The plow that broke the plains a century ago caused little public consternation until another half-century had gone by. The power shovel which is beginning to break the plains today is being greeted with dismay even before it is well under way.
The causes of conflict are clear. The nation needs the coal, particularly the lower-sulfur coal that is most prevalent in western areas. At the same time, hardly anyone is willing to accept the gutted and sterile earth that was left behind in the wake of earlier strip-mining activities in Appalachia and elsewhere. In the prairies themselves, there is no consensus. One rancher sells his mineral rights, while his neighbor resolutely refuses to cash in on riches beneath the feet of his flocks. In Congress, the prevailing mood, developed before the Middle Fast added acuteness to the energy crisis, is still one of resistance to strip-mining encroachment.
A bill passed by the Senate in October called for the imposition of rigorous standards governing the reclamation of strip-mined land anywhere in the country and banned exploitation of federally retained mineral rights on privately owned lands except with the consent of the surface owner. With scant qualification, acceptable reclamation was defined as restoring stripped land to "approximate original contour." In some areas, designated as "unsuitable for surface mining," such mining was to be prohibited altogether. Revenues derived from various charges under the proposed act would be used, in addition to direct appropriations, to foster the reclamation of already abandoned mines. The House, meanwhile, developed its own bill along similar lines, with the added inclusion of a specific reclamation fee (90 percent forgivable against actual reclamation expenses) which would be used as one of the sources of revenue for the abandoned-mine reclamation fund.
Both Senate and House, in short, seemed prepared to accept the added costs of coal inherent in the conservation of topography and flora which was the objective of the legislation. They do not see these costs as unduly high. The Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, in reporting the bill in September, estimated the incremental cost of the bill's requirements, over and above the reclamation costs already required under state laws, at "somewhat less than 600/ton for most mining operations." This would add some 7 or 8 percent to the current average price of bituminous coal, hardly more than its relative rise in recent years for other reasons. In coal's principal (public-utility) use, the incremental reclamation requirements would add only 0.03 mills to the average cost of a kilowatt hour of electricity.
Fear of a scarred landscape has also helped delay, for the last few years, the exploitation of western deposits of oil shale, believed potentially to hold the equivalent of many times the exploitable U.S. resources (Alaska and the continental shelf included) of crude oil. There has also been a great deal of uncertainty as to the cost at which large quantities of such shale oil could be extracted and brought to market. But in November, Interior Secretary Morton approved a prototype program to lease large tracts of shale land in federal ownership, potentially among the most economical. The first lease sale was scheduled for early January, with five more sales, each of rights to 5,000 acres, to take place in each of the next five months. The tracts are located in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah.
Objections to such shale-development initiatives include the argument not only that the environmental damage is potentially so great that it would be better to do without the additional liquid fuel, but that the presumed method of exploitation, involving mining and subsequent processing, is premature. It has long been considered that the ultimately optimum way of exploiting the oil shale is by extraction of the volatile oils from the natural mineral (kerogen) in situ, instead of large-scale excavation and retorting. This approach appears environmentally superior, but is not without possible surface-disturbance problems nor altogether free of a disposal problem, since at least some of the shale must be excavated to create what is in effect an underground retort.
Evaluation by the U.S. Interior Department itself has shown that reclamation of mined oil-shale land presents particularly difficult problems, because of the inhospitality of the backfill to most kinds of vegetation. Environmentalists also point to the potential pollution of ground-water and of nearby streams by water seeping through the mine workings. Water raises still another question in regard to oil-shale development, since large quantities are required for processing, in areas where freshwater is generally in scarce supply.
Environmental considerations have similarly been a stumbling block with regard to oil on the continental shelf. Here, too, the Interior Department, after four years of little activity, has decided to face the repercussions. The gathering energy crisis resulted, at various times in 1973, in the sale, offering, or opening to nomination of new blocks of Gulf of Mexico leases. Also opened to nomination, for 1974 sale, were new tracts off California. And there was talk of near-future offerings, for the first time, of Atlantic Coast leases, contingent on the outcome of a broad-ranging investigation entrusted by the President to the Council on Environmental Quality, including public hearings across the country, consultants' reports, and workshops. New risks of major oil spills, and in some places the certainty of "visual pollution" by close-in offshore drilling structures, are implicit in such moves.
Talk of offshore oil terminals gathered similar momentum, paralleled by environmentalist reaction. The immediate need was diminished somewhat as the result of the Arab oil embargo, but the prospects grew that construction would soon be under way on one or more terminals for receipt of oil and possibly for liquefied natural gas and other bulk fuels.
Reconciling environmental objectives with oil production on the continental shelf has an importance beyond most other types of environmental compromise in respect to future adequacy of liquid fuel supplies. Omitting Alaska, subsea oil deposits around the margins of the United States as of now probably offer considerably more unexploited oil resources than in all of the U.S. land area. The technology to reach the great bulk of these resources is well developed, and there are only minor questions of U.S. jurisdiction.
A version of this article appeared in print in the January 1974 issue of Resources magazine.
