"Northwestern Colorado has been viewed for a century as a potential oil treasure. By some calculations, the Piceance (pee'-awnce) Basin alone contains 300 billion barrels of recoverable petroleum, equal to 48 percent of Middle Eastern reserves. Yet no one has been able to extract profitably the keragen, a waxy petroleum, from the shale."
"In 1974, the first Arab oil crisis sparked a boom here, as oil companies decided shale might finally pay. Workers streamed in. Shale would be mined and heated in large ovens, or retorts, to cook the keragen out, then condensed and refined. The process used enormous amounts of energy and water. New towns were drawn up to house thousands of expected workers. Plans were made to suck up vast quantities of water and to dump vaster quantities of waste rock."
"But in the early 1980s, several oil companies canceled their projects. The collapse culminated in Exxon's 1982 closure of the Colony Oil Shale project in Parachute, which threw 2,500 people out of work. Unocal was the last to fold, closing its plant in 1991, despite a federal contract to buy shale oil for $41.50 per barrel, about twice the market rate. No matter how high the price of crude oil went, shale oil always seemed to cost more."
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