Oil shale enthusiasm resurfaces in the West

The headline on the newspaper that state Rep. Bernie Buescher keeps in a box at home captures the allure of the vast petroleum riches under the rolling hills and arid mesas north of this western Colorado city.

“Oil Shale Development Imminent,” the paper reads. That edition of the defunct Grand Junction News, Buescher notes, was published at the dawn of the 20th century.

More than a hundred years later, instability is roiling world oil markets, and Americans are paying $3 a gallon for gas. And oil shale fever is again rising in the geologic region known as the Piceance Basin, part of the Green River Formation that stretches across the rugged plains of northwestern Colorado and parts of Wyoming and Utah.

There is no dispute that a thousand feet below the isolated ranch country here on Colorado’s western slope lie almost unimaginable oil riches. It’s locked in sedimentary rock – essentially immature oil that given a few million years under heat and pressure would produce pools of oil easy to extract.

USA Today