Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
his spare oi ce, not in a gleaming tower in Dallas or Houston but in
a grungy part of downtown Newark, where he now does business as
founder and chairman of American Shale Oil. “When I was on those
gas lines,” he recalls, “people were speaking about the enormous shale
resources in Colorado. h
at was a dream worth pursuing. But it wasn't
my time.”
Nor, it turned out, was it time for oil shale. Richard Nixon, Gerald
Ford, and Jimmy Carter would all make the legendary resource, esti-
mated to match the holdings of Saudi Arabia, central to their plans for
U.S. energy independence. Developers would mine vast tracts of rock in
the American West, crush it, and then heat it until the chemical com-
pounds it contained turned into oil. “h ere's a time for technologies to
happen,” says Jonas. h at wasn't one of them. By the early 1980s, oil
prices crashed, government subsidies vanished, and the industry was in
ruins. h e rest of the U.S. oil business wasn't in great shape either: for
the next quarter century, output would fall steadily, with few exceptions.
Americans became more pessimistic about the country's oil-production
prospects with every passing year.
In 2008, Jonas moved back from Israel and came out of retirement.
h e outlook for American oil was still gloomy, but he decided to pursue
his teenage dream. “If I was going to take the medicine [of going back
to work],” he recalls, “I was going to take some of the dessert too.”
In January of that year, IDT, still controlled by Jonas, took a majority
stake in EGL Oil Shale, a small i rm that had recently won a research
and development lease for a tract of Colorado land owned by the fed-
eral government. It was the same stretch of the country, and the same
resource, that had defeated the U.S. oil industry nearly thirty years
before. In May, the company became American Shale Oil, or AMSO,
and a year later it entered into a joint venture with the French oil giant
TOTAL.
Howard Jonas was optimistic about AMSO, but, like most others,
he was still pessimistic about the broader landscape of American oil. In
June 2010, he posted a stark let er on the i rm's website.
1
“Dear Fellow
American,” it began. “h e world is facing a serious fuel crisis.” h e
one-page brief detailed the calamities to come: skyrocketing prices for
oil, food, and other necessities, alongside geopolitical competition so
Search WWH ::
Custom Search