Oil shale is a fine grained sedimentary rock that contains large amounts of kerogen. With todays technology we can extract hydrocarbons from this kerogen. This process is known as pyrolysis that converts kerogen in oil shale to synthetic crude oil.

The hydrocarbons extracted from the oil shale kerogens is not real efficient for fuel use. Leaving many scientists to believe this non-conventional oil won’t be replacing any other fuels any time soon.

You can find oil shale all around the world, and the United States has a few major deposits. Global deposits of oil shale, are esitmated at around 2.8 trillion to 3.3 trillion barrels of recoverable oil.

Though the engery cost to produce this fuel, to the energy gained ratio is low, it can be used as an alternative to normal fuel we use today for many smaller countries to break away from foriegn oil dependicies.

Oil shale has a large negative impact on the environment and water quality, and China, Brazil and some other countries are large producers of oil shale at this time.