Word: shale
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Potentially, shale oil is a fabulous fuel. It requires no costly hit-or-miss exploration, no ocean rigs, no precarious negotiations with foreign governments. Instead, it is a U.S. resource, locked in immense quantities-estimates range from 600 billion to 3 trillion bbl. - in rock formations throughout the semi-arid Rocky Mountain states. But no major shale-oil development could begin until the Federal Government, which owns between 70% and 80% of the oil-bearing lands, decided to lease out its deposits. That decision, in turn, depended mostly on how serious the environmental effects of mining would...
Last week, after studying the situation for more than three years, the Interior Department announced that it would launch an experimental program to tap federal shale-oil reserves. "It is in the national interest" to go ahead, said Interior Secretary Rogers C.B. Morton, adding: "We have developed rigorous and comprehensive environmental controls. The potential benefits outweigh the unavoidable costs and risks involved...
Those benefits start, of course, with the fact that the U.S. needs the oil. Economical methods have been developed to get it (estimated cost per bbl.: around $6, or about as much as that of newly found U.S. oil). In each of these, the shale is literally chewed up and cooked. Under heat, the kerogen in the rock yields a heavy oil similar to petroleum crude. As an environmental plus, shale oil contains very little sulfur. At first glance, Interior's program might appear to be too tentative and cautious for an energy-starved nation. Of the Federal Government...
...January will have to invest $200 million to $250 million just to get the oil out of the rock. Return on that investment will be slow, because construction of mines and refineries will take about five years. The first plants are expected to produce 250,000 bbl. of shale oil a day. That is only 1% of the nation's daily demand for oil-"a teacup," says one oilman. The justification is that if all goes well, the shale-oil industry could be expanded to provide 1 million bbl. a day by 1985, and eventually perhaps...
...Interior Department expects that different extraction techniques will be used in different locations. At the two tracts in Wyoming, for example, the oil will most likely be boiled out of the rock in situ-underground. Occidental Petroleum Co., one of the many U.S. oil companies that lease private oil-shale lands, has developed such a process. Occidental's technique is to blast a chamber inside the oil-bearing rock, inject natural gas into it and then set it afire. The subterranean conflagration would cause the rock to yield its oil, which would then be brought to the surface...