The University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center of the American West has issued an online report, “What Every Westerner Should Know About Oil Shale,” to add perspective to the debate over the resource.

“After two previous booms and busts, including a regionally devastating downturn in the early 1980s, it looks like another oil-shale development cycle is on the horizon,” the center reports. “It’s a prospect local residents, policy-makers and concerned citizens throughout the country regard with a mix of anticipation and apprehension.”

The report’s authors are Patty Limerick, history professor, faculty director and the center’s chair, and Jason Hanson, a member of the center’s research staff.

Hanson says the report is “to provide a safe port in the storm of data disputes that usually rage on topics like this. We want to encourage a more responsible, more informed and more productive decision-making process.”

Limerick says, “As a historian, I’ve read as much as I care to read and studied as much as I care to study about people acting in haste. I really don’t need more of that. So it was great for me to look at a situation where there is such a process of deliberation going on.”

The report details the first two oil-shale booms on the western slope of the Rockies—where the world’s largest supplies of the substance lie—and the reasons those efforts ultimately failed.

Estimates are that 800 billion barrels—more than triple Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves and equivalent to more than 100 years of current U.S. demand—may be extracted one day from the Green River formation along the T-shaped border of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. The richest known deposits are in Colorado’s Piceance Basin, a more than 1,300-square-mile area north of Grand Junction.

An environmental concern in development of the shale oil is water requirements: Current estimates are that commercial production could require about three barrels of water for every barrel of oil.

The report details ways energy companies and other stakeholders can anticipate and manage the variety of social, economic and environmental issues raised by the prospect of a Rockies oil-shale industry.

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