The most abundant energy sources in the United States are hydrocarbon fossil fuels consisting of oil, gas, oil shale, and coal. Currently, the most important of these energy sources are crude oil and natural gas. Although supplies are adequate today, it must be realized that oil and gas are depletive substances. Within the next few years, the increasing demand for liquid fuels will necessitate the supplemental supplies of domestic energy from crude oil and natural gas with synthetic fuels such as those from oil shale. To date, those persons working in the development of oil shale technology have found limited amounts of reference data. If data from research and development (R and D) could be made publicly available, however, several functions could be served. The duplication of work could be avoided, documented test material could serve as a basis to promote further developments, and research costs could possibly be reduced. To capture the results of Government-sponsored oil shale research programs, documents have been written to specify the data that contractors need to report and the procedures for reporting them. The documents identify and define the data from oil shale projects to be entered into the Major Plants Data Base (MPDB), Test Data Data Base (TDDB), Resource Extraction Data Base (REDB), and Math Modeling Data Base (MMDB) which will meet the needs of the users of the oil shale data system. This document addresses what information is needed and how it must be formatted so that it can be entered into the TDDB for oil shale.