Along the western slope of the Rocky Mountains lies a possible path toward energy independence.

The world’s largest deposit of oil shale is hidden here, beneath a landscape dotted by pinyon pines and twisted junipers.

If the oil industry can learn how to extract oil and gas from the oil shale in a cost-effective manner, the United States could lay claim to oil reserves totaling, perhaps, 800 billion barrels — three times Saudi Arabia’s.

With oil prices riding high and conventional crude reserves ever more difficult to find and produce, companies including Shell Oil Co., Chevron Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Schlumberger are conducting research on a resource that could forever alter the geopolitics of energy.

But the history of oil shale has been a story of grand plans and locked gates.

And its future is anything but certain. At best production is years away, while upredictable oil markets, growing water demand, sizable electricity needs and climate change all pose potentially huge hurdles.

“We’re working on the tough stuff,” concedes Rick Mykitta, operations manager for Shell Oil Co.’s Mahogany oil shale research project.

President Bush last month linked oil shale with his oft-repeated calls to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and more areas offshore to oil and gas drilling, hailing the “extraordinary potential of oil shale.”

But Democrats have barred the Bureau of Land Management from leasing any federal land forcommercial-scale oil shale projects.

And whether a nation now focused on boosting use of renewables and lowering dependence on fossil fuels will give oil shale another look remains an open question.

The Utes who populated this part of the West long before there were oil companies described oil shale to settlers as “rock that burns.”

Oil shale is not a shale at all, geologists say, but a type of rock called marlstone containing kerogen, an organic material left over from ancient lakes. The trick is to convert the kerogen into usable oil and gas.

Skeptic Randy Udall of nearby Carbondale, Colo., argues that oil shale is but a poor cousin to other fossil fuels, with an energy content per ton less than one-third that of cattle manure and only slightly better than the potato.

But oil shale’s allure is understandable. The Green River Formation that sprawls across portions of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming is estimated to hold 500 billion to 1.1 trillion barrels of recoverable shale oil resources, a 2005 Rand Corp. study found.

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