Israel Presses for Oil From Shale

With oil prices hovering around $70 a barrel, Israel is pondering the use of its huge reserves of oil shale.

Thanks to a technical breakthrough, it should be possible to extract fuel oil from shale for less than $20 a barrel, which could allow Israel eventually to cut its crude oil imports by up to one-third.

Moshe Gvirtz, a Russian-born Israeli immigrant, developed a technique in the 1990s to squeeze oil from shale at a cost far less than that of older technologies.

How does it work? Older technologies squeezed oil out of shale by putting the crushed rock under enormous pressure at high temperatures. But the process developed by Gvirtz costs far less. The shale is mixed and coated with bitumen, a remnant of normal oil refining, then put through a catalytic converter under relatively low pressure. The output is synthetic oil that can be refined into gasoline and other products.