PETROLEUM. 
51 
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. 1 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. 2 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. 3 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. 4 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 5 — 
1 These are direct reasons, but more fundamental inhibiting factors are inherent in the 
economic situation as explained on page 71. 
2 The Scottish shale-oil industry became successful only after it boiled down to a few r 
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 
between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000, but a unit of this size would be small as such 
things go. 
3 Reference is had, of course, to tractor fuel and nitrogen (ammonium sulphate), the 
other two being potassium and phosphorus. 
4 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. 
5 C. F. 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. 
