Posted on 09/03/2005 6:46:32 AM PDT by narby
When oil prices last touched record highs - actually, after adjusting for inflation we're not there yet, but given the effects of Hurricane Katrina, we probably will be soon - politicians' response was more hype than hope. Oil shale in Colorado! Tar sands in Alberta! OPEC be damned!
Remember the Carter-era Synfuels Corp. debacle? It was a response to the '70s energy shortages, closed down in 1985 after accomplishing essentially nothing at great expense, which is pretty much a description of what usually happens when the government tries to take over something that the private sector can do better. Private actors are, after all, spending their own money.
Since 1981, Shell researchers at the company's division of "unconventional resources" have been spending their own money trying to figure out how to get usable energy out of oil shale. Judging by the presentation the Rocky Mountain News heard this week, they think they've got it.
Shell's method, which it calls "in situ conversion," is simplicity itself in concept but exquisitely ingenious in execution. Terry O'Connor, a vice president for external and regulatory affairs at Shell Exploration and Production, explained how it's done (and they have done it, in several test projects):
Drill shafts into the oil-bearing rock. Drop heaters down the shaft. Cook the rock until the hydrocarbons boil off, the lightest and most desirable first. Collect them.
Please note, you don't have to go looking for oil fields when you're brewing your own.
On one small test plot about 20 feet by 35 feet, on land Shell owns, they started heating the rock in early 2004. "Product" - about one-third natural gas, two-thirds light crude - began to appear in September 2004. They turned the heaters off about a month ago, after harvesting about 1,500 barrels of oil.
While we were trying to do the math, O'Connor told us the answers. Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world.
Wow.
They don't need subsidies; the process should be commercially feasible with world oil prices at $30 a barrel. The energy balance is favorable; under a conservative life-cycle analysis, it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production. The process recovers about 10 times as much oil as mining the rock and crushing and cooking it at the surface, and it's a more desirable grade. Reclamation is easier because the only thing that comes to the surface is the oil you want.
And we've hardly gotten to the really ingenious part yet. While the rock is cooking, at about 650 or 750 degrees Fahrenheit, how do you keep the hydrocarbons from contaminating ground water? Why, you build an ice wall around the whole thing. As O'Connor said, it's counterintuitive.
But ice is impermeable to water. So around the perimeter of the productive site, you drill lots more shafts, only 8 to 12 feet apart, put in piping, and pump refrigerants through it. The water in the ground around the shafts freezes, and eventually forms a 20- to 30-foot ice barrier around the site.
Next you take the water out of the ground inside the ice wall, turn up the heat, and then sit back and harvest the oil until it stops coming in useful quantities. When production drops, it falls off rather quickly.
That's an advantage over ordinary wells, which very gradually get less productive as they age.
Then you pump the water back in. (Well, not necessarily the same water, which has moved on to other uses.) It's hot down there so the water flashes into steam, picking up loose chemicals in the process. Collect the steam, strip the gunk out of it, repeat until the water comes out clean. Then you can turn off the heaters and the chillers and move on to the next plot (even saving one or two of the sides of the ice wall, if you want to be thrifty about it).
Most of the best territory for this astonishing process is on land under the control of the Bureau of Land Management. Shell has applied for a research and development lease on 160 acres of BLM land, which could be approved by February. That project would be on a large enough scale so design of a commercial facility could begin.
The 2005 energy bill altered some provisions of the 1920 Minerals Leasing Act that were a deterrent to large-scale development, and also laid out a 30-month timetable for establishing federal regulations governing commercial leasing.
Shell has been deliberately low-key about their R&D, wanting to avoid the hype, and the disappointment, that surrounded the last oil-shale boom. But O'Connor said the results have been sufficiently encouraging they are gradually getting more open. Starting next week, they will be holding public hearings in northwest Colorado.
I'll say it again. Wow.
Probably nothing. ANWR is a conventional oil deposit and would require conventional drilling techniques.
This process appears to only apply to oil shale deposits. Some variation of it might be applicable to tar sand deposits.
With out refineries to turn it into gas, it won't matter! We need refineries first! Bush should mandate that every state must build at least 1 new refinery, or every consumer in that state that refuses to build one will automatically pay an extra buck a gallon in taxes!
Now its a matter of national security!
>1 million barrels a day is the present out put of the Gulf
>of Mexico - according to a story about what happens with a
>shut down of the LA refiners. This is 25% of our daily
>use, so this one area added to the gulf would give up 50% >and Texas still provides more than the gulf.
>this story give you hope that a number of sources will
>soon change how we run America - nuke, clean coal, gas and
>ANWAR.
Our daily use is 20.4 million barrels a day in this country (average daily usage for the 1st 10 monthes of 2004)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html#oil
If you can come up with a more reputable source than the Department of Energy let me know and post it. The current output from the Gulf of Mexico is 1.6 million barrels a day, and onshore Texas is 1.1 million barrels a day.
1 to 2 million barrels a day would amount to 5-10% of daily usage no more and probably less as demand gradually increases. Shell achieved and impressive 5 barrel a day average (1500 barrels over the course of a year). If they can multiply what they did by 10,000 or 100,000 great. If not its an interesting but in the end not very significant process.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.
I would guess that's it's a function of how much oil is there, and how deep it is. I suspect it's pretty shallow. The tar sands in Canada are being strip mined like coal.
The energy for freezing and heating I suspect is the same source. You'd use a heat pump to heat the center and freeze the perimeter simultaneously.
If Shell is talking about spending their own money here. Or, worst case, getting some kind of guaranteed contract with airline, government, someone, so they can pay for the work out of profits, then you needn't be suspicious. This won't get done if Shell doesn't make the cash.
