Feds refuse to open up huge shale formation in Nevada

Las Vegas Review Journal:

About 200 miles due north of Las Vegas is Nye County’s Railroad Valley. Home to only a few hundred people, it receives few visitors.

But Railroad Valley boasts something unique to Nevada that could someday mean a new boom of wealth and job creation to the tune of more than 21,000 jobs.

Here, in 1984, the Grant Canyon oil-field wells were first drilled. For nearly 10 years, before tapering off in the mid-1990s, the Grant wells produced about 110,000 barrels of oil per month. During these years, the Grant wells were the most productive onshore wells in the 48 contiguous states. Through most of the 1980s, in this section of rural Nye County, these few wells generated prosperity.

Despite this success, however, Nevada oil exploration has been slow and sporadic. In part this was because of a technological inability to identify and economically extract oil reserves. The rock formation beneath Railroad Valley and much of Eastern Nevada, known as the Chainman Shale, contains petroleum, but until recently the technology to extract it did not exist.

In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the Chainman Shale formation could contain as much as 383 million barrels of undiscovered oil, as well as 242 billion cubic feet of natural gas. Ten years later, using more sophisticated modeling techniques, the USGS. upgraded that estimate to 1.598 billion barrels of oil and 1.836 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

In other words, Eastern Nevada could be sitting on one of the most energy-rich rock formations in the entire world. Around the time of the updated estimate, one oil developer told Las Vegas reporters, “You have the richest largest organic mature rock source anyplace in the world except Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. … There is no doubt, I can assure you 100 percent, you are sitting on some of the greatest wealth in this country and the world.”

However, before oil and gas developers can begin realizing this vast energy potential for Nevada, a major obstacle must be overcome: The Chainman Shale formation lies almost entirely under land controlled by the federal government. Without federal permission, these resources cannot be tapped.

The federal Bureau of Land Management, which controls most of the land in Nevada, occasionally auctions off mineral rights for small swaths of land. Mostly, however, it has blocked large-scale energy development in Nevada.
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That contrast is particularly relevant in light of a new analysis from Dr. Timothy J. Considine, a professor of energy economics at the University of Wyoming. He shows that development of the Chainman Shale on federally owned lands would result in $5.2 billion in economic impact over the next decade while creating 21,797 new jobs.
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This is an example of the criticism I have raised about the control of energy development on federal sites.  It is pat of the Democrats' policy of artificial scarcity.