Joel Hefley: “I would like to thank my leadership for scheduling this bill today. It is my hope that, with the passage of this…”

“I would like to thank my leadership for scheduling this bill today. It is my hope that, with the passage of this legislation, we can begin the cleanup work on certain naval oil shale reserves and proceed with the transfer we enacted on the floor 3 years ago. I was the author of legislation which transferred these two oil shale reserves from the Department of Energy to the Bureau of Land Management in 1998. After a 10-year debate on the issue, even the Clinton administration came to agree that there was little future in using oil shale to fuel battleships and that these two reserves could be more useful to the public as BLM properties managed for multiple use and particularly for oil and gas leasing. The State agency charged with promoting such development estimated as much as $125 million in oil and gas revenues to be generated by the two sites, to be split equally between Colorado and the Federal Government. The early returns seemed to confirm this as the first lease sale in the fall of 1999 generated $7 million, and that amount has since risen to around $8.5 million. At the same time, it was acknowledged that cleanup work needed to be done on the two sites, particularly at Anvil Point on the naval oil shale reserve number 3, which was the site of a Bureau of Mines experiment years before.”