Conservative media are once again hyping the amount of oil in the U.S. by including oil shale, ignoring that oil companies have found no profitable way to develop that resource.

The most recent flood of misinformation came after testimony by the Government Accountability Office's Anu Mittal about "oil shale," a sedimentary rock that when heated at high temperatures can produce liquid fuels (except gasoline) with a larger carbon footprint than conventional liquid fuels. While some conservative outlets claimed it was major news, the testimony -- which was based on an October 2010 GAO report -- contained no positive developments for oil shale, which has long been known to exist in large amounts in the U.S. but is not commercially viable. Earlier this year, energy expert Robert Rapier wrote, “It is not at all clear that even at $100 oil the shale in the Green River formation will be commercialized to produce oil.” Even an editor at the right-wing blog The American Thinker acknowledged that “any large scale operations” for oil shale development would be “prohibitively expensive at this time.” And just recently, Chevron gave up its oil shale lease in Colorado.

Mittal noted in her testimony that no technology to develop oil shale “has been shown to be economically or environmentally viable at a commercial scale.” But Fox News' nightly news show and CNSNews.com, a project of the conservative Media Research Center, failed to mention that oil shale is not currently commercially viable. Breitbart.com and Investor's Business Daily incorrectly suggested that oil shale is not being developed because of Obama administration policies, rather than economic considerations. And Powerline suggested that oil shale is in fact viable because of the “advance of extraction technology,” seemingly confusing oil shale with tight oil from shale rock, which can be extracted via horizontal drilling and hydrofracking.

It's interesting to see that the same people who dismiss the enormous potential of solar and wind power and attack investment in renewable energy are hyping the potential of oil shale. A December 2011 Congressional Research Service report, which classified oil shale as a “sub-economic” resource, stated that “despite government programs in the 1970s and early 1980s to stimulate development of the resource, production of oil shale is not yet commercially viable.”