But now that prices are rising again, Shell Oil has gone public with its Mahogany research project near Rangely, Colo., where it's creating a new way to turn rock into oil.
Shell's "in-situ" process would cook the rock while it's still in the ground, then pump it out, eliminating the giant retorts, tailing sites and open-pit mining.
But Shell won't even be ready to make a decision on whether its process is commercially viable until roughly 2010.
Congress, though, wants the leasing program to begin long before that. And some are talking about going after shale with technology that, while upgraded, is very similar to the retort method used in the 1980s.
For example, one of the star witnesses of Gibbons' hearings was Jack Savage, president of Utah-based Oil-Tech Inc. He said the company is ready to start cooking oil out of shale with a retort it has built near Vernal, Utah.
"We have been working on this for 15 years," Savage said. "Now we're ready to go."
Savage, once president of companies that manufactured golf bags and other sporting goods, said he can turn shale into oil for $10 to $22 a barrel, depending on market conditions. Savage pushed for an accelerated federal leasing program, but he's already leased 38,000 acres of state land in Utah and says he's working on a research-and-development bid to continue work on his project.
Meanwhile, even the new process Shell is trying won't be light on the land.
"While you are drilling, that acreage is being used pretty substantially," said Dag Nummedal, a geologist at the Colorado School of Mines. "You will have intense industrial development in patches."
Shell executive Terry O'Connor compares the impact with that of coal strip-mining but says there's a long history of restoring land dug up for coal. "Time has proven that coal-mining operations in the Rocky Mountain West have an excellent record of handling reclamation," O'Connor said.
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