Interesting, but these oil shales are just one of many potential energy sources that is not being exploited because it is just too expensive to produce the energy from the resource at current prices. There is a supply of thousands of years of geothermal energy locked up in the earth's core, there is countless years of supply of energy from wind, solar, and tidal energy that is untapped, etc. Think of all the sun that hits dsert wastelands and heats up sand that could be hitting solar panels and producing electricity! Oil shale is really no different from these other sources of energy in that it is largely untapped because of the economics of the production of the resource.

Another oil shale region in the US, the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana, is actually seeing a boom in production-- but not from the shale itself, but rather from adjacent permeable layers of rock that some of the oil from the oil shale migrated into. I actually looked into the Bakken five years ago and wrote a DailyKos diary on it before it was making many headlines-- you might be interested to read We may have more oil than you think: The Bakken Formation to see what I was saying about that at the time.

Maybe in five or ten years, these oil shales will be in wide production like the Bakken is now, but I tend to doubt it, given what I have heard about current oil shale extraction techniques. and other factors such as the fierce competition over scarce water supplies in the areas where these shales are located. I'm obviously not a geologist, but my guess is that high volume extraction from oil shales, if it were to occur here, would occur in the Bakken region first, because there's already pipeline infrastructure there and the energy companies already have leases and so forth.