Oil shale and its not-so-repetitive past

When it comes to the future of the American West, how we think about the history of oil shale is of immediate and direct consequence. No place in the world matches this region in the abundance of this resource. The Shale Country region that straddles the T-shaped border of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming holds enough oil shale to dwarf the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. But oil shale is a resource of unusual persnickityness. Dark-hued rocks found in pockets along the Western Slope of the Rockies contain a high concentration of petroleum-like kerogens that will ignite when exposed to enough heat. An individual or group with hopes to put this resource to commercial use must extract the oil from the rock by mimicking the natural geologic process that produced conventional deposits of oil and gas, the process that will eventually take place in Shale Country over millennia if the rock is left undisturbed. Twice in the twentieth century, with the start of World War One and then with the energy crisis of the 1970s, anxiety about the nation’s energy security prompted the federal government to encourage the development of oil shale. Federal support artificially stimulated large-scale rushes based on the hope that, with enough money and effort, industry would discover a viable, cost-effective technology. But then, as the price for oil declined and the nation’s energy anxiety subsided, the commitment to a long-shot resource like oil shale waned. The artificial booms collapsed into very real busts. On the Western Slope of Colorado, the “Black Sunday” bust in 1982 marked an extraordinary episode of big hopes and ambitions hitting the rocks...HeadwatersNews