Oil shales of the Green River Formation (GRF) of Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado in the western United States have been considered economically valuable since the early 20th century. During the mid-1800s, oil shale was burned and oil distilled from shale in Utah. In Colorado, shale oil was used as smudge in orchards about the end of the 19th century. No appreciable output of shale oil, however, was realized until the 1920s, when some 3,600 barrels were produced at a U.S. government plant at Rulison, Colorado, and about 12,000 barrels from a private industrial operation in Nevada. Those facilities were closed by 1930 in the wake of the discovery of major conventional oil fields in Texas, Oklahoma, and California, ending the second cycle of U.S. oil shale interest.

The oil shale industry reached a third peak of development immediately after World War II. This period of growth was driven by security concerns of the military, which saw oil shales as a secure source of fuel. The Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act of 1944 and the Korean War-era Defense Production Act of 1950 funded the operation by the U.S. Bureau of Mines of retorts near Rifle, Colorado. At that time, however, plants were small, with capacities of only about 350 to 1,500 barrels of oil per day. Cost of production was high because of the labour necessary for mining and crushing the rock. Finally, the giant oil fields found in the Middle East before and after the war virtually eliminated any remaining commercial interest in the exploitation of oil shales.

Shocked by the oil embargoes and price rises of the 1970s, several countries surveyed their oil shale deposits in order to determine whether resources were sufficient and technology available to justify the large investments that would be needed to turn shales into a practical energy source. In the United States billions of dollars were spent by the federal government on oil shale projects through its Synthetic Fuels Corporation (SFC), and hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by major oil companies on the expectation that oil prices would stay high into the future. However, oil prices rose only briefly and then plunged in the 1980s, curbing the oil industry’s interest in oil shale. The SFC and various projects funded by both private industry and the federal government were canceled, causing major economic distress in parts of Colorado and Utah. Only a project run by the Unocal Corporation near Parachute, Colorado, went forward, supported by a price guarantee that the company had secured from the SFC. Unocal (then known as Union Oil Company of California) had started efforts to produce oil from shale in 1921. It had begun to develop its Union A retorting process, employing direct internal combustion, in the 1940s and had tested the technology in the 1950s. In the 1980s it built and operated a large facility to demonstrate the feasibility of its Union B process, which employed externally generated hot gas. The plant produced five million barrels from 1986 until 1991, when Unocal shut it down, thus ending the fourth cycle of North American interest in oil shales.

21st-century prospects

A possible new cycle began in the early 2000s, when the rising price of crude oil (this time largely driven by rising demand in the emerging economies of Asia) once again revived interest in oil shales on the part of industry, government, and the financial sector. One major new development of this episode of oil shale investigation was the testing of new in situ methods for shale oil extraction, as well as a focus by conventional retort developers on life-cycle efficiency and on environmental performance (including the management of carbon emissions). Though no company immediately committed to economic production by any specific method, experiments with in situ processes were begun and in some cases completed. Meanwhile, technical challenges remained in surface retorting, though numerous retorting operations were built and a number of companies drew up plans to build new systems in locations as far afield as Estonia, Jordan, and the United States.

The future of the development of oil shale thus would seem to hinge upon the satisfactory resolution of some technical constraints, but it may depend just as well on economic and political conditions on a national and global scale. The most significant of those conditions is the long-term price of conventional crude oil. The capital costs of a commercial shale oil project are very high, so that the production of oil from shale will be economically competitive only if the cost of conventional oil stays high. It remains to be seen whether commercial production of shale oil will be able to expand beyond the three countries where it has previously been produced on a large scale.