The promise of oil shale?

"Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil"

J. Paul Getty

Years ago, we took a family vacation to Grand Junction, CO to visit my best man and his family. My best man was in the oil business and knew a thing or two about all type of fossil fuels, including oil shale. Not being well versed on the subject, I had never heard of oil shale. Out on the road, he would point to different rock formations in the hills and show me where the oil shale was - and there was lots of it.

So is this a resource was can use as a fuel source? And how much is there is the world? In the United States? In 2010, it was estimated by the International Energy Agency, the total amount of oil shale in the world held more than 5 trillion barrels. This is somewhat misleading as with today's technology only 1 trillion barrels is considered recoverable. Of this amount, about 60% exists in the United States. This is a sizable amount of potential fuel when you consider the proven conventional oil reserves in the world is 1.3 trillion barrels. In other words, the amount of oil shale we have "just ain't nothing".

If you go under the Department of Energy's web site, there is very little about this vast natural resource. In days of old, the only way to extract this oil shale was strip mining. That was a bad idea - however, that was the technology of the day. Today, there are methods of mining this resource that will not disfigure the land.

I have pointed out in previous posts that the United States has more natural gas than any other country. In addition, even though there are over 600 deposits of oil shale in the world, the United States has by far and away the largest quantity. Between our coal mines, natural gas, shale gas, oil shale and unrecovered oil, we are sitting on a gold mine. There is no excuse on this planet why we need to import one drop of oil or one cubic foot of gas from anybody outside North America.

Our technology will give us the new millennium energy sources which will mothball the fossil fuel era. However until that happens, we have what it takes to power our nation. To not do so, is nothing short of energy treason. Right now it is use it or lose it - please let us use it.