The Denver Jewish news., 1919-05-21

talil OIL OIL, tnlS VIII interest yO,.
If you have, of course, seen these
wonders with your own eyes you
need not read this story.
You who wish to take this trip
come with us now. We board the
train for long ride watching tie
Kaleidoscope view from the win
dows of the coach as we pass
over fields of verdant grain, past
burning deserts and again into
the cool mountain breezes. We
gaze in admiration from dis
tance at the beauty of the snow
capped peaks, the red and blue
and green and gold of the radiant
Rockies, but this admiration is
turned to awe when we come in
to closer contact with the dear
old hills.
We leave the train and go in
an unlovely but reliable noun
tain climbing automobile. For
many miles the roads are fine.
Suddenly there towers above us
a great mountain of shale = oil
shale.
We point out to you the var
ious strata or layers of which it
is composed. You can readily see
the different formations and dis
tinguish them by their colors.
The oldest of them all, after
thousands and thousands of
years. refuses to weather or per-
ceptibly change in it's rich COIL
tent of oil. Here we will show
you the black bituminous forma-
tion and there the velvet brown
aniline. Again You will see
stratum that is gray, one blue,
one reddish brown and another
almost black. These strata were
evidently formed at different
times, perhaps many hundreds of
years apart, and yet all of them
so many years ago that their his
tory is i'll the forgotten past, and
we only know what the hills
| themselves have tod us.
Rock That Burns
We clip off piece of shale and
apply a lighted match. 1t burns
end smells so strong of kerosene
that your last fleeting doubt is
gone. Taking couple of hand
fuls of shale with US, we SO into
our cabin laboratory AID demon
strate-to you on very small
scale how the oil can be distilled
from the shale.
Here we show you small re-
tort with a glass tube leading
from it. We place our two small
handfuls of shale into the retort
and light fire under it. The va
por rises and passes along the
tube for several inches through
water. This condenses the oil
that is in the steam and it drops
down into a glass receptacle as
crude oil, while the gas passes
on to the end of the tube, where
we touch a. match to it to show
you how it burns. In the large
plant this gas is sufficient to sup
ply fuel for the retorts.
And still your wonder grows
when you see the quantity of oil
we gather from two small hand
fuls of shale. These, when care
fully measured and weighed, give
us the percentage of oil which we
may expect from the shale in our
vast deposits. 1t is estimated
from numerous tests made that
our shale will produce an average
of 40 to 60 gallons to the ton,
while the famous shale of Scot
land only averages about 20 gal
Ions. Dozens OF experts have
been working on this proposition
for the past two years planning
new improvements over the, old
Scottish methods of distilling oil
from shale. There are now sew
eral methods which purport to
be thoroughly practical and prof
liable.
Several plants have already
been built and trial runs made
which show by definite results
that the industry will without
doubt be a highly profitable one
in fact, one of the greatest this