"Excepting Africa."
I beg to differ. It will take 2 to 3 decades, but the transforming power of Christianity will topple the dictatorships, and Africa will rise from the ashes.
Anyone wanting to fight terrorism and poverty long term should be donating money to church organizations doing missionary work in Africa and televangelism in the Middle East.
NOT MY analysis, BTW. Comes from several university studies of a few years ago, making it somewhat suspect.
Unless, of course, you LIVE it every time one ventures from one's home in Atlanta or another large US city.
New Orleans seems to have solved THEIR vehicular traffic problem for a while, however.
In the case of energy, it simply is not scarce. One, the term itself is a misnomer, as it is entropy relations governed by flow of energy per unit time (power) across an entropy differential, that does work. Energy sensu stricto is absolutely conserved, as a law of nature. It is only shunted around and rearranged differently, never created or destroyed.
Even of power sources supplying continual energy flows across an entropy gradient, there is no scarcity. The sun pours 200 times as much onto the earth continually, as all life (let alone just us) has ever used. And there is more nuclear power in the earth's crust than mankind could use in thousands of years, even with energy consumption rising continually the entire time. The absolute order to live off of exists in matter itself, which "wants" to change into low energy photons spreading in all directions.
All fossile fuels are simply old bio fuels, and all bio fuels are simply organic solar power. No one has ever even demonstrated that more fossile fuel is currently being used than is currently being made, since the making process is so diffuse. But even if we are using it a thousand times or a million times faster than it forms, it formed for hundreds of millions of years.
And since only capital scarcity limits our access to unlimited power from uranium and direct solar, it makes no sense to sacrifice capital, the actually scarce factor, to spare fossile fuel sitting in the ground helping nobody. The sensible use to make of it is to get energy from the capital-cheap sources while capital is relatively scarce - which is the present - and those sources are relatively abundant - which is the present. And then to shift to capital-expensive sources when capital is relatively abundant - which it will be in the future - and those sources are relatively scarce - which will be in the future.
The transition is occasioned by price. When the capital spent on nukes generates several times the power that same capital spent on fossile fuels does, people will use more nukes and less fossile fuel. And this point must happen at some point, as capital becomes more adundant and fossile sources become more scarce. The same is true, probably long, long after that, for uranium to solar transitions. Eventually it will get hard to find uranium ore at high grades - not because it isn't there, we know there is enough for thousands of years of vastly expanded use from overall radiation counts in the crust - but because it may become hard to get at, just as shale oil is harder to get at than light sweet crude.
There is no absolute scarcity of anything. There are just limits set by the present level of our technology and our available capital. Within those limits, the signal that tells us which makes the most efficient use of the things that are actually scarce, as opposed to "finite" in the abstract and subject to green handwaving arguments, is price. Refusal of this proposition is the sure sign of economic ignorance and desire for central planning amongst green luddites.
tar sands can be dug.
The energy ratio of 1 in to 3.5 out is in the article. The energy input can, and should, be stationary sources not compatible with mobile use. Like wind, solar, nuclear, or coal.
All this oil shale will be tapped, it's only a matter of when. At 3.09/gal gas, even ANWR is on the table with the leftie idiots.
This is why it's obvious that the ANWR argument was merely a money making sales pitch with the greenies. They may be whacko, but they're not stupid. They know full well that at some price we'll tear down the Washington monument and replace it with an oil derrik. ANWR will be drilled someday. And probably soon. That oil isn't going anywhere until we pump it.
I'm sure they can be dug up cheaper than oil shale can be, but there may be some additional cost saving if this process could be adapted in some way to be used on them.
The impression that I get from the article is that there's a major cost benefit in leaving the rock in place while the extraction is being done. That benefit may or may not be there for tar sands.
Assuming that Shell's estimate of $30 oil in this formation, I'd guess that until this field is tapped out, that caps oil costs at something like $35.
Commodity markets operate at somewhere close to the price to produce the product at it's most expensive production site, when enough production sites are on-line to feed demand.
So the Saudi's have it easy. They can pump at $4 all day, no brainer. When enough of these shale fields are on line to effect market prices, assuming this is the most expensive oil on the planet, it will cap the market price at that point. This is assuming that there is enough production on-line to feed demand. That apparently isn't the case right now, so we'll see what happens.
I'd assume we've got $35 dollar oil for the rest of my life (Steve Forbes estemated this price the other day).
But, if I were an oil company and had a choice of selling oil that cost $4 to get and oil that cost $30 to get, what would I choose? Hmm, that's hard.
thanks for your more detailed and accurate post. As I said, I was repeating a NEWS story - my mistake.
"Wow" is right!!
Atlanta's problems are probably nothing compared to Washington DC. Washington's chief problem is that the Federal government keeps getting more and more huge, and it has to locate everything within 10 miles of prime Maryland swampland. I'd rate Marta over the Metro, btw. But I'd say a healthy pair of legs, a car, and non-dictatorial zoning laws trumps both.
That's unconstitutional. The federal government can't levy a tax unevenly depending upon what state the taxpayer resides in.
Well, I don't know. We've been at it in Africa for about 1,940 years, and it hasn't worked out yet. Plus, we're losing ground now to Islam.
That's unconstitutional. The federal government can't levy a tax unevenly depending upon what state the taxpayer resides in.
That's true but I think the feds could allocate more (or less) federal highway funds based on new refinery construction. :=)
My presumption is based on the strong-arming of the 'federal' 55-mph speed limit. Imposing it directly wouldn't have been constitutional but forcing it via highway funding threats apparently was.
Good.
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