Energy: Tapping the Riches of Shale

Venturesome companies bet big on "the rock that burns

Once again the turmoil in Iran emphasizes American dependence upon what Jimmy Carter calls the "thin line of oil tankers stretching halfway around the earth to one of the most unstable regions in the world." The drive to gain some freedom from OPEC by developing domestic energy sources has never been more pressing. Last week the Senate easily adopted by a vote of 65 to 19 a $20 billion synthetic-fuel program that, among other things, would turn the nation's vast coal deposits into oil and gas. But of all the old and new sources of petroleum now being freshly examined, none is more promising or as controversial as the oil-bearing rock known as shale.

Venturesome companies are betting millions on shale as they plunge deep into development projects that could soon foster a new energy industry. TIME Los Angeles Bureau Chief William Rademaekers reports from the heart of the U.S. shale country:

The dirt road running up Parachute Creek in western Colorado winds through an ever steeper canyon. As the road climbs, it deteriorates into first a stream bed and then a cliff-hugging path that passes a blackened ledge of shale rock that was struck by lightning two years ago and spouted flames for three days. The Indians once dubbed the magic mineral "the rock that burns."

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 of shale land soon to be developed by Gulf Oil and Standard of Indiana.

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's work.