Word: shale
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since the Arab oil embargo nearly every major oil company has been researching technologies for cost-competitive production of fuels from coal, shale and tar sands, with little regard for the environmental consequences. Replacing just ten per cent of the nation's oil production with liquefied coal would require a mining capacity equal to one half of the present U. S. coal output. This would require heavy strip mining, which causes devastating damage to the land...
...elements called rare earths, the Chinese are also becoming increasingly skilled at extracting them and putting them to work in many ways, for example, as catalysts in petroleum refining. The visiting American specialists found one area where the U.S. could learn from the Chinese: the production of oil from shale...
...Wyoming and southeastern Montana, taken from 920 km (570 miles) above the earth. He noted that clusters of medium density sagebrush on the photographic maps fell in the same area as known uranium deposits. Further study showed that this type of vegetation pattern coincided with the kind of sandy shale rock formations that often accompany uranium deposits...
...spread into states downstream of the rivers that flow from Colorado to the Midwest and South. Brackish water seeping into overworked underground sources is a growing woe in Florida. The energy shortage will worsen the situation because more and more water will be needed to produce coal slurry, shale oil and other synthetic fuels...
...reverse the decline in domestic oil production. The argument that decontrol of oil prices would encourage oil exploration does not obscure the fact that "over 2 million wells have been drilled in the United States--four times as many as in all the rest of the noncommunist world combined." Shale oil would cost far more than conventional oil and takes too long to develop--"a production level equal to about half of one percent of U.S. oil consumption--100,000 barrels a day--would require a billion dollars and a decade"--as well as using enormous quantities of water, which...