Source: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Energy ... hl1015.cfm
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How large is this resource? In the Piceance Basin, an area of 1,100 square miles, the oil shale is over 1 million barrels per acre, or roughly 750 billion barrels of recoverable oil. If you extend outward to Wyoming and to Utah, it is 1.3 trillion.
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The resource, again, is in the trillions of barrels of oil, and if you compare, Saudi Arabia's official reserves are about 289 billion barrels.
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If the Saudis upgraded their own recovery technology, which would take billions to do, they would still have one-half of the reserves in oil shale discovered in Colorado. We're talking still about 1.2 trillion, 1.3 trillion barrels of oil; the Rocky Mountain region is the Saudi Arabia of oil shale. The United States has 75 percent of the world resource, which is about 1.8 trillion barrels. Brazil is next.
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How long can oil shale last? There is enough shale to sustain United States consumption of crude oil easily through 2120.
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If shale is commercialized by 2012, we can, under production from Colorado alone, eliminate dependency on Middle East oil by 2020. The President wants to lower it by 20 percent by 2017.
Shale production will eliminate it altogether, and that dependence is roughly 2.3 million barrels a day. The projection is that when it is commercialized, with the ramp-up that will occur, and with everything favorable—that is, world price—we would be at 2 million barrels a day, or the objective of the Department of Energy in the shale process. Currently, we're getting 2.2 million barrels a day from the entire Middle East: 19 percent of our total imports.
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Interesting stuff.
