Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Roger Day remembers the moment well. A tall, lanky man with
a kind smile, Day earned a degree in mechanical engineering from
Michigan Tech before trekking out to California to mine rare earths.
In early 1982, he moved to Ril e to join the oil shale rush; soon at er,
the industry collapsed. Six months at er he bought his new home, its
value had been slashed by more than half.
Day spent the next twenty-i ve years in the area developing solution
mining of nahcolite. In layperson's terms, he became a pioneer in the
extraction of high-quality baking soda from the ground. h en, in the
late 2000s, as oil prices began to rise, a company called EGL came
calling. h ey had bid for and won a federal research and development
lease (one of only three; the others went to Chevron and Shell) to go
at er oil shale and they wanted Day to come onboard. h e team quickly
took shape. Day would be the chief operating oi cer. Alan Burnham, a
careerlong employee of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
where he had pioneered techniques for simulating the cores of nuclear
weapons, would join as the chief technology oi cer. In January 2008,
Howard Jonas's company bought a 75 percent interest in EGL. By early
2012, TOTAL had put its own man in the small Ril e oi ce along-
side Burnham and Day: John Foulkes, a mustachioed Briton who
boasted of having drilled the i rst well at the famed Kashagan oil i eld
in Kazakhstan.
h e trio had few illusions about what they were up against. When
I described their ef orts as the second at empt to commercialize oil
shale at er the failed experience of three decades before, they quickly
corrected me: it was the i t h. Developers had found their hopes dashed
i rst in the middle of the nineteenth century, then in the years at er each
of the two world wars, and i nally in the early 1980s.
Oil shale is forebidding. Having broken so many hearts so many
times over, it still scares most suitors away. “I know that when some-
thing has a bad name,” Jonas says, “people are very hesitant to go back
there, even if things have totally changed.”
h at change is what a few investors are bet ing on. Modern oil prices
and new technology could eventually make oil shale economically viable.
In 2005, Jim Bartis at the A
ND Corporation led a team to study the
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