Thirty years after quitting one of the nation’s most promising yet costly energy resources, Chevron Corp. wants to take another crack at unlocking shale oil from western Colorado’s Piceance Basin.
Chevron announced its return – which will come with help from scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico – on Monday at a petroleum engineers conference in San Antonio.
Oil companies have struggled for decades to unlock the solid organic kerogen from sediment layers ranging from surface outcrops to deep underground.
Now, with rising oil prices and instability with overseas supplies making such endeavors more attractive, Chevron is turning to chemists at Los Alamos to determine how this fuel can be liberated at the molecular level.
Chevron chief technology officer Don Paul said the venture with Los Alamos could enable the company to tap some of the estimated 1 trillion barrels of oil locked in the shale, four times the holdings of Saudi Arabia.
“It’s a combination nobody else has,” he said.
Paul said it could be decades before any meaningful production begins.
Last week, the federal government determined that experimental oil-shale works in Colorado by Chevron and two other oil companies would have no significant environmental impact.
Bureau of Land Management officials expect to award leases for 160-acre parcels in Colorado and Utah that will give the oil companies production rights on nearly 5,000 acres of adjacent land.
