Technology will eventually exist that allows us to get to this oil. It doesn’t yet.
Apparently, that technology already exists.
As I recall, the current technology involves drilling 2,000 ft into the strata, heating the shale and "sweating" the kerogen out of it, then pumping the kerogen out. No need to "strip mine" the western half of Wyoming.
Which is, by the way, a pretty bleak area (speaking as one who once spent a summer in Wamsutter).
“Bleak” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Just because it’s not lush green as those areas east of the Missouri River, the vast vistas are beautiful in their own right.
By the way, the amount of water needed to get the shale oil out doesn’t readily exist unless you want to ship in really big chunks of Arctic ice!
Ah, Wamsutter, WY, land of the Red Desert and Continental Divide. I spent six years (1980-86) there as a Marathon Oil Co supervisor, before getting transferred to Bakersfield, CA.
There were more murders in the tiny town during that six years than I can recall. When I first got there, all the pumpers were carrying weapons in the company vehicles, which I decided to stop. Within just a few weeks, I ate crow and told the pumpers they could get their guns back in the co. trucks.
Sweetwater County sheriff’s dept. told me that stretch of I-80 was the most dangerous piece of highway in the nation, said the prairie around there was full of unmarked graves. In winter when the lease roads would often drift shut, one pumper would take a ridge route to reach some wells. He remarked one day that he had hit a bump he never had before, spring revealed he had been driving over a body for most of the winter. The sheep herder who found the body was Basque and spoke no English, he was half insane trying to describe what he had found.
Happiness for me was seeing Wamsutter in the rear view mirror the day got transferred.