Making things worse with oil shale

A number of oil companies have been looking toward what they suppose to be the next big thing for energy--oil shale. This is not good, either for the oil companies or the environment. For those of us in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah who care about the environment, mass production would be a major disaster.
As the name implies, oil shale is rock that contains oil--not very much oil, but oil nonetheless. The main problem for the oil companies is that oil shale is a pretty expensive commodity. It does not yield as much energy as conventional oil, and therefore they need much more of it to be effective. Besides the cost of getting the rock out of the ground and trucking it to the refineries, they'd need to build new refineries (according to one estimate, up to $100 million dollars to serve every 500,000 people). All that rock has to be retorted (heated) to a very high temperature to get the oil out, and once that is over they need to find somewhere to pile the slag (leftover rock). Somehow I don't see this being very environmentally friendly. First it destroys habitat when it comes out of the ground, and it is likely it will destroy more habitat when the companies dispose of it.
To lighten the environmental impact, oil companies are testing a new way to get the oil called in situ retorting. The idea is to get the oil out of the rock without taking it to a refinery. Sounds great, but it involves heating the ground up to around 3,000 degrees and keeping it there for three years. I am no soil scientist, but it seems to me that something like this could adversely impact soil chemistry and plant growth, which can have far-reaching repercussions. What if there is an underground oil spill? That could ultimately be bad for us. The companies have been working on creating frost walls to contain spills, but chemically freezing the ground down to a depth of 2,000 feet doesn't sound like a very good idea for the same reasons that heating the area up sounds like a bad idea.
As usual, this comes down to money. As long as the oil companies are making money and getting rich, they'll keep trying to do so no matter who it hurts. Unfortunately for the environment, money buys power, and the people in power don't listen to the peasants trying to caution them against adverse effects. After all, they're not the ones who will suffer.