placing the retorts down in the mine is largely obviated the environmental advantages and cost savings are numerous particularly with underground mining and by utilizing smaller proven retorts and the above economies associated therewith there is a much lower cost of capital to effect recovery of shale oil fig1 is a schematic representation of a shale oil recovery operation of the present invention which enables recovery of the shale oil through a plurality of individual retort operational units each of which if desired can be owned by an individual operator thus eliminating the requirement that the entire capital outlay be produced by one company further each of the retorts is portative mobile in nature and can be quickly connected to or disconnected from the system or moved as the mining operation is moved as can be seen in fig1 the oil bearing shale is removed by a quarrying operation 10 in any well known manner the quarrying operation may be a strip mining operation or it may be an underground mining operation both methods are old and well known and the shale produced thereby is placed on a conveyer belt 12 which carries the shale to a primary crusher 14 which has jaws or other means for reducing the size of the shale in a well known manner the output from crusher 14 is carried by conveyor belt 12 to a large screen 16 which separates lumps in excess of the maximum allowable size the screened shale is then carried by conveyor belt 12 to secondary crusher 18 where the large pieces of shale are further reduced in size the crushed shale is carried by conveyor belt 12 from secondary crusher 18 to a small.