Rifle – An energy company that shelved its oil-shale project in western Colorado a decade ago is firing up a retort facility to test its effectiveness on as much as 4,000 tons of shale rock from Australia.
The former Paraho Corp. shale retort is 6 miles west of Rifle, near the former federal Anvil Points oil-shale research facility.
“If we get successful yields to make it economically viable, they’d use the process in Australia,” said Larry Lukens, who headed Paraho in the 1980s and is now a consultant for the Queensland Energy group considering development of the Stuart oil-shale project in Australia.
Workers started work on the mothballed plant in July. Lukens said the retort process that removes oil and byproducts from shale rock should begin in the next few weeks.
“If we do all the shale rock, it could continue into January or February,” he said.
Paraho began its oil-shale work in the early 1970s with a privately funded, $10 million managed demonstration program at the Anvil Points site.
“Paraho’s process was used for a number of years in Colorado and other Western states, and we were just on the verge of going commercial when the federal government pulled the plug on the (Synthetic Fuels Corp. that provided financial aid to oil-shale companies),” Lukens said.
The Paraho plant and the Unocal shale plant near Parachute both closed in 1993. Lukens said the plant’s operating permits were maintained and no other governmental actions were needed to restart the facility.
A number of energy companies are exploring the potential for new oil-shale projects around the Rockies, though shale from Australia has different characteristics, Lukens said.
“The Australian shale rock was formed in a marine environment compared to a freshwater environment for U.S. shale,” he said. “That poses some different processing conditions to extract the oil.”
