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causes not only the abominable odour on burning but also the 

 evolution of acid fumes of the oxides of sulphur which, more than 

 being intolerable to men attending boilers where the oil might be 

 used as a steam raiser, have also a serious corrosive action upon 

 the metal. The same corrosive action on cylinders of internal 

 combustion motors is also an effective bar to the use of the lighter 

 fraction of the oil in ordinary industrial practice. Unless the 

 amount of sulphur can be considerably and economically reduced 

 in Kimmeridge Oil, or alterantively an alloy of iron which is not 

 corroded by acids used in explosion engines, the vast potential 

 wealth of the Kimmeridge Clay cannot become actual. 



The Oil Shale Industry in General. 



Scotland must be regarded as the birthplace and home of 

 Petroleum production from shales. In 1849 a thin stream of oil 

 was observed oozing from the shale measures of the Carboniferous 

 formation at a colliery near Alfreton, in Derbyshire. A close 

 examination of this occurrence and experiments with the oil led 

 to the idea that on the failure of these small springs of natural 

 oil it might be possible to produce it in quantity from the seams 

 of bituminous coal by a low temperature distillation process. The 

 first efforts were highly successful, and upon the discovery of the 

 deposits of Torbanite or Boghead mineral in Scotland about 1850 

 attention was directed to it in preference to the bituminous coal. 

 On the exhaustion of the torbanite about 1862 the Lothian shale 

 deposits were utilised, and have been actively mined and treated 

 from that date to the present. The Scottish shales occur in a 

 somewhat broad and well defined belt to the west of Edinburgh, 

 and are developed on both sides of the Forth in a series of rocks 

 designated Calciferous Sandstones. Their geological position is 

 in between the Lower Carboniferous and the Upper Red Sand- 

 stone of the Devonian system. Interstratified with the Sandstone 

 are a dozen or more seams of oil-shale, varying in thickness from 

 4 to 12 feet and yielding from 20 to 30 gallons of oil and from 

 20 to 60 lbs. of Sulphate of Ammonia per ton. The total output 

 probably now exceeds three million tons of shale per annum, 

 yielding roughly 18 million gallons of crude oil, from which nearly 

 a million gallons of motor spirit are obtained. It is, however, 

 the large yield of the sulphate available for fertilisers that has 

 maintained the industry in face of the keen competition with the 

 American oils. 



In Ireland, at Bally Castle in County Antrim, close to the 

 coast, some seams of rich cannel coal occur which have yielded 

 50 gallons of crude oil per ton on a manufacturing scale. It was 

 from this source that it was intended to produce oil to mix with 

 that of Kimmeridge, with a view to reduce the percentage of 

 sulphur. 



