Word: shales
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Finally, at an altitude of 8,200 ft., the track breaks through onto a rolling plateau of sagebrush, juniper and 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...
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...
...Shale drillers know where to find their fuel, but they differ on the best way to get it out. Essentially, shale rock must be "cooked" at 900° F so that the kerogen can be vaporized and extracted. Two processes have been developed to do this...