What's PR?  Spending 1/6th of the entire cost on public relations seems like too much.

Seems a great use of windpower,but, considering transmission losses and conversion of electric to thermal energy has conversion costs too, whats the real EROI? I suspect a lot less than 1.
  Weren't these shale experiments funded from Deoartment of Energy grants?
   And a small aside-the Cistern and Muldoon fields in Fayette County Texas were produced with windmills as pumps years ago. They were very shallow Yegua(Eocene) fields. It strike me that very shallow fields in other areas could profitably be produced with windmills to and save the energy conversion losses. Won't add much to the US reserves, but it might make some good ol' boy a buck or two.  

Re: "Shell oil shale output stabilizes at 120,000 barrels/day + NG in 2022..."

Sorry, Alan, I can't stop laughing.  

SCENARIO

News release 2017 -- After decades of effort to develop the oil shales of the Western Slope of Colorado, Shell announced today that it will discontinue it's work there due to lack of a profitable return on such production....

And thanks for your kind e-mail yesterday about Thailand.

best, Dave

Shell's in situ oil shale idea is to finish off the job nature walked away from and make newborn oil appear in selected patches that have been electrically frozen off (to keep ground water from flushing away the liquid) and electrically superheated (to transform the kerogen).  It's then pumped out normally - no site restoration needed (since the earth was not disturbed, unlike Alberta) - and the crew moves on to the next four-year-roasted patch.  The advantage over conventional drilling is that companies know exactly where the kerogen is - no mystery at all.   The disadvantage is the freezing and superheating routine, but that doesn't seem weirder than the science fiction stuff going on in the tar sands.  Shell's problem is of course to keep science fiction cheap.  Almost all the electricity in this area now comes from coal strip-mined and burned on the spot, which is pretty cheap and very dirty, but there is also wind if you want to pay a premium for it.  Wyoming has plenty of wind.  It just costs more than coal.  I don't see why Shell would need to get in the electricity business itself when other people will sell it wind power now - but it needs to make a profit of any kind first.

The other problem is that oil shale country looks like this:

There is no water, and features on the map like "Green River" would simply be called large creeks anywhere else, and every drop is already spoken for, many times over (and global warming is just going to make this worse).  If Shell could conjure up a lot of water without taking it from Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and local tourism one might begin to see how it could eventually follow (thirty-five years behind)  in the footsteps of the tar sands.

The NREL maps for solar thermal and PV both look relatively favorable for NW Colorado and environs.  The solar sources would provide additional electricity in the late spring and summer, when many wind resources decrease.

At any rate, Shell plans to use the natural gas produced to provide the electricity once the project gets going.  At that point, coal fired generation would not provide a significant amount of the electricity needed.  

The natural gas generation would be a good fit for any intermittant renewable, as a peaker turbine can come online rather quickly, to be followed, perhaps by a combined cycle gas plant.

Perhaps Shell's use of renewables in the production of cooked kerogen and natural gas could be used to offset CO2 emissions elsewhere, making the renewables more attractive.