New Source

Near the little (pop. 1,500) mountain town of Rifle, Colo, last week, a five-year-old federal experiment reached an exciting climax. The Bureau of Mines announced that in its test plant it had produced oil from oil shale at a cost of $2 to $2.50 a barrel, comparable to the cost of petroleum pumped from the ground in east Texas. "We're over the hill now," crowed Plant Superintendent Boyd Guthrie. "We have the processes and the know-how . . . We're positive we can produce equal or better products than you can get from petroleum."

Experiments in Colorado date back to 1926. They were abandoned in 1929 as unnecessary when new petroleum reserves started coming in, were revived during the wartime oil shortage. At that time Congress appropriated $30 million for large-scale research in synthetic fuel. It seemed a good gamble; geologists estimate that U.S. shale reserves might yield 365 billion barrels of oil, enough to fill U.S. industrial needs for 180 years at the current rate of consumption.

The process now used at Rifle is simple. The shale is blasted from the surrounding cliffs, run through a rock crusher, burned in retorts; the gases given off in this process are distilled into oil ready for the refinery.

Some big problems must still be licked. One is the lack of water needed for refining. All big U.S. shale deposits lie in the most arid sections of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. Another problem is the question of ash disposal: more than a ton of ash is piled up for every barrel of oil produced.

Despite these problems, some big users of crude are about ready to go to work on shale oil on a commercial basis. Union Oil Co. of California has 14,000 acres of oil-shale lands, hopes to build a plant which will produce 200,000 barrels of oil a day.

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