If this is fruitful I suggest investing in Schlumberger. They are working on the biggest oil shale deposits in the US.

Beautiful. Lets just strip clear the rockies & burn it all into the atmosphere.

We are creating the day of reckoning.

People would rather drive big fat cars, rather than do more with less... the consequence is destroying the planet for their children. People can't see what is happenning. We need our government to step in & make things like this simply ILLEGAL.

Talk about crimes against humanity.

Environmentally responsible oil from oil shale is about like saying a cancer-free cigarette that cleans the air. What they're describing may be slightly less harmful than the current horribly bad methods, but it is a million miles from anything benign. The money would be far better spent on solar or biofuels. I don't even know why this story is on Green Car Congress.... it belongs more on The Road Warrior Congress.

In general shale makes coal look clean.

I prefer nuclear to this.

The only real difference between oil extraction from Tar Sands and Shales is the geographic location. It would be more generous to pollute ourself in our homeland instead of our northern Canadian neighbour. Or, would that be anti-American?

Extraction from shales would be a great pollution double ''wammy'' for USA.

High oil prices are starting to drive research and innovation in EV's, PHEV's and fuel efficiency but unfortunately dirty, energy intensive fuel sources like oil shale also become more attractive in these conditions.
Some of the posts here suggest that we have no alternative than to continue driving the planet towards runaway climate change. I have news for you, business as usual is destroying our planet and, ultimately, us.
Article after article on this forum show that there are massive opportunities to move towards sustainability without recourse to the false dichotomy of having to choose between "business as usual or back to the stone age". Unfortunately mindsets change more slowly than the technology and the opportunities we have before us.

Here are some comments/factoids: (1) I wonder if the oil shale deposits are the same one's mined by UNOCAL under the Fred Hartley regime; maybe Chevron got them in the UNOCAL purchase, (2) google "aboiotic oil genesis" for an interesting take on whether or not 'fossil fuels' are really finite, (3) there are more btu's in known coal deposits in N. American that there were in total btu's of oil in Saudi Arabia before the first barrel was pumped. (4) Coal gasification yields about 3+ gallons of diesel per ton of bituminous coal.

I've been neglectful in not stating something that's obvious to me but likely not to most: one of the biggest problems with this recovery is local environmental contamination, especially oil and oil-related nasties getting into the groundwater. Click on the second diagram and you'll see a groundwater monitoring well on the left, tapping into a formation below what they're proposing to fracture. I'm sure they will claim little or no groundwater contamination, but don't believe it! Fracturing a rock formation, while now quite common, is nasty and not all that predictable. While this is not a good approach from a global GHG perspective, it is much worse still from a local contamination perspective.

As for energy independence, I am 100% for it. I don't like sending oil dollars overseas. But I think virtually all other currently in development alternative fuel sources are better than this one.

Harvey:
There is significant difference between Canadian oil sand and oil shale. Our oil sands are in general regular oil sands, but due to very close location to surface most of light oil fractions evaporated (to the environment). Remaining tar-like hydrocarbons could be easily separated from sand by simple heating. Because these deposits are by definition very close to surface, they are currently cheaply mined in open pits, oil boiled off, and remaining practically dry sand is deposited back into mine. Potentially this operation could be extremely clean and restore mines back to “green lawn condition”. We all have to demand only this kind of heavy oil sand exploration.

Oil shale is different matter. Usually it is deposited way dipper, and generally consists of clay which adsorbed oil. Extract this oil from clay is very difficalt process. For many years oil shale was considered “last oil reserve”, and probably will remain this way forever.

BTW, Chevron looks being serious in diversification of their energy business. They have massive geothermal generating facilities in Indonesia and Philippines, investing in wind and solar, currently began construction of biodiesel plant in Texas, have substantial joint ventures with Iogen to produce cellulosic ethanol, and with Cobasis to develop advanced batteries. Total investments are not very substantial for such a company (about 2+ billions?), but no doubts more then required for green image PR.

After petroleum becomes too scarce and expensive to dream of burning as fuel, our industries will still need petrochemicals -- plastics, solvents, paints, pharmaceuticals, insecticides and more. That's when extracting oil shale will really make sense.

our oil shale reserves in utah and Nevada which is mostly desert uninhabitable regions far exceeds All know Saudi Oil, it is far too expensive to extract at $30/bl however at our present cost approx $60/bl it becomes economicaly feasable and with rising oil costs we need to be doing the research. This is not to say we should not be persuing with all speed alternative fuels, advanced battery storage and super capacitors for electricity and phev/pev with household PV arrays for the consumer. This only makes economic sense in both the short and long run, any thing less than expanding our options on all fronts would be careless. However for national economic and security reasons we need to have oil supplies that are not imported from foreign national soils.

Use renewable energy to extract oil shale deposits
The trillion barrel oil shale and oil sand deposits in North America offer the potential to make the less energy dependent on unreliable foreign sources. However, if these unconventional deposits were produced using existing combustion processes, substantial CO2 emissions would be injected into air.
To avoid this green house gas problem and yet produce liquid fuels, a wind powered electro thermal energy storage system is described. It stores the unpredictable intermittent wind electrical energy as thermal energy over long periods in thick fossil hydrocarbon deposits. Because thermal diffusion time is very slow in such deposits, thermal energy is effectively trapped in a defined section of the hydrocarbon deposit. This allows time for the thermal energy to convert hydrocarbons into gaseous and liquid fuels. The process is highly energy-efficient and makes available considerably more energy than was expended during the heating. In addition, the method can increase the reliability of the grid and provide a load-leveling function. The wind-powered electro thermal conversion method produces substantially less CO2 than traditional shale oil extraction processes or renewable energy processes that employ a combustion step to produce the fuel.
In order to reduce the use of fossil fuel, renewable energy such as Solar and Wind should be utilized to extract the oil from shale. Additionally renewable energy should be used to power up the pumps that bring water from areas of the country where water is plentiful. Also utilize renewable energy to deliver the end product OIL to its ultimate destination for processing.
In short wherever and whenever possible utilize renewable energy to produce and ship oil and its derivatives to its various destinations.
The use of renewable energy technologies will enhance and expedite the technological advancement of renewable energy and maximize the efficiency.
We should also utilize renewable energy to produce hydrogen from water.
Cost of ENERGY has been going up since 2000, and it will keep going up as long as world population increases and various industrial and developing nations demand for energy increases.
There is no way around – we must develop renewable energy and increase the current renewable energy technology’s efficiency and reduce cost to the end-user.
Has anyone considered using the oil shale deposits in Colorado? The U.S. has the largest reserves of oil shale in the world by far. In a RAND Corporation report in 2005, it stated that oil shale production would be economically viable when oil reached $75 dollar per barrel.