The process chemistry of sulfur and arsenic in oil shale retorting is being studied. After an introduction, Section II deals with identifying and quantifying the chemical forms of sulfur that were obtained in spent shale and retort off-gas from laboratory retorting experiments using a nitrogen atmosphere and covering a temperature range from 350/sup 0/C to 800/sup 0/C. The third section describes preliminary work on the separation of iron pyrite from oil shale by sedimentation using a liquid medium. Section IV describes some exploratory work on the analysis of raw shale for total arsenic by atomic absorption spectroscopy (AA). Arsenic analyses were also carried out on materials obtained from the air atmosphere retorting experiments described in Section VI. Section V describes an exploratory experiment that included the high temperature water leaching of a spent shale. Work on Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) described in Section VII includes a composited table of FTIR absorption peaks for oil shale minerals and a comparison of methylene peak heights with Fischer assay data on oil yields.