There are vast quantities of Vevonian shale in the Eastern United States including the state of Alabama. The energy potential amounts to several hundred years of total equivalent crude oil demand in the United States. Most of the prior research on Devonian shale by conventional retorting methods resulted in oil yields of only about half that of oil shales from the Western United States even though the total organic carbon content of the Eastern and Western shales are comparable. Eastern shales have organic carbon in polynuclear aromatic type structures. Such structures are very refractory, and it is virtually impossible to break them down into oils. However, hydrogen will react with polynuclear aromatics to form aliphatic structures which can be readily decomposed into oils. The purpose of this work is to determine how much oil yield or equivalent gaseous fuels can be recovered from Devonian shale in retorting and gasification under hydrogen-containing atmospheres. Experiments involving the retorting of granular shale under hydrogen atmospheres resulted in recoveries of organic carbon from Devonian shale exceeding eighty percent. This compares favorably with recoveries from Western shale. Other studies involved the gasification of shale char and the development of fluidized bed reactor design models for evaluation of various process alternates. 10 references, 1 figure, 5 tables.