Study of oil-shale combustion in a computer controlled retort

As the world-wide energy demand increases and conventional energy sources are depleted, interest has developed in exploiting some of the "exotic" energy sources which have remained virtually untapped in the past. One of these sources is the liquid hydrocarbon in the large deposits of oil shale in the western United States and elsewhere. One of the most promising prospects for recovery of this type of oil appears to be the proposed modified in-situ recovery process. This technique involves the creation of vertical or horizontal beds of rubblized shale by mining and/or the use of explosives. A combustion wave would be passed through the rubblized bed and a liquid product would be recovered from the bed [1, 2]. One of the advantages of this proposed process, as compared to other in-situ type processes, is that it is not dependent on the inhomogeneities in the shale. In the early 1970's at the United States Bureau of Mines Laboratory at Laramie, Wyoming, studies of the modified in-situ pro