problems had never turned out to be as bad as they had seemed. The challenges of the difficult environment were as stimulating as they had been in gold-rush days. Prospectors were in the hills again dreaming of fortunes as they scratched for strange new metals. Solar heating was discussed everywhere as the hope of the future in a state where the sun shone most of the time. Cloud-seeding to increase rainfall showed some promise to ease the water shortage. One cloud-seeding effort in the San Juans had worked too well. Residents had asked the seeders to desist because the extra snow was causing avalanches and frightening away skiers.
Of one thing Coloradans were sure. They did not want their beautiful land marred without their permission by federally sponsored experiments to solve the nation’s energy crisis. And they deplored attempts by out-of-state people to direct the management of federal lands in Colorado without regard for local opinion. Resisting such “foreign” encroachment and minimizing its adverse impact on the land were key problems of the crossroad they had reached.
And still they looked ahead with confidence that their enduring mountains and plains would protect them from the evils of affluence and bestow blessings on them, spiritual and material. And they would keep on hoping, as Coloradans had always hoped, that they could preserve their paradise and prosper by developing its riches too.
1. Sylvia Lewis, “Yes, Virginia, There Is an Oil Shale Industry,” Planning Magazine 40:8–13 (October 1974).