This is really interesting in the fact that my dad was talking about this 25+ years ago. I can't repeat what he said in regards to the oil companies ignoring this!!
THey aren't ignoring it.. see post 8.
It'd be OK, however, if you'd care to share with us his ideas on extracting the oil from the the shale economically.
Shale oil production has always been an economic decision. The problem is that the marginal production cost of oil in the Middle East is effectively zero. Once a private US company has invested billions in shale oil recovery, OPEC could undercut them by selling below their production costs, to say nothing of the amortization cost. The very threat of undercutting scares off investors. Once the production cost of shale is lower than the marginal production cost of oil, it will come on line. You heard it here first.
Note that producers have little economic incentive to create a robust supply system to bring us through a natural disaster, like Katrina. In this sense at least, some tapping of the national emergency stockpiles is justified, I suppose.
I learned about shale oil in 1970 in Geology class, but I cannot imagine a process that would extract it. If prices are high enough now to do so, my vote would be to get with the program.
But if they're high enough for this, then they're probably high enough to look also at cracking either water or ethanol to extract hydrogen.
Either strategy would be fine with me, because either one would deny the OPEC nations their seemingly unstoppable flow of petrodollars that's giving them more money than sense.
Not all of them did. I lived in CO for 10 years, and at that time Exxon was in the process of building a huge community on the Western Slope, getting ready to gear up on extracting oil from the shale.