In Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot,” the two main characters sit and, well, wait for Godot.
He never comes.
I couldn’t help but think of Godot this week when the oil shale debate heated up again. Despite our being told for a century that it’s “just around the corner,” Coloradans sit and wait for oil shale and it never comes.
In 1918, amid oil shortages brought on by war and worries over all those new gas-powered automobiles, National Geographic printed a story titled “Billions of Barrels of Oil Locked Up in Rocks.”
Its author, Guy Elliott Mitchell of the U.S. Geological Survey, estimated 20 billion barrels of oil were locked inside the Rocky Mountains. (Today, the estimate stands at nearly 1 trillion barrels.)
“The potential value of this immense oil resource of America is almost beyond comprehension,” he wrote. “Enough oil is held in these natural reservoirs to fill many times over every tank, cask, barrel, and other container of every kind in the world.”
His next line could have been written last week: “Until recently, [oil shales] have been referred to by the government geologists as a reserve available for extraction whenever the demand and the price shall become great enough to warrant the establishment of a new industry to supplement the supply of petroleum from the oil fields. This time is now at hand.”
Or maybe not.
Black gold soon would gush from Texas oilfields and everyone would forget about Colorado’s shale. Interest would resurface during World War II, but eventually shale would be cast aside for cheaper Middle East oil.
The Arab oil embargo in 1973 and its long gas lines would present another opportunity for shale. President Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, his goal to eliminate oil imports by 1980, and the federal government began issuing contracts to companies to develop “in-situ retorting” techniques to recover the oil.
Once again, oil shale looked promising. President Jimmy Carter declared “the moral equivalent of war” on energy use and the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 contributed to an unsettled Middle East.
Ambitious projects sprouted on Colorado’s Western Slope as thousands of construction workers, scientists, engineers and others flocked to the state.
But, as my former colleague Peter G. Chronis wrote in 1984, “As 1981 drew to a close, because of conservation caused by oil prices near $41 a barrel and because previously uneconomic sources of conventional crude oil came on stream, a world oil glut developed.”
Prices dropped and shale projects began to shut down. On May 2, 1982, which would become known as Black Sunday on the Western Slope, Exxon halted its giant project north of Parachute.
Before it could boom, oil shale went bust.
Sensing a pattern?
Writing in a column for The Post one month after Black Sunday, author Stephen M. Voynick laid out the pattern and decried oil shale as a myth. But he predicted its return.
“But don’t worry, you’ll hear of ‘rubber rock’ again, the next time some sheik shoots his brother-in- law and our foreign crude is disrupted. And the same politicians who are killing the alternative fuels programs will be right there clamoring for a “realistic energy policy” and assistance for synfuel development. And the first word out of their mouths will be oil shale. And the myth goes on.”
Oil shale is more than a myth, but after a century of waiting I can’t help but think Godot isn’t coming.
The joke’s on us, and we don’t even know it.
Editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.
