It has been estimated that over a trillion gallons of oil currently exists in the oil shale of the State of Michigan. A successful program for commercial extraction of a part of this oil could lead to a substantial reduction in the foreign oil requirements of the United States. At the present time a large significant research effort is being directed by the Department of Energy (DOE) towards developing a practical means of extracting energy from Michigan oil shale. Part of this effort is the development of various models for describing the physical processes that occur in a single particle of oil shale as the energy bearing products are being extracted. This paper describes the current stage of development of these single particle models and outlines some of the problems in the numerical solution of the resulting partial differential equations.