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The world consumes 86 million barrels of oil each day and the price of gas is at an average of $4 a gallon. Although the dream answer would be to find an alternative to oil, we know that we are years away from that type of technology. So the oil industry and inventors around the world are searching for ways to increase oil products.

Bill Merrell, who is a self-taught inventor, believes that the solution to the world’s oil problems can be solved with oil shale rocks. Oil shale contains hydrocarbons which Merrell says can be distilled to produce petroleum. Merrell says the process is just finishing off what Mother Nature didn’t complete.

Merrell does admit that there are limitations to oil shale, but he is firm in his belief that oil shale can be the solution to the world’s oil shortage.

Oil Shale is a predecessor to oil, and this organic pre-historic sediment can be found under most of Colorado and Utah. A study by the Rand Corporation estimates that there is approximately 800 billion barrels of oil shale in this area, which is three times larger that the oil reserves in Saudi Arabia.

The sticking point is that, although it might be enough oil to fuel the US for the next hundred years, we have yet found the technology to efficiently turn the oil shale into oil. With the present process it takes over a ton of oil shale to make one barrel of oil. And to dig and remove oil shale would be an incredibly expensive operation, which just might not be quick enough for our current desperate needs.

Randy Udall, who is the USA Association for the Study of Peak Oil co-founder stays that with oil shale we might produce 100,000 barrels of oil in 10 years. Currently the US uses 100,000 in seven minutes.

Shell oil has its own ideas on how to use shale to make oil. The company is working on a process called In situ Conversion, where they heat a huge section of shale for several years while it is still underground. An ammonia frost wall blocks out moisture, and the shale is eventually liquefied into oil which is then sucked out of the ground. But this process also takes enormous amounts of energy.