Salt Lake Tribune | 1918-01-24 | Page 12 | Will use Shale Oil as Fuel for Ships

WILL USE SHALE OIL US FIERI! SHIPS Deposits in Utah Take Foremost Rank in New Industry. The oil shales of the United States have lately attracted much attention and they are undoubtedly of great interest and importance. We have here a vast reserve of fuel which will no doubt be fully utilized In the near future. That the government is well aware of these potentialities is plain from several recent publications and from the fact that an area of the best material in Utah has been withdrawn from entry as a possible reserve of fuel oil for the navy. A recent bulletin of the, geological survey deals with the oil shales of the east, among which those of the Devonian age from Kentucky and other states are the most valuable. However, few of these shales compare in value with those from the plateau region of Utah, just referred to. These are persistent beds in the Eocene freshwater fresh-water formations and cover an area of about 5500 square miles in northwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah. Oil shale, as is well known, is defined as an argillaceous deposit, from which petroleum petro-leum may be obtained by distillation, but not by trituration or treatment with solvents. sol-vents. The oil shales of Utah, according to an interesting article in a recent number of Economic Geology, occur within a thicK-ness thicK-ness of 200 feet of these lake beds, and there are few places along the southern edge of the Uintah basin in Colorado and Utah where there is not a thickness of more than ten feet of shale that will yield more oil per ton than the average which is being obtained from the oil shales of Scotland, and in places there are more than 100 feet of such rich shale, yielding thirty to forty gallons per ton. Interesting data have been obtained regarding re-garding the origin of the shale oil, particularly par-ticularly from the investigations of the late Dr. A. C. Davis, who did much to extend our knowledge about the peat marshes of the United States. From microscopic studies he reached the conclusion con-clusion that the shale contains an immense im-mense amount of vegetable matter, such as algae, spores and pollen. There is but little animal matter and the oil is apparent! ap-parent! v indigenous to the shale and derived de-rived bv slow process of decomposition from the vegetable matter. Ammonia and other nitrogen compounds would represent rep-resent valuable by-products of the distillation distil-lation of the material composing the oil-shale oil-shale deposits. Engineering and Mining Journal.