THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Washington Wire: Putting the Heat On:  As international oil prices climb higher, the Interior Department took another step to develop oil from shale formations in Colorado and Utah.: Posted Friday 20 January 2006

Interior's Bureau of Land Management approved the applications of eight companies to try new oil recovery technology on 160-acre test plots on federal land. The winners, culled from 20 applications, include the research subsidiaries of three majors: Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. The companies get the option to develop an additional 4,960 acres next to their test plots if the small-scale tests show their technology is promising.

Most of the winning proposals, which will now undergo environmental scrutiny, involve so-called in-situ processes, which use heat to remove the oil underground so that mining the rock will not be necessary. According to Interior, the U.S. has the largest concentration of oil shale in the world, 70% of which is under federal land. It estimates the shale contains 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil, enough to meet current levels of U.S. demand for 110 years. --John J. Fialka

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