Oil Shale Industry

The oil shale industry is the branch of mining and processing engaged in extracting oil shale, a fine grained sedimentary rock containing kerogen, and manufacturing liquid hydrocarbons from it. The industry has developed mainly in Brazil, China, Estonia, Germany and Russia, with Estonia responsible for roughly seventy percent of the world's processed oil shale as of 2005 and generating about ninety percent of its own electricity from the resource, employing some 7,500 people there. Modern industrial mining of oil shale began in 1837 at the Autun mines in France, and the industry expanded before the First World War as automobile production grew. In 1924 the Tallinn Power Plant became the first power plant in the world to switch to oil shale firing. The industry declined after the Second World War once abundant, cheaper crude oil was discovered, then saw a resurgence following the 1973 oil crisis, and the United States started its own oil shale development program in 2003. By 2008 total world shale oil output was about 930,000 tonnes, with China producing 375,000 tonnes and Estonia 355,000 tonnes. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/