Piceance Basin Oil Shale and Nahcolite Resources Databases

A detailed description of the methodology employed to perform a geology-based assessment of in-place oil shale and nahcolite resources in the Piceance Basin of northwestern Colorado is presented here. Considerable advancements in computer and database technology since the previous oil shale assessment in 1989 provided the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assessment team with new tools to convert legacy data, store and manipulate new data, perform calculations, and quantify, report, and display the assessment results. Relational database and geographic information systems (GIS) software were used seamlessly to streamline the storage and manipulation of the data. A deterministic spatial interpolation method, the Radial Basis Function (RBF), was used to generate isopach and isoresource models in the GIS software, which provided a spatial statistics function to summarize the prediction models and determine the in-place oil shale and nahcolite resource totals.