ENERGY INDEPENDENCE ON THE HORIZON - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 63

issue. h ey estimated oil shale could become proi table at an oil price
between $80 and $110 a barrel, with costs eventually falling over time
as the industry gained experience. 31 (h ree years later, Bartis brought
together another group of researchers to look at the prospect of turning
coal into liquid fuel; they concluded it could work with prices around sixty
to seventy dollars per barrel.) 32 But oil shale would take a lot of time to
develop at a commercial scale; the A ND teams estimated it would be at
least twenty years before production might be brought up to a million bar-
rels a day. Jonas says he thinks he can deliver in twelve, but it's a long way
to go from a handful of commercial projects to a full-blown industry.
In any case, when I visited his lease in July 2012, it was supposed to be
producing its i rst oil. h e idea is to drill deep within the shale and heat
the rock until it essentially melts, yielding l owing oil. Instead, when the
engineers had put their massive heater down a two-thousand-foot drill
hole, the high-tech equipment had broken. It will take time, and a lot of
trial and error, before oil shale had any chance of yielding big results.
Were it to do that, the consequences would be far from universally
embraced. If oil shale is the biggest American oil resource, it's proba-
bly also the most controversial. Oil shale production, at least histori-
cally, is not a pret y business. h e traditional approach has involved
mining massive amounts of kerogen-bearing rock and then heating
it up to temperatures as high as nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit
in order to create synthetic oil. h e process requires three barrels
of water for every barrel of oil produced. 33 It also leaves massive
amounts of “spent shale” behind, which can bleed salts and other
toxic materials into local water supplies if handled improperly. 34 Most
new producers, AMSO among them, are exploring novel methods
that convert the kerogen into oil by heating it before drawing it out
of the ground, avoiding most of the toxic mess and reducing water
demand. (One company, American Soda, wants to produce oil shale
and baking soda at the same time.) Yet there are challenges here too:
safeguards need to be put in place to make sure that now-mobile oil
doesn't seep into aquifers on its way to the surface. Shell is trying
to freeze the area around the well to create an impermeable barrier;