Word: giant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most of the industry agrees that the first production units should be small test sites rather than giant plants...
...pine. It is here, on this remote plateau, southwest of Rifle, Colo., that Caterpillars of the Colony Development Operation have already cut 300 yds. into a mountain of shale. Near by, in another canyon, Union Oil engineers monitor a conveyor belt delivering a stream of shale into a giant funnel. Some 40 miles south, at Logan's Wash, Occidental Petroleum miners have cut two mine faces into the sides of a shale mountain. Farther northwest lies another tract of shale land soon to be developed by Gulf Oil and Standard of Indiana...
...same way that moonshiners extract alcohol from corn mash. After the shale is mined, the rock is crushed. Union Oil then moves shale chunks through a towering surface retort, where hot gases heat it to release the kerogen. Colony uses a different process: it cooks finely ground shale in giant drums by mixing the marl with superheated, marble-size ceramic balls that distribute the temperature evenly and vaporize the kerogen. The balls are then separated from the spent shale by a screen, reheated and used again...
...then reduced to rubble by explosions in both the top and bottom. Each chamber is sealed, and pilot-light burners are lowered to start cooking the rock. Kerogen released from the shale settles to the bottom of the chamber and is piped out. Occidental engineers have already "fired" six giant chambers at an experimental facility at Logan's Wash-with mixed results. In an experiment last July, the roof of the chamber collapsed. In others, the yield of shale oil was not as high as expected...
...frightening a natural cataclysm as had befallen the young nation. Buildings tumbled and forests were destroyed. Giant fissures opened in the ground, accompanied by a thunderous roar and a spreading sulfurous odor. Wrote one eyewitness: "The whole land was moved and waved like waves of the sea." The usually placid Mississippi became an angry torrent of whirlpools and rapids, overflowing its banks and possibly even briefly reversing course...