In his first act after being inaugurated as Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd reversed John Howard's fuel-hardy ways by moving promptly to sign on to Kyoto. He had the support of most Australians: an impressive 84% Down Under say climate change is a real problem.

It would appear that Queensland's Premier, Anna Bligh, is following in Rudd's carbon footsteps. She has put a 20-year moratorium on shale oil extraction planned by Queensland Energy Resources (QER), halting the company's plans to dig up about 400,000 tons of rock for resource testing. Bligh said the government would spend the next two years researching whether shale oil deposits "can be used in an environmentally acceptable way" before she would release her moratorium.

Premier Bligh said that QER would be permitted to try to develop new technology, "And if that is proved satisfactorily, then the Government will have a look to see if other sites are suitable to be developed."

This marks the second energy source Queensland has halted until it can be proved environmentally sound. The state has already placed a prohibition on the mining and export of uranium.

QER said it had examined 60 different technologies for extracting shale oil and was confident that the one it had chosen would satisfy the requirements of the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency. The technique it plans to use is the Paraho process, which involves drilling holes and inserting heaters in target underground zones to slowly heat the shale, per Gargi Chakrabarty at Energy Bulletin:

"Once the shale is sufficiently heated, a chemical reaction starts and releases the lighter hydrocarbons, which rise. The heavier hydrocarbons remain within the formation. The lighter hydrocarbons, almost a gasoline-type product, are subsequently pumped out of the ground through conventional means.

The advantage of this new process is that it eliminates the problem of waste disposal, because the heavy hydrocarbons are left in their original form in the underground shale. Also, the process requires much less water.

In contrast, the old retort method requires a lot of water to cool the heated rock. Also, once the oil is extracted from shale, the greasy residue - which almost doubles in volume because of heat expansion - has to be disposed of."

Current oil shale mining makes at least three times more carbon emissions than traditional oil drilling and uses three barrels of water to make one barrel of oil. Australia is now a decade into the worst drought in the developed world. If this technique proves to be a more environmentally sound way to scrape oil from rocks than what we are doing now, it will be big news.

Oil Shale photo by Nick Bristow