A cautious boom in oil shale in the United States

Government estimates of recoverable shale oil in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming put the reserves at 800 billion barrels — more than triple the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. So aside from Vawter, now many in Washington have their eyes on a big prize, not in small part for the promise it might hold to ease national security concerns. “It could literally shake the world,” Senator Pete Domenici, a Republican from New Mexico, said at a recent Senate hearing.

But there are plenty of good reasons why no one has ever come up with a profitable, environmentally acceptable method for extracting oil from shale. Not only were the previous efforts too expensive and energy intensive to compete with conventional oil resources, they also laid waste to the land, produced lots of air pollution and threatened scarce groundwater in one of the driest regions of the country.
So it is no surprise that Shell, Chevron and Vawter’s EGL Resources, the three companies that won the 160-acre, or 65- hectare, leases, say they are going to go slow with their experiments before they begin considering commercial production of synthetic fuel. The initial outlays are small, in the millions or tens of millions of dollars.

They are all looking over each other’s shoulders, wondering if any of their new techniques, aimed at overcoming the previous obstacles, can hit the jackpot. Each is refining its own method, but they say they are cautiously optimistic that they can succeed where so many others have failed.

International Herald Tribune