Word: shales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fuel in the West holds as much promise-so far unfulfilled-as shale oil. The slopes of northwestern Colorado, southwestern Wyoming and northeastern Utah are layered with marl, a limestone in which a fossil fuel called kerogen is embedded. When heated to 900° F, the marl bleeds its kerogen, which
Though research on extracting kerogen from marl began in the 1920s, shale oil went undeveloped because its production cost always exceeded the market price of crude. Promises still outpace production, but during the past few years Occidental Petroleum, Atlantic Richfield and Union Oil have spent millions experimenting with shale-oil extraction in Colorado's Piceance Basin. Occidental Chairman Armand Hammer believes that his company will be able to begin commercial production by 1985, keeping costs below $25 per bbl. Today other companies are digging mines near Grand Junction and Rangely, Colo., and Vernal, Utah. Exxon is the most enthusiastic...
...coal and oil shale are only part of the Mountain West's buried wealth. Ninety-one percent of the nation's uranium lies in the Mountain West, with New Mexico and Utah supplying most of the region's ore. From Arizona comes more than half of all the copper dug in the U.S. each year; the Kennecott Copper Corp.'s Bingham Canyon open-pit mine in Utah, at two miles wide and a half-mile deep, the largest excavation in the world, alone has produced copper-over 11 million tons-than any other mine in history...
...most threatened area in the Mountain West may be Colorado's gorgeous and still half-empty Western Slope. It is estimated that if Exxon does build 150 oil-shale plants there, the population in Rio Blanco and Garfield counties could shoot from 75,000 to 1.5 million. Colorado Senator Gary Hart has figured that the Exxon project alone would require enough new schools, hospitals and roads each year to accommodate a city the size of Grand Junction (pop. 54,000), now the largest city in western Colorado. Water would have to be imported from...
...nothing to ease the immediate OPEC squeeze, but its long-range effect will be important. Initially, Carter had called for a ten-year, $88 billion effort to construct a network of synfuel plants that could produce up to 2.5 million bbl. of crude oil per day out of coal, shale rock and tar sands. That would enable the nation to cut its projected consumption of imported oil about one-third by 1990. The House-Senate conferees accepted the ultimate goal of the program as set by the President but slowed the pace of spending. Instead of a crash effort that...