BOARD02623

• Board Meeting Date: 8/1/1974
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

federally owned and you can see that the bulk of the shale in the
Piceance Basin is under federal control by the Bureau of Land Manage-
ment. -

The colored lands are private lands. Colony and Union are shown.
Somehow we got the printing larger in the Colony than in Union. I I
don't know how that happened. The red elliptical lines indicate the
depth of the richer shale. The outermost is the 100 foot marker so
that the richer shale is only a hundred feet thick at the outer
portion of the basin. In the center the line is a thousand feet and
there you have the enormous deposits of oil shale, rich, 6il shale
a thousand feet in depth and in some cases, close to two thousand
feet.

(slide) This line goes from the south end of Grand Valley off the
screen and up southeast of Colony property of the retorter in the
narrow canyon. Our valley is colored in green and it passes through
both Union property and the Colony property.

(sliqe).Here is a schematic slide of oil shale processing. Let me
run through it very briefly. We start at the lower left where it
says start. First comes the mining step, then the crushing step.
Then we follow the arrows to the coarse ore stockpile, a very large
stockpile. From there we go into the final crushing stage to reduce
the shale to a half inch or finer size in our process. Then we go
into.theretorting operation which is shown at the top right.
And from there we have two streams; the oil stream to the left to
the upgrading unit and the processed shale to the right. At the
bottom of the picture then we have primarily a low sulfur fuel oil
and in addition certain byproducts such as coke, ammonia and sulfur.

(slide) A view of the mine in color, mining system that will be
employed. He have a two-bank system or two-level system. The total
final cuts will be sixty feet in depth and the pillars occupy a
sizable portion of the mine, about forty percent, so that we have a
sixty-forty extraction ratio.

(slide) A cut-away artist diagram of what the mountain would look
like after some period of mining. It shows the honey-comb effect
that will penetrate the whole property eventually if this system is
utilized. It is to be utilized. And that is what it would look
like after room and pillar mining.

(slide) Now this aerial shot shows the terrain of the grass portion I
of the Piceance Basin. We are looking into East Middle Fork, Union
Oil property on the right and Colony property on the left. East
~lidd~e Fork is Colony property. That was originally to be the
depos1tion site for processed shale. Our plant was to be built down
below in the valley, two thousand feet below the top of the plateau;
However, our studies convinced us that it would not be possible to .
meet state and federal air standards with a plant located a~ ~he

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