SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 
The Necessity for Research in the 
Oil-Shale Industry. 
An Account of the Shale-Oil Industry as Developed in Scotland—Steam- 
Regulated Pyrolytic Distillation—Quality and Quantity of Oil Yields— 
New and Improved Practice should be Developed from Old Operation. 
By MARTIN J. GAVIN.* 
One rarely reads a technical or oil-trade journal without coming 
across some article or statement regarding oil shale. We are told of the 
enormous supplies of this material within the borders of the United 
States, of the plants to treat shale that are operating or under construc- 
tion or about to be constructed, of the companies organized to produce 
and refine oil and other products from oil shale, and commonly of the 
huge profits to be made on small investments in oil-shale operations. 
Supplementing these articles, the country has been well covered with 
oil-shale company promotion literature, commonly of a still more 
optimistic and often misleading nature. The public apparently has 
been led to believe that the American oil-shale industry is a going one 
—that is, plants are making and refining shale oil on a successful 
commercial scale—and that money is actually being made in oil-shale 
operations by marketing shale oil and its products. 
Snuave-Or Inpusrry Acrivrry. 
The writer does not desire to discourage the proper kind of activity 
in connexion with oil shale, because the time is growing near when shale- 
oil products will undoubtedly be necessary to supplant in part our 
present petroleum supplies, and he believes that in the course of a 
¢omparatively short time oil-shale operations, if properly conducted and 
financed, can be made commercially successful. - It is desired in this 
paper to indicate particularly the great necessity of properly conducted 
scientific research and control work on oil shale and shale oils, without 
which it would be indeed difficult to carry on oil-shale operations 
successfully. 
At the present time there are, strictly speaking, no commercial oil- 
shale operations under way in the United States. There have been 
perhaps eighteen or twenty shale retorts erected in the country and 
most are in intermittent operations from time to time for experimental 
or demonstration purposes, but with one or two possible exceptions 
these are too small to give much of an idea of their commercial 
feasibility. Nearly if not quite 150 companies have been organized 
in connexion with oil shale, many of which, unfortunately, are purely 
stock promotion concerns. Some are actually engaged in experimental 
work of a sort, and a very few are actually conducting well-planned and 
organized investigational and research work. ' 
_ Printed by permission of the Director, United States Bureau of Mines. 
* Refinery Engineer, United States Bureau of Mines, 
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