This may be a stupid question but my buddies land is littered with oil shale near an opening to a mine shaft. supposedly it was a coal mine but there sure is alot of shale around it. i was wondering since that stuff burns would it burn hot enough to forge with it?? 

Interesting. 

Isn't that the flat grey layered rock I pick outbof my green coal and the forge because it won't burn? Not alot of it but some in every bag the size of your thumb nail.

No.      Coal beds are often bounded/interleaved with shale beds and so "contaminate" a mechanically dug load---they used to employ children to pick it out of the coal as it went by in the mines.  Ah the good old days!

I forget what that job was called.  My son did a report on it when they studied the U.N. children's rights declaration at school.  He found some old pictures of some very dirty 8-10 year olds sitting in front of a conveyor belt of passing coal picking out the rocks.

The pit ponies were treated better

They were called breaker boys.