Sen. Hatch is a complete buffoon.
I was a cost engineer on the original Exxon/TOSCO Colony Shale Oil project in 1980-81. Since the 1920s, petroleum engineers have been saying that if the price of oil was just $20-$30 per barrel higher, shale oil conversion would be economical. In 1980-81, with Exxon and everybody else expecting the price of oil to go to $80-$100 per barrel, a huge project was started up in Western Colorado near Parachute Creek and Rifle (Grand Junction is the closest real town) to turn shale oil into crude.
There are a million reasons why the project failed, including but not limited to technical problems, cost overruns on an extremely large and complex project, uneconomical location (over 9,000 foot altitude in many places) and when shale oil is heated and pressurized to crack open the rock to release the crude the rock pops like popcorn and you end up with a lot more detritus than you started with.
The tar sands in Canada are so completely different from shale oil that it's laughable. Hatch is a buffoon and should keep his mouth shut - which is asking too much of a Senator, I realize.
"Better to keep your mouth shut and look like an idiot than open it and remove all doubt" . . . . . . .
"There are a million reasons why the project failed, including but not limited to technical problems, cost overruns on an extremely large and complex project, uneconomical location (over 9,000 foot altitude in many places) and when shale oil is heated and pressurized to crack open the rock to release the crude the rock pops like popcorn and you end up with a lot more detritus than you started with."
Hey after all that taxpayer dough dumped into his best friend Teddy's 'big dig' can't blame a guy for trying....
---ah--a voice of sanity. I , too worked on oil shale projects for one of the large San Francisco engineering companies in the late 70's and early '80's--by the time it all shut down, we too realized we were looking at production costs approaching $100/bbl-----