Energy Boom in West Threatens Indian Artifacts

Less than a fifth of the park has been surveyed for artifacts because of limited federal money.

Much more definite is that a giant new project to drill for carbon dioxide is gathering steam on the park's eastern flank. Miles of green pipe snake along the roadways, as trucks ply the dirt roads from a big gas compressor station. About 80 percent of the monument's 164,000 acres is leased for energy development.

The consequences of energy exploration for wildlife and air quality have long been contentious in unspoiled corners of the West. But now with the urgent push for even more energy, there are new worries that history and prehistory -- much of it still unexplored or unknown -- could be lost.

At Nine Mile Canyon in central Utah, truck exhaust on a road to the gas fields is posing a threat, environmentalists and Indian tribes say, to 2,000 years of rock art and imagery. In Montana, a coal-fired power plant has been proposed near Great Falls on one of the last wild sections of the Lewis and Clark trail. In New Mexico, a mining company has proposed reopening a uranium mine on Mount Taylor, a national forest site sacred to numerous Indian tribes.

Now, if they had had the brains to invent ... writing

Quite a number of writing systems were developed in MesoAmerica.

Some believe the quipu systems of the Andean Indians constituted a sort of "digital" data entry.

I understand injection of heated steam or even injection of CO2, but drilling for co2?

Yes, in some places there are pockets of CO2 that can be drilled just like natural gas.

Here is a company out of Texas that drills for and uses CO2:

Denbury Resources Inc. http://www.denbury.com/CO2Assets.htm

Jackson Dome

We believe that having sufficient CO2 volumes is the key ingredient, if not the most important factor to our tertiary operations. We acquired our Jackson Dome CO2 source field in February 2001, giving us control of most of the CO2 supply in Mississippi, as well as ownership and control of the critical 183-mile NEJD CO2 pipeline. Since February 2001, we have acquired two additional wells and drilled 15 additional CO2 producing wells, significantly increasing our estimated proved CO2 reserves from 800 Bcf at the time of acquisition to approximately 5.6 Tcf as of December 31, 2007, replacing 164% of our production during 2007. Today, we own every producing CO2 well in the region. We plan to drill several additional CO2 wells during 2008, including four development wells and one exploratory well, to further increase our proven CO2 reserves and to obtain additional CO2 deliverability.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.