You Can’t Get Blood From A Stone
But Shell Oil appears to have found a way to get oil from a rock. The Denver Post describes a promising technology to extract oil – a lot of oil – from oil shale in the American West. There are many unanswered questions and many details that need to be worked out, but this is pretty promising. Shell's test site yielded about a 65% recovery rate for the oil. Versus about a 25% recovery rate for traditional methods. The resultant extracted oil is of an extremely high quality.
GARFIELD COUNTY — The ramshackle collection of wellheads and electric cables hidden in a pine-covered draw west of Rifle doesn't look like much now, but until three years ago it was the home of the oil industry's equivalent of the Manhattan Project.
Over five years here, Shell Oil conducted a series of secretive experiments that have the potential to blow open the status quo of North American oil production, unlocking the vast reserves of oil shale that underlie Colorado's Western Slope.
Early attempts failed miserably. But beginning in 2002, Shell drilled a honeycombed series of wells, then lowered in giant heating elements, raising the temperature of the shale to 650 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 months. Out flowed an abundance of high-quality shale oil.
"It was our 'eureka' moment," said Tracy Boyd, a spokesman for Shell, smiling as he showed off the historic spot. "Now we know we have a technology that works."
Now that and similar technologies have become fodder in the increasingly contentious energy debate, holding out the possibility that, in an era of $4-a-gallon gasoline, America might just be sitting on oil reserves equal to a 100-year supply of the country's imports.
The fight over oil shale has become a major issue in Colorado's U.S. Senate race as well as a regular talking point for Republicans nationwide. At the White House in June, President Bush blasted Democrats for "standing in the way" of oil-shale development and hurting ordinary Americans.
The latest to enter the fray is Orrin Hatch, the powerful Republican senator from Utah, who accused Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall of siding with "an elite, anti-oil crowd" by helping impose a moratorium on commercial leasing regulations for the shale deposits. (Utah is one of three Western states with oil-shale reserves.)
The technology still needs to be proven at an industrial scale and there are serious issues about the environmental impact, especially on water resources. Read the whole thing. The early battle lines are already forming both in the short term of this election and in the long term, decades away. But this appears to be promising. Certainly more promising than this incident over in Zimbabwe.
Energy, Environment | Gaius August 17, 2008
Other Links to this Post
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No Runny Eggs » Blog Archive » The Morning Scramble - 8/18/2008 — August 18, 2008 @ 8:10 am
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Plumb Bob Blog » Shale Oil Soon to Come On Line? — August 19, 2008 @ 1:45 pm
By bill-tb, August 17, 2008 @ 10:04 am
RF Heaters …
By Sam, August 18, 2008 @ 8:12 pm
I was interesting to read the article and get the story beyond the snippet excerpted here. The rest of the story is one long lament about the potential environmental cost of harvesting the shale oil. Given my experience with the Denver Post, which champions a Green agenda pretty relentlessly, that is no surprise.
By Plumb Bob, August 19, 2008 @ 1:43 pm
I know this is bad manners, but I posted on this same topic about 2 weeks ago, and have a link to a Rand Corporation study that provides some fascinating detail about Shell’s technology and its production metrics.The process involves freezing the ground water in a region surrounding the drilling area to prevent leaching into surrounding ground water, a process that’s already well understood and in use in various construction sites. Then they heat the shale using electric heaters to a temperature of around 700 degrees F, a process that takes 2-3 years. At that temperature, the shale liquifies and runs into collection wells. The resulting oil is refinery-ready, contains no sludge that requires discarding, and yields about 6 times the energy that it took to extract it. The oil thus extracted is expected to remain competitive at any price higher than about $25/bbl.The process does require a boatload of electricity to drive the heating elements, so site preparation includes the construction of a full-blown electrical generating facility — coal, nuclear, or natural gas-fired. There’s plenty of coal in the vicinity.The amount of oil in the region exceeds known oil reserves in the world’s twelve largest oil producing nations. You read that right. If this process works, we’ve just more than doubled known oil reserves in the world.Read the whole article at http://www.plumbbobblog.com/?p=705.
By Plumb Bob, August 20, 2008 @ 4:17 am
This site apparently does not permit links in comments. However, if you’ll look under "Other Links to This Post" and follow the track-back link to the article "Shale Oil Soon to Come On Line" at Plumb Bob Blog, you’ll find a link to a study by the Rand Corporation that spells out the details of the process described in this article. It’s worth the time.Here’s the short version: first, they freeze the groundwater surrounding the area, to prevent oil from leaching out. The technology for ground freezing is very well established — ice barriers have been established around construction sites that have remained stable for years. Then, they drill into the shale, 15 to 25 holes per acre, and insert heating elements into the rock. They heat the rock for 2 to 3 years, until it reaches around 700 degrees F, at which point the oil runs into a collection point and gets pumped out.The process requires huge amounts of electricity, so site preparation includes construction of a power plant — coal, nuclear, or natural gas. However, the yield from process is high enough that they obtain 6 btu for every 1 they spend getting them. The oil is a light, sweet crude that’s ready for the refinery and carries no sludge at all. The estimates say that the oil from this process would be competitive at any price above $25/bbl, which is roughly what it costs to get oil out of some of the older wells in America using CO2 scrubbing.We’re all aware of the 800 billion barrel figure for shale oil, but that turns out to be LOW. The Rand study estimates the area contains between 1.5 and 1.8 TRILLION barrels of oil. For comparison purposes, the known oil reserves in the 12 largest oil-producing nations on the planet measure around 1.2 trillion barrels. In other words, if this process works, we’ve just more than doubled the world’s known oil reserves.Shell needs to continue testing in order to convince the DOE that they’ll not contaminate ground water afterward, but the technology has succeeded in on-site tests, and this promises immensely.