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U.S. public lands estimated to hold 31 billion barrels of oil and 231 trillion cubic feet of natural gas WASHINGTON, D.C. -- With average national gas prices hovering around $4 per gallon, the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management today released a study that shows vast untapped oil and natural gas resources exist on public lands in the United States. "America has abundant energy resources," said Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Land and Minerals Management C. Stephen Allred. "However, for a variety of reasons, many of these resources are not available for development. At a time when energy prices have reached record levels and Americans are feeling the impact, we must find ways to develop those key energy resources that are available to us right here at home, on our public lands."

USDA Undersecretary Mark Rey has signed a Record of Decision (ROD) amending 38 National Forest Land Management Plans to identify locations of corridors suitable for future energy transmission infrastructure across Forest Service land. The corridors protect or minimize resource impacts to lands and surface resources by identifying preferred locations for corridors that also cross Federal lands managed by other agencies. These corridors offer the American public a way to meet the increasing energy demands while mitigating potential harmful effects to the environment.

On election day, the Bureau of Land Management in Utah quietly announced its last round of oil and gas lease sales for the year. On Dec. 19, close to 400,000 acres of America's redrock wilderness -- much of it adjacent to Arches and Canyonlands national parks and Dinosaur National Monument -- were to be sold for drilling to the highest bidders. Public outcry was fierce. The National Park Service had not been consulted, as it usually was, and much of the land listed for auction had long been proposed for wilderness protection. The BLM succumbed to the pressure and met with the National Park Service, which asked that 93 oil and gas leases be removed from the list. The BLM backed off 22 parcels, and then later deferred other leases in sensitive areas. From a cynical perspective, the lease sale announcement could be seen as a fire the BLM set intentionally around the edges of Utah's most precious natural treasures, knowing it could extinguish the flames, emerge as a reasonable land steward and still get what its current boss, the Bush administration, wants -- more and more public land in the American West to exploit.

Farmland stretches as far as the eye can see -- row upon row of corn stalks waving in the breeze. It's an unlikely place to watch America debate its energy crisis but a battle is raging in this corner of South Dakota over what could be the nation's first new oil refinery in 30 years. Farmer Dale Harkness wants future generations to enjoy the land in Elk Point, South Dakota, as it is now. Farmer Dale Harkness wants future generations to enjoy the land in Elk Point, South Dakota, as it is now. Click to view previous image 1 of 3 Click to view next image Plans were kept secret for months but residents of Union County have now voted in favor of rezoning land for a $10-billion refinery capable of converting 400,000 barrels of Canadian oil into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel every day.

The Bush administration is trying to make it tougher for Congress to block mining and oil and gas drilling on public lands. The Bureau of Land Management, which manages 258 million acres of federal property, stripped from its regulations Thursday a provision that gives two Congressional committees the power to compel the Interior Secretary to temporarily place public land off limits to mining and oil and gas development.

Four Federal agencies today released a Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (Final PEIS) proposing to designate more than 6,000 miles of energy transport corridors on Federal lands in 11 Western States. The Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Defense (the Agencies) prepared the Final PEIS as part of their work to implement Section 368 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The proposed energy corridors would facilitate future siting of oil, gas, and hydrogen pipelines, as well as electricity transmission and distribution facilities on Federal lands in the West to meet the region's increasing energy demands while mitigating potential harmful effects to the environment.

U.S. federal oil and gas royalties are payments made by firms to the federal government in exchange for the opportunity to explore for oil and gas on government-owned land or water. Traditionally, most of the funds generated by these royalties have gone directly into the general U.S. Treasury. Some of the funds have been directed to the Historical Preservation Trust Fund and the Land and Water Conservation Fund. During most of the twentieth century, oil and gas companies generally paid between 12.5 and 16.7 percent in royalties for a lease to drill on public land or water. Over time, these royalty payments generated over $100 billion in revenues.

"A quick update on the slow motion oil spill that is the Alberta Tar Sands and how the death of birds is just one of the huge environmental problems here: The Winnipeg Free Press reports that the long-running trial of Syncrude over the death of some 1,600 ducks in one of its toxic tailing ponds has concluded, with Syncrude found guilty. Syncrude Failed to Deploy Duck Deterrent Systems in Snow Storm Judge Ken Tjosvold: It should have been obvious to Syncrude that deterrence should have been in place in the spring as soon as reasonably possible. Syncrude dud not deploy deterrence early enough or quickly enough. I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Syncrude could have acted lawfully by using due diligence to deter birds from the basin...and it did not do so. The crux of the case was whether or not Syncrude deployed noise-producing duck deterrent systems early enough in the season. Defending its actions, Syncrude maintained that a snowstorm had delayed their deployment. In the snowstorm, with no other place to land, other bodies of water being ice-covered, the birds landed in the toxic tailing pond. There, soaked with toxic sludge, they became unable to fly and either were eaten by ravens or sank to the bottom dead. "

The Bush administration gave energy companies steep discounts in the royalties they will be required to pay as it established the groundwork Monday for commercial oil shale development on federal land. Interior Department officials said the 5 percent royalty rate during the first five years of production was needed to spur drilling while still giving taxpayers a fair return. But that rate is much lower than the 12.5 percent to 18.8 percent the government collects from companies harvesting conventional oil and gas on public lands.

