Contents

Welcome to Shale Country

How Many Rocks Fit in a Barrel?

The most bountiful oil shale beds in the world lie in basins within the Green River Formation along the T-shaped border of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. The richest known deposits are located in Colorado's Piceance Basin, an area of more than 1300 square miles just north of the city of Grand Junction and centered in Garfield and Rio Blanco Counties. (Say it right: The Piceance Basin, the site of all this excitement, is pronounced "PEE-ants" or "PEE-awnts" Basin, possibly as a derivation of a Ute Indian word for tall grass.)

The richest oil shale beds in the world are found in the basins...

The vast majority of these deposits, and 72% of all oil shale resources within the entire Green River Formation, lie beneath public land controlled by federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service. Estimates of the oil contained in the tristate Shale Country area range from 1.2 to 1.8 trillion barrels, with between 500 billion and 1 trillion located in the Piceance Basin alone. (One barrel equals 42 gallons of oil.) The United States consumes about 20.6 million barrels of oil total every day, of which roughly 75% is imported. Although not all of the oil in Shale Country will be recoverable, judicious estimates suggest that 800 billion barrels - more than triple Saudi Arabia's proven reserves, enough to meet current US demand for over a century - might ultimately be extracted.²

This 800-billion-barrel figure was put forward as a reasonable estimate by James Bartis, a widely recognized expert on the subject, in an influential report he wrote for the Rand Corporation in 2005. As with all estimates of oil reserves, and especially with those as tricky as oil shale, not everyone agrees. Some more recent estimates suggest that the amount of recoverable oil is upwards of a trillion barrels, and that the total resource represents 5 or even 8 times more than Saudi Arabia's reserves. But the scope of the resource is, beyond question, already so large that a 200-billion-barrel bump makes little difference for broad social, economic, and environmental considerations addressed in this report.³

The potential geopolitical and economic ramifications of such an immense resource for our nation and for the global community stagger the mind. With such a large prize waiting beneath the western flanks of the Rockies, oil shale promises to remain part of the nation's thinking about energy sources into the foreseeable future.