Northwestern Colorado has been viewed for a century as a potential oil treasure. By some calculations, the Piceance (pee’-awnce) Basin alone contains 300 billion barrels of recoverable petroleum, equal to 48 percent of Middle Eastern reserves. Yet no one has been able to extract profitably the keragen, a waxy petroleum, from the shale.

Shell executives think they now will be able to produce shale oil at a cost that can compete with $15-$25 per barrel crude oil. Their proprietary extraction technology uses electricity to heat the oil shale underground. They then pump out the liquid keragen with traditional oil-drilling techniques. This approach still uses water and energy, but not as much as the retorting process, and it leaves a much smaller environmental footprint, Hansen says.

World oil peaking represents a problem like none other. The political, economic, and social stakes are enormous. Prudent risk management demands urgent attention and early action.
www.peakoil.net...

For those who may not know...Canada is not part of the United States...yet.

The companies involved are Syncrude and Suncor and guess what...the Chinese want to get a deal for 2 million barrels a day from there. In fact, Enbridge is working out a deal with the chinese now to build a $2.5 billion pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver to pump it onto their ships.

Where to find such a huge amount of capital is largely a moot point because, even with massive improvements in extraction technology, the oil sands in Canada are projected to only produce a paltry 2.2 million barrels per day by 2015.

The huge reserves of oil shale in the American west suffer from similar problems. Although high oil prices have prompted the US government to take another look at oil shale, it is not the savior many people are hoping for.