I thought of that many times as I studied oil shale during the 1970s. President Nixon appointed me to the Oil Shale Advisory Committee composed of government experts, university scientists, industry representatives and officials from Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. We analyzed research reports, visited every budding mine and met monthly for several years. We observed many attempts to extract oil from shale.
Gov. Scott Matheson then asked me to serve on the Utah Board of Oil, Gas and Mining. I had access to the latest technology and reserve estimates. I concluded we were lucky kerogen was tightly bound in rock. Otherwise, we would just burn it.
With the high price of gasoline, people lust again after the 3.3 trillion tons of oil shale in the West. Past promoters created ephemeral booms and devastating busts in the West several times during the past two centuries.
The problem is "oil" in shale is not what we normally think of as oil. It is kerogen, a complex and waxy substance formed primarily from prehistoric algae. To convert it to fuel, shale has to be mined, kerogen extracted and then converted to oil. Technology has long been available for those steps.
Entrepreneurs and politicians treat the problem as an economic exercise. When gasoline reaches about $3 a gallon, the process is marginally profitable. But when gasoline prices drop below that amount, it costs more to produce fuel oil from shale than the product is worth.
Some advocate a subsidy to give us "energy independence." However, energy efficiency is one of the two major issues arguing against oil from shale. The other is environmental damage.
Most of the 1970 technologies (I have not examined recent energy budgets) used more energy in the mining and processing of shale than yielded in fuel oil produced. Not only would the process give a net energy loss, but it would take large amounts of water from agriculture, other industries and culinary use. It also increased air pollution. To subsidize oil from shale would cost us energy, use scarce water and contribute to global warming.
The greatest long-term societal cost is probably environmental damage. A close second is loss of a valuable future resource - kerogen. The complex chemical structure of kerogen makes it an ideal candidate for material that scientists could use in making useful products. It is not science fiction to suggest we may see shoes, automobile bodies, airframes, floor coverings, skin-protection films and other things we cannot now imagine made from kerogen.
Our goal should not be to make gasoline from whatever source we can find, but to wean ourselves from the oil patch. Instead of subsidizing any use of fossil fuel, we should move full speed ahead in a "Manhattan-type" effort for alternate energy sources.
There should never be another war over oil to push automobiles or heat homes. Our homeland will be safer when we no longer depend on oil. We should work toward making the burning of fossil fuel as socially unacceptable as smoking a cigarette.
We can develop clean, non-fossil energy if we set our best minds to it and fund scientists like we did with the atom bomb. Kerogen and fossil fuels can remain as building materials to lessen demands on our forests, rangelands, oceans and renewable natural resources. That will improve our chances of making them sustainable.
Maybe we're fortunate we cannot easily extract oil from shale.
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* THAD BOX is a former dean of the College of Natural Resources at Utah State University.
