BLM Oil Shale

Energy in America: Oil Shale – Boom or Bust?

From: FoxNews.com
By John Roberts

Published July 13, 2011

With all the talk that global oil production has reached its peak, and will only slowly decline from here, you may be surprised to learn that there is a vast untapped reserve that could possibly yield 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to supply the daily oil needs of the United States for 191 years.

And where is this incredible reserve –The Middle East, Russia or Brazil? None of the above. It’s right here in the U.S. Specifically, in the great open spaces of Colorado’s Piceance Basin and the Uintah Basin in Utah.

Below is an article from the Oil & Gas Journal published in 2004.   The article concludes:

“The size and richness of US oil Shale resources, combined with teh evidence of commercial viability analogous to Alberta tar sand, warrants a collaborative government-industry-public effort to commercialize this resource to augment US Petroleum supplies.  T

The amount of oil shale resource that could eventually be classified as proved reserves will depend on the demonstrated successuc of commercial operation and site-specific economics, but the end result could be hundreds of billions of barrels of oil that America would not need to import.

CRE Note:  USGS’s 2011 completed assessment estimates total in-place resources at 1.44 trillion barrels of oil in the Eocene Green River Formation of the Greater Green River Basin in southwestern Wyoming, northwestern Colorado, and northeastern Utah.

From USGS

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recently (2011) completed an assessment of in-place oil shale resources, regardless of grade, in the Eocene Green River Formation of the Greater Green River Basin in southwestern Wyoming, northwestern Colorado, and northeastern Utah. Green River Formation oil shale also is present in the Piceance Basin of western Colorado and in the Uinta Basin of eastern Utah and western Colorado, and the results of these assessments are published separately. No attempt was made to estimate the amount of oil that is economically recoverable because there has not yet been an economic method developed to recover the oil from Green River Formation oil shale.