Template:Did you know nominations/Oil shale in Morocco

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Panyd^{The muffin is not subtle} 18:38, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Oil shale in Morocco edit

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... that in 1939–1945, the Tanger oil shale deposit was used to fuel an 80 tonnes per day shale oil pilot plant?

Created/expanded by Beagel (talk). Self nom at 19:44, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Date, length, and citations ok. No neutrality tags or plagiarism issues. The hook is supported by its source, but I wonder if we can't find something more unique to grab people's attention. Is a 80 ton per day plant special in some way? I see the dates line up exactly with WWII in Europe. Was this reactor somehow related?
Regardless, the hook would pass. But there are prose issues in the article that need to be dealt with before this passes. In the first line of the first paragraph after the lead, English use would prefer "resources" to resource. The second sentence of the second paragraph reads "to consists" instead of "to consist." Under "Recent activities" it should either read "A new strategy was" or "New strategies were," not "New strategy was". These kinds of errors run throughout. Get a copyedit, and I see no reason this shouldn't pass. Norstrem (talk) 05:10, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

By my understanding, not directly related to the WWII, but increased oil consumption and lack of conventional oil supply are definitely reasons behind of oil shale industry developments of this period. A 80 ton per day plant is not significant for the oil industry in general, but compared with other oil-shale operations of this time, it is worth of mentioning. I propose also ALT1 for the hook. Beagel (talk) 10:10, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

ALT1: ... that T³ was a process for extracting oil from oil shale in Morocco.

I did a copyedit - not creating brilliant prose but I think it's mostly OK now. Might I suggest this alt hook: That over 53 billion barrels of shale oil could be extracted from oil shale deposits in Morocco? Billions of barrels of oil is catchy, no? (Or maybe "over 50 billion", since this source, used in the article [1], reads "Morocco’s total in place oil shale reserves are estimated at between 50 and 55 billion barrels.") Novickas (talk) 17:02, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

I like that alt hook too. Norstrem (talk) 18:02, 15 November 2011 (UTC)