Posted on 12/31/2016 10:39:59 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, has revolutionized energy production in the United States and cornered OPEC. That cartel is currently attempting to restrict oil production and raise prices, but it faces the reality that American frackers can rapidly expand output. It’s a nightmare if you are a corrupt petro-dictator of any stripe, communist to jihadist.
Now the never-ending quest for new technologies has yielded a potentially revolutionary replacement or substitute for fracking: microwaving shale to extract oil and gas. James Watkins reports in Ozy.com:
As strange as it sounds, producers are experimenting with ways to zap previously unextractable oil resources with microwaves, which has the potential to kick-start an even bigger energy revolution than fracking — and appease environmentalists while they’re at it. This is potentially “a whole shift in the paradigm,” says Peter Kearl, co-founder and CTO of Qmast, a Colorado-based company pioneering the use of the microwave tech. Some marquee names are betting on the play: Oil giants BP and ConocoPhillips are pouring resources into developing similar extraction techniques, which can be far less water- and energy-intensive than fracking.
If producers can find a way to microwave oil shales in the Green River Formation, which sprawls across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, the nation’s recoverable reserves could soar and energy independence could become more than an election slogan. Even with existing methods — strip-mining the shale and then cooking it, or injecting steam to cook the rock underground (hydraulic fracturing is useless here) — the formation contains enough oil to last the U.S. 165 years at current rates of consumption. Microwave extraction could goose those numbers even higher. After all, there are more than 4 trillion (with a “t”) barrels of oil in the Green River Formation....
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
No wait!
“and appease environmentalists while they’re at it.”
Never going to happen. For most greenies it is the downfall of the USA that they are after.
I hope we can drive these mid-east bastards to the poorhouse.
“... zap previously unextractable oil resources with microwaves...”
.
But will that not fry rare earth worms?
God Forbid!, the envirofascist will scream. You’ll mutate some deep-earth 1-cell bacterium newly hypothesized to exist at those depths. No genetically-modified oil!
We probably should have backed England and France when they attempted to stop the theft of the Suez Canal.
We didn’t, and the power of Islamic Oil has been growing ever since.
Yes, I know that Egypt did not have oil. That wasn’t the point. Abiding by existing treaties and contracts was.
The Saudis and others in the region stole the oil technology and oil they had signed extraction contracts for after that, and their power began to grow.
Of course, the Soviets were a major player then.
Never going to happen. For most greenies it is the downfall of the USA that they are after.
Exactly. They are “Watermelons”. Green on the outside, red on the inside.
Agreed. They wish us all to be living in caves and freezing. Making extraction easier doesn’t solve the problem of increased consumption and therefor so called increased production of greenhouse gasses.
This technology can double as a deterrent to the Muzzie tunnel rats digging into Israel. Cook the jihadis rodents underground in their burrows!
Ha!
They will come in droves to the US and Europe and declare refugee status and we will allow them in as we are doing now. Perhaps it’s not such a good idea.
Just wait till the environmentalist wackos get ahold of this idea. I can hear the screaming already.
More importantly, won’t the leakage of microwaves into the water table pollute the aquifers forever? This must be stopped!
I love the smell of microwaves in the morning.
They are going to complain about microwave contamination of the water table
Mother Jones will start writing articles about people who have microwaves coming out of their faucets.
In a Tommy Chong voice:
“Like, I was washing my arugula one day, and like, it just started cooking right there in the sink, it was getting zapped man! Yeah, dude! I’ve been getting so many headaches from the stray microwaves coming up out of my outhouse, that I had to like, cover the whole inside of my earth-ship home with aluminum foil to protect myself, bro!”
I love this. It up-ends all assumptions.<p
I don’t think Paul (”Population Bomb”) Ehrlich is even enjoying hell anymore. All the hydrocarbons are being pumped out.
Over the summer the USGS updated their report to reflect the higher figure of four trillion bbl. equivalent of kerogen in the formation, perhaps one-half recoverable.
The in situ heating of the kerogen within shale allows conversion to a light crude like material. Tight oil is a more apt description of the Bakken formation, which only needs cracks to allow flow.
The Qmast process is applicable to work-over of non-producing fracked wells with the formation plugged with paraffin, etc. This has been stated by Peter Kearl as a likely first target application of the technology.
Nope on the Suez. We lost enough people in WWII trying to preserve the colonial possessions of the Brits rather than going for the fastest possible kill of the third reich.
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