Monday, June 09, 2008

The politics of oil shale - Jun. 6, 2008

Tired of gasoline prices???  Thank a Democrat!

The politics of oil shale - Jun. 6, 2008

The politics of oil shale

Fortune talks to Sens. Orrin Hatch and Wayne Allard about the roadblocks to oil shale production.

By Jon Birger, senior writer

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- You'd think this would be oil shale's moment.

You'd think with gas prices topping $4 and consumers crying uncle, Congress would be moving fast to spur development of a domestic oil resource so vast - 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone - it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

You'd think politicians would be tripping over themselves to arrange photo-ops with Harold Vinegar (whom I profiled in Fortune last November), the brilliant, Brooklyn-born chief scientist at Royal Dutch Shell whose research cracked the code on how to efficiently and cleanly convert oil shale - a rock-like fossil fuel known to geologists as kerogen - into light crude oil.

You'd think all of this, but you'd be wrong.

No comments: