Thanks for the dialog on oil shale in the letters to the editor prompted by Steve Hagerman’s good question as to whether oil shale is useful in asphalt paving. The short answer is yes and that is about the only use it is good for.
Thanks for reader Scalzo’s answer and I hope that the trace toxic minerals in the rock are not harmful to the residents and visitors to Rifle. The sequestered settling ponds may still be seen in the Parachute abandoned oil shale refinery in Parachute to hold toxic metals. But even that is not the key issue in oil shale.
The highest quality ore of oil shale is about 19 parts hard inorganic rock and one part organic kerogen. As one leader in the research put it “we had to deal with too much rock!”
The process of extracting the kerogen from the parent inorganic rock and then transforming it to “oil” requires more energy than that contained in the product. How, then, can zillions of barrels of oil from oil shale reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy?
There are no public research data from Shell or any other researcher to counter this objection about oil shale.
LARRY SODERBERG
Parachute

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