Oil Shale, Past and Present: Lecture by Armand de Beque and Robert Dal Porto

Description

In a general meeting of the Mesa County Historical Society, Armand de Beque describes the history of oil shale development in De Beque and the Piceance Basin, Colorado. He offers three stories for how it was discovered that oil shale can burn. He describes the founding of the Shale Oil Syndicate, an organization founded by his father, Dr. W.A.E. de Beque, William R. Warren, George Newton, and William Dinkel. He explains the lengthy process the Shale Oil Syndicate went through to survey oil shale claims and get them patented. He describes the first shale plant in Colorado located on Dry Fork, which had its first run of shale on July 1, 1917, but was shut down shortly after that due to insufficient equipment. He mentions other early attempts to produce shale that also folded quickly, including the Washington Shale Plant and Mount Logan Oil Shale Company. He describes an incident that occurred on July 30, 1921, when a tramway cable snapped in Wheeler Gulch, sending 12 Schuyler-Dole Shale Company miners crashing 2,000 feet down the mountain, leaving six dead, three seriously injured, and killing an additional miner, who was afraid to ride the tram and chose to walk, who was completely severed at the waist by the whipping cable. He also describes the Index Shale Company founded by Harry Lewis Brown, which produced oil in 1918 and later produced a fertilizer and medicinal salve from the byproducts of oil shale production, both of which were removed from markets after the Department of Agriculture suggested they were carcinogenic. Following Armand de Beque, Chevron representative Robert Dal Porto describes the present state of oil shale development in Western Colorado after Exxon laid off 2,200 oil shale workers and pulled out of the Colony Project on May 2, 1982. He describes the current shale resource holdings possessed by Chevron, Sohio Superior, Occidental, the Getty Oil Company, Texaco, and Tosco. He clarifies that oil shale is actually a deposit of silt and clay containing kerogen, a waxy organic precursor to oil that can be refined into a high-viscosity synthetic oil. He describes the retort process used to extract shale oil from the rock, the large water and electrical power requirements needed to conduct that process, and the economic challenges that affect its commercial viability. He describes Occidental’s experiments with developing a more cost-effective “in situ” process for extracting shale oil from the ground, which did not meet expectations in tests. He concludes by expressing his personal opinion that oil shale has a future, but that it will take some time to develop more efficient processes and would likely require tax write-offs for research and development. This recording is provided by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and the Museums of Western Colorado.