BY MARK UDALL
In northeastern Utah, just across the border from my home state, Colorado, the Estonian-owned company Enefit American Oil is trying to make good on a promise that the federal government and private industry have been making in the American West for almost a century: squeezing oil from a stone.
Oil shale is sedimentary rock containing bituminous minerals that can be mined and processed to release petroleum products. Not to be confused with shale gas, which is a major American industry, oil shale has never been successfully commercially exploited in the United States, even though over half of the world’s known oil shale deposits are in the Colorado River Basin...