Processing of oil shale to turn it into petroleum by the means of retorts became a high-priority activity in Sweden during the 1930s for strategic reasons. The Swedish navy acquired and expanded a plant with its adjacent shale pit to supply bunker oil for naval vessels. The plant was opened in 1940 and was surrounded with the greatest secrecy. A village was built in the vicinity to accommodate the workers. Seeing pictures from that time with the enormous smokestacks gives a feeling what it must have been to work and live there by then.

The process was terribly expensive and the cost of the produced oil was at least three times as high as the pre-war import price, but wartime is wartime... This fact made it impossible to proceed after the war ended and the plant was finally closed in 1946.

Today, sixty years after the closure, not very much remains of this once huge plant except the enormous waste piles, some scattered concrete skeletons and some left over storage buildings.

It probably goes without saying that the site is heavy polluted and poses a headache for the environmental agencies.
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