After the most expensive spring and summer seasons on record, the price of oil has finally settled down to between 120 and 130 dollars a barrel. While there’s no telling if that price is stable, it sure sounds cheap to consumers living in fear of $150 and the $4+ gas prices that come with it.

Historically speaking, though, $120 is still incredibly expensive.  So expensive that many other energy sources more or less ignored over the past few decades suddenly seem like a fantastic bargain. In many ways, this is good news for environmentalists, as it lends renewed economic viability to all sorts of green energy projects, from biofuels to battery-electric vehicles. As a result, many in the green sector are hailing these high oil prices as one of the best things that could possibly happen to a world facing the imminent consequences of global warming; a veritable economic salvation for a world of carbon polluters. But such an assessment is woefully simple-minded. 

The free market is an equal-opportunity environment, and while they may have lost the press and public relations wars to their greener rivals, several carbon-emitting fossil fuel technologies can also offer a competitive product in a more expensive oil market.  Oil shale, for example, becomes a viable source of crude at a price somewhere between 70 and 95 dollars a barrel.  And with massive oil shale resources within borders of the Continental US, it offers the additional allure of increased domestic revenues and energy independence.

In oil-shale-rich Western Colorado, a firestorm has exploded over new regulations designed to ease extraction. Predictably, the debate over the regulations, which reduce the costs oil companies must pay the state to begin drilling in oil-shale lands, has broken across party lines. Democrats accuse the Bureau of Land Management of carrying out Bush administration orders for a last-minute energy grab, before an administration likely to have less friendly ties with the energy industry takes over the White House.

Republicans have countered, accusing Colorado Democrats of acting like “white knights” for political gain, fending off oil companies that have always had fair access to the land, and the potential energy source below it. Regardless of political posturing, though, oil shale, like many of its biofuel counterparts, is still years away from commercial viability, due to the time required to build the infrastructure that delivers the resource. Shell, which already has an experimental plant in place, anticipates that viable levels of production cannot begin before the next decade, at the earliest.

In the interim, it will ultimately be the American people who decide which fuels fill the supply gap indicated by the high price of oil. Through the representatives they elect, voters will decide whether or not carbon-heavy fuel sources, like oil shale or gasified coal, face extra taxes, and through the decisions they make at the cash register, consumers will determine whether increased costs associated with Earth-friendly products prevent them from becoming viable products. Only time will tell which energy resource reigns supreme in the new millennium.

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Photo by Flickr user David George