BREAKTHROUGH FOR OIL SHALE

The oil shale deposits of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming have more oil than all of the Middle East combined. The possibility of in situ processing by nuclear explosions (October AtE) is as yet untried, but the method would almost certainly yield slightly radioactive oil.

The objection to mining the shale and then retorting (heating) it to extract crude oil is mainly environmental, and this time not without reason. At midpoint in the lifetime of a l,000 megawatt powerplant, mining of the required shale should disrupt an estimated 1,000 acres of land with surface mining, and about double that amount for deep mining without returning the spent Male to the mine. Only about 60 to Woo of the spent shale can be returned, since the waste is far less dense than the original shale. and it cannot be easily be compacted. To this must be added the problems of run off pollution from the wastes. and high watet consumption in disposing of the wastes.

Although oil shale mining affects a far smaller acrage than mining coal with an equivalent energy content. the prospects of disrupting land in the countrybs most scenic regions is far from enticing, Coupled with the comparative scarcity of water in those regions. the problem is a very real one, and ruining the Rockies is one of the dangers that the environmentalists hasc unsittillgly belittled by crying wolf too often.

Fortunately. a breakthrough has been announced by the Occidental Oil Corporation in the research of in situ combustion of oil shale to produce oil. The process, which extracts the oil from the shale underground, eliminates the need for vast amounts of water to dispose of the spent shale, and the need of disposing of the contaminated water thereafter. Moreover, virtually no land except the sites of the oil pumps themsehres needs to be disrupted.

Occidental has been running the project since June of last year in the upper Colorado river basin, near Rifle, Colorado (some 30 miles from where an additional and much larger experimental project by a consortium of several oil companies has recently got underway). Although the possibility of in situ oil shale processing was demonstrated as early as l944 in Sweden, the big stumbling block has hitherto been the problem of permeability, i.e., rendering the shale formation penneable not only to the heat going through it, but also to the distilled oil flouing to the point where it is pumped to the surface. By methods which Occidental has not yet disclosed, this problem has been solved, and Dr. Donald E. Garrett, vice president for research and development, announced that the retort is "consistently pumping 25 to 30 barrels a day from underground shale, and even though it is only about half fired, the yields are already more than 50%."

Occidental expects to make the process commercial in 3 to 4 years of accelerated development. If, thereafter, the company succeeds in marketing the shale oil at competitive prices, it expects to capitalize on the method by both its owm production and licensing the system to others.

Hopes for the process run high, for the test facility is located at the edge of the Piceance basin, where the shale thickness is only about l00 feet (at a depth of 500 to 600 feet). In the center of the deposit, the thickness of the shale layer is up to l,500 feet. Even so, the 4,000 acres on which the test facility is located are expected to yield some 250 billion barrels of oil; in the center of the 3,000 square mile basin, yields would be vastly larger.

Abu Dhabi and other assorted sheikdoms, please note.