The Fantasy of Oil Shale Recovery and Use

I have always been somewhat skeptical of the oil shale story and all the riches, new resources, and employment such a new industry would provide to western Colorado, eastern Utah, and southwestern Wyoming. If oil shale were easy and cost effective to recover, it would have already been accomplished to a significant extent. Clearly the costs from an environmental perspective as well from a cost perspective make it seem to me that it is all but certain we will never see this alternative fossil fuel source ever developed beyond a few pilot projects. The need for huge unimaginable sums of the most essential and scarce resource of water in the Rocky Mountain West as well as a quantity of electricity that is impossible to create makes the dreams by some of harvesting this oil resource a pipe dream and fantasy. It seems certain that developing resources such as wind and solar energy are much less expensive and environmentally intelligent than spending billions of dollars and wasting trillions of gallons of water to mine a rock from beneath the surface of the Earth in this region of the planet that will only add significantly to the Global Warming crisis that will beset citizens and society sooner and harsher than is being told to mankind by authorities, officials, and scientists. The article in the Los Angeles Times in the link below explains this further.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-shale28-2008dec28,0,4185226.story

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