More oil beneath Utah than Saudi Arabia?

[Brain_Caster]

In this thread one of the posters claims that there is three times more oil in the sedimentary rock of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado than in Saudi Arabia. Of course it's the Democrats fault that the US is still importing any oil, and hasn't yet started to exploit this infinite reserve of the fluid black gold, which is why McCain needs to be president... etc, etc, you get the general idea.


Now my question is this: Has anybody around here heard of this before, and how much of it is true? I'm somewhat sceptic of his claims, but not really familiar enough with american politics or geology to be able to assess the truthfulness of this, and I'm curious.

[aerius]

It's oil shale. In theory there is more oil there than in Saudi Arabia, problem is we can't get it out of the ground at a net energy gain. So short of building dozens of nuke plants to supply the electricity to cook the rocks, that oil might as well be on Mars. We've known about oil shale for the better part of a century and have been talking and trying to exploit it for nearly that long. Like nuclear fusion, it's always 20 years off in the future.