As the nations needs for additional sources of petroleum products become ever more pressing, a role for oil shale in the synthetic fuels industry becomes more probable. One of the problems in converting shale oil to hydrocarbon liquid products in the elimination of nitrogen from the shale oil. Nitrogen compounds not only impart undesirable properties to the finished products but their basic nature makes them effective poisons for the acidic catalysts used in petroleum refining. An efficient means of eliminating nitrogen from shale oil is hydrodenitrification of the oil in the presence of a dual function catalyst. In a study of the denitrification of model nitrogen compounds over an Ni-W on Al2O3 catalyst, Flinn reported that amines and anilines reacted readily to form ammonia but indole was much less active and quinoline was the most difficult to dentrify. Unfortunately, most of the nitrogen in shale oil has been found to be of the quinoline and indole types.