PETROLEUM. 79 



in Utah. Numerous companies have been incorporated and some 

 preliminary plants have started building. The whole matter, how- 

 ever, has been retarded by the uncertain status of the land laws, as well 

 as by a general feeling of uneasiness as to the attitude of the current 

 public-land policy toward any but a meager-scale type of develop- 

 ment.^ It is evident, however, on the basis of geological occurrence 

 and experience abroad that a shale-oil industry can come into effec- 

 tive action only as a large-scale engineering procedure, accumulating 

 its profit from a narrow margin made significant by the magnitude 

 of operations.^ The production of oil from shale, involving ordi- 

 nary mining operations and a large distillation plant, partakes not 

 at all of the nature of small-unit " wildcat " drilling by means of 

 which the petroleum fields are developed. 



We may pause for a moment, by way of parenthesis, to contemplate 

 an eventual prospect of a great oil industry in the Rocky Mountains, 

 producing two, if not more, of the four products upon which the food 

 supply of the future turns.^ And if we recall that northwest of the 

 shale areas lie the richest beds of phosphate rock in the world, with 

 water power and the acid fumes of great smelters as forces of extrac- 

 tion, it may not be altogether unreasonable to foresee a development 

 of a food-production industry occupying the great plains that stretch 

 eastward from the Rocky Mountains and energized by the applica- 

 tion of mechanical tillage and chemical fertilization upon a scale for 

 which the past presents no parallel.* Lest such a picture be re- 

 garded as too fanciful, it may be recalled that the United States Geo- 

 logical Survey has recently announced the discovery in Montana of 

 phosphatic oil shales carrying a phosphoric acid content up to 15 per 

 cent, thus combining in a single resource three of the four food essen- 

 tials, gasoline, nitrogen, and phosphorus, lacking only potassium ^ — 



1 These are direct reasons, but more fundamental inhibiting factors are inherent in the 

 economic situation as explained on page 99. 



2 The Scottish shale-oil industry became successful only after it boiled down to a few 

 large, efficient companies. The budding industry in Colorado would have the advantage, 

 if not arbitrarily hampered, of skipping this inefficient stage and at the same time of 

 taking over a developed technology shorn of its obsolescent features. It is estimated 

 that a plant in Colorado capable of handling 1,000 tons of shale and clay would cost 

 hetween $2,000,000 and $3,000,000, but a unit of this size would be small as such 

 things go. 



3 Reference is bad, of course, to tractor fuel and nitrogen (ammonium sulphate), the 

 other two being potassium and phosphorus. 



* The only element definitely lacking is potassium, and the prospect of that essential 

 is more promising in the general western region than elsewhere in the United States. 

 In connection with ammonia recovery in the by-product coke oven, suggestive experi- 

 ments have been carried on looking to the absorption of the ammonia by means of 

 phosphoric acid Instead of by the customary sulphuric acid ; the bearing of such a 

 process, if successful, upon the shale-oil matter is significant. 



" C. P. Bowen, Phosphatic oil shales near Dell and Dillon, Beaverhead County, Mont. : 

 Bulletin 661-1, United States Geological Survey, 1918. This work opens up promising 

 possibilities in respect to the occurrence of phosphoric acid in some of the oil shales 

 elsewhere in the Rocky Mountain region, and suggests also a new field for petroleum 

 •exploration in those places where such shales occur under geological conditions which 

 may have given rise to a natural process of distillation. 



