Word: rocke
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...billion synthetic-fuel program that, among other things, would turn the nation's vast coal deposits into oil and gas. But of all the old and new sources of petroleum now being freshly examined, none is more promising or as controversial as the oil-bearing rock known as shale...
...dirt road running up Parachute Creek in western Colorado winds through an ever steeper canyon. As the road climbs, it deteriorates into first a stream bed and then a cliff-hugging path that passes a blackened ledge of shale rock that was struck by lightning two years ago and spouted flames for three days. The Indians once dubbed the magic mineral "the rock that burns...
This is the Piceance Basin, the heart of a geological formation containing the world's biggest known deposit of oil shale. Locked in the mottled rock is the energy equivalent of about 1.2 trillion bbl. of oil, or roughly 40 times the nation's present proven reserves of liquid petroleum...
Actually, "shale oil" is neither shale nor oil. The rock is marl, a variety of limestone laced with a solid fossil fuel called kerogen. The kerogen was deposited 40 million years ago in the form of millions of tons of vegetable matter that collected on the bottom of a mammoth freshwater lake that then covered Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. But these lake-bed accumulations were never subjected to temperatures as high as 300° F and to extreme pressures that in time created underground deposits of readily usable liquid oil and natural gas. Now man must finish nature...
...years shale oil remained undeveloped because conventional petroleum always hovered about $2 below the projected price of shale. Capital development costs have inflated almost as fast as OPEC prices. In the 1960s, when crude was selling for $2 a bbl., estimates were that oil from rock could be produced for $4 a bbl. Now, with world prices going up almost daily beyond the $23.50 OPEC level, shale oil may be produced for $30. But spurred by the ever higher price of crude, a group of energy entrepreneurs aim toward turning out more than 200,000 bbl. of shale...