TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC POTENTIALS OF SHALE OIL PRODUCTION BY NUCLEAR EXPLOSIVES

The largest single reserve of hydrocarbons known to exist anywhere in the world is given by the oil shales of the Green River formation. in the western part of the United States. With available conventional techniques only an insignificant part of these resources could be tapped, and that only at great cost and under considerable technical uncertainties. It is on this basis that the Oil Shale Advisory Board came in 1964 to the negative conclusion that such an oil shale industry would not be competitive under conditions as they were at that time. In the following report a new technology is discussed which was first proposed in 1959, but which has been developed mainly since 1964: the in situ production of oil from shale by large underground retorts created by nuclear explosives. The first part of the present report describes this new process; the second part gives an analysis of the United States and the world endowments with crude oil resources and oil shale deposits and finally, the third part deals with expected cost estimates of this new technology as compared with present crude oil prices and potential costs of conventional shale oil production.