Gov. Dave Freudenthal urged federal land managers to proceed cautiously in developing rules for oil shale leasing, even though commercial development is likely many years away in Wyoming, if at all. "While oil shale is a technology that may one day be used for large-scale economic production, it is still an unproven and unknown resource and thus caution should be taken in its development," Freudenthal wrote to Bureau of Land Management Director Jim Caswell.

ABORIGINAL elders from Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory say they have been stonewalled by the Commonwealth over whether their land will be used as a nuclear waste dump. The land was designated as a future dump under the Howard government's controversial Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act (CRWMA), which did not require full consent from affected traditional owners.

Tips on leasing your land for oil and gas drilling and what to be careful of.

The residue of millions of tons of coal burning at Kingston Fossil power plant in the Watts Bar Reservoir in Tennessee burst the bounds of the pond in which it was contained, burying as many as 400 acres of land in up to six feet of sludge. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which owns the coal-fired power plant-first operated in 1955-announced that 15 homes were buried and no injuries were reported. A combination of rains and accumulating sludge likely contributed to the disaster-one of two major ash pond collapses in the past decade. All told, about 2.6 million cubic yards of so-called coal ash slurry escaped, the TVA says. The collapsed pond is one of three on the site.

One estimate has oil shale extraction needing 10 barrels of water per barrel of oil produced. And, with Colorado's proposed oil shale operations at full capacity, by mid-century, the industry could require as much as 14 times more power than currently generated by the state's largest power plant. These estimates are very imprecise, because the technology is unproven. You might wonder, "Why so much water and energy? And what do do about it?" See the illustration and answer below. A recent Los Angeles Times article, "Energy dispute over Rockies riches," reported: Shell has the most mature technology, which it has been experimenting with at its Mahogany test site, near Rifle, Colo. Tucked into a rolling landscape of empty range land, the company has sunk heaters half a mile into oil shale seams and subjected the rock to 700-degree temperatures. Over weeks or even months, a liquid known as kerogen is produced, which can be refined into diesel and jet fuel.

How important is it to eat organic? Is it a fad, a craze or is it a warning against chemical fertilizers and GMO crops, which will help protect the next generation? Organic farming is natural farming, that means no chemical fertilisers, no genetic modification for either food crops or feed crops. Commercial farming pushing demand for agricultural produce forced a shift towards chemical fertilisers and farming methods to maximise output, for maximum profit, unaware of the significantly unnatural processes being used can be harmful. At the consumer level organic produce is a relatively new phenomena. On the supermarket shelves we are finding products labelled 'organic', most of us think it means 'natural' or 'cruelty free'. When you buy organic you are buying a green product . That means methods such as green fertilisers, crop rotation and biological pest controls are used instead of toxic chemical fertilisers and genetically modified organisms which are harmful to the land. Organic farming composes about 2% of all farming on the planet.

TVA is near the end of its first phase of response to a massive coal ash spill in East Tennessee last month, stabilizing and preventing further spread of the sludge at an estimated cost of $1 million a day. The giant public utility is considering options for what could be the costliest, lengthiest and most complicated operations: removing the ash from land and water and restoring the area to pre-spill conditions. Advertisement The state must approve the Tennessee Valley Authority's "corrective action" plans and has given it a mid-March deadline to submit details.

Peak oil is just five years away, and we must start to plan now to avert a truly ruinous crisis If eight companies across a broad spectrum of UK industry had warned, five years ago, that a ruinous credit crunch would hit the global economy this year, might the government have taken the warning seriously? Might UK leadership in damage limitation have been proactive, rather than reactive? Could a softer landing and a faster recovery have been possible as a result?

The House Natural Resources Committee has just announced hearings next week into the latest scandal to grip a federal agency under the Bush administration. Turns out an Interior Department agency in charge of collecting oil and natural gas royalties was compromised for years, investigators said, alleging that employees improperly accepted gifts from oil companies, handed out sweetheart deals, had sex with subordinates and used illegal drugs. As the Los Angeles Times described it, investigators spent two years examining the cozy relationship between the energy industry and the Minerals Management Service, an obscure Interior Department agency that issues lucrative drilling leases to energy companies and then collects royalties from leases of the land, which is owned by taxpayers.

A high-level fight has erupted within the Interior Department between the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service over plans to sell leases for oil and gas drilling near Arches, Canyonlands and Dinosaur National Monument. The Park Service wants to delay the Dec. 19 lease sales. The BLM has refused to do so. "We're not anti-oil and gas but we're very much pro-park," said Denver-based Park Service regional director Mike Snyder. "I'm not saying not to put those up for a lease sale. I'm just asking they wait until the next quarter."

It didn't start that way: His land was once a low hill in a rugged hardwood forest - cherry, oak, hickory - skipping from ridge to ridge across one of the poorest, most rural areas of the Lower 48. Then came the mining companies with their dynamite and their trucks. They clear-cut the forest, blew the tops off the ridges and scraped the rocks into the hollows, pushing hundreds of feet of mountains into the valleys below.