Posted on 06/07/2008 12:10:09 PM PDT by Donald Rumsfeld Fan
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- You'd think this would be oil shale's moment.
You'd think with gas prices topping $4 and consumers crying uncle, Congress would be moving fast to spur development of a domestic oil resource so vast - 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone - it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.
You'd think politicians would be tripping over themselves to arrange photo-ops with Harold Vinegar (whom I profiled in Fortune last November), the brilliant, Brooklyn-born chief scientist at Royal Dutch Shell whose research cracked the code on how to efficiently and cleanly convert oil shale - a rock-like fossil fuel known to geologists as kerogen - into light crude oil.
You'd think all of this, but you'd be wrong.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
A question might be how the rate of production would be from one well site.
Easy enough for yout to miss your own point?
That’s a telling statement.
We’re interested in rate of production rather than how much might be in the rock.
One of the problems with oil shale extraction has been the quantity of water required. The Colorado river flows through oil shale country but virtually all of the water is already spoken for by those downstream. Do you know if the Shell process addresses this concern?
My point is that we are in Peak Oil condition now. If anything happens such as blockage of the Strait of Hormuz there will be severe troop movement worldwide.
The extensions are amusing, but they are yours.
I think the video in post #74 addresses the Colorado water issue.
My understanding is that it takes about three barrels of water to produce one of shale oil and it can be recycled on site. The constraint on the availability of water is purely economic. Water costs about a penny a cubic foot (if that), with about eight cubic feet per barrel. With water at $0.08/barrel and oil at $140.00, I think they’ll be glad to truck it in. (They would, of course, prefer to us available local supplies.)
Incidentally, i heard the break-even point for oil shale drilling is around $80/barrel.
“If you can’t beat ‘em; eat ‘em.”
- Idi Amin
Not one well. Many wells. But drill in an environmentally sensitive low foot print way, utilizing the best technology possible. That should be written into their contracts.
If it's impossible then no one will bid.
There is been a lot of good discussion on this thread. One FYI that seems to be needed is that “in situ” is retorted below ground. There can be no doubt that environmentalist control of the Democratic Party and a significant number of Rino’s is at fault for the current “energy crisis”
The Global Warming Hoax drives the madness and the energy companies, looking to jump on the bandwagon are themselves enablers. Many of you may have noticed some of the “green” commercials from oil companies of late.
There is no “can America become energy independent?”. We can it is a matter of doing. We have oil shale and we have a lot of energy in coal. Coal to Diesel, under some of the new processes (basically FT, with new scrubbing Tech) is viable when oil is at least $70/bbl.
What we have is an impasse on this issue that will not soon be remedied. The AGW hucksters have the people convinced and Government is not about to rock that boat in any meaningful way. The oil companies are afraid to invest and we are talking about huge investments here. There are some energy companies who will make a few investments in experimental processes, little beyond that. Energy companies are afraid of making this big investment and then being shot down. All we can do is support these companies when they try to move forward to meet our vast energy demands and let our voices be heard. Let there be no doubts, we CAN do it. The question is WILL we allow environmentalists to shout us down. We CAN do it, but WILL we?
It's my understanding they are going to recycle their water.
Yeah, we've heard that for three decades now. I don't know anyone active in the industry who agrees with that conclusion.
But as long as we have people who tell us what we can't do economically, or whatever profits we make will be taken from us to distribute to Democrat voters, it just doesn't matter.
The liberals are determined to make us into a Peak Oil situation. It disturbs me that you're a willing ally.
The rate of production from a single well is irrelevant. We drill as many as there are available drilling rigs and labour as and the the cost is approximately $80/barrel.
In general you are accurately characterizing the process. I guess I see this process as potentially helpful, but not something that is going to replace conventional oil anytime soon.
Not that Shell shouldn't try, but I saw the pictures of the pilot and it did not look simple. The very small pilot had more than a dozen pump jacks and what appeared to be the heat source plumbing made the entire surface of the place [maybe a couple of acres?] look like a solid mass of metal. Around the heated area is more infrastructure to support the freeze wall to keep the oil that has been cooked from the kerogen from migrating into ground water. To make the process work at scale would require massive amounts of electrical generation capacity that would have to be built. If if gets done, I hope its nuclear, but whatever it is, it needs to be built pronto.
Water constraints? I just don't know. I know there isn't much excess water in the Green / Colorado, but if it comes down to shale production versus decorative ponds in Las Vegas / raising alfalfa in Yuma / cotton in Maricopa, I hope the water rights issues can be worked out. I have read the popular press reports of water requirements and they made no sense to me. In one paragraph the reports indicated that the water was necessary to upgrade the stuff that cooked out of the kerogen, and the same paragraph described the unprocessed stuff as a fine light crude oil that could be piped out the area without upgrading requirements. Who knows?
The point is that the Green River Formation oil shales shouldn't be equated to four or five Ghawars just waiting for a drill bit [or even a drill bit, sea water injection facilities, GOSPs, oil pipelines etc. etc. etc.] One Ghawar would get the U.S. back to its conventional crude peak. Three incremental Ghawars to balance domestic production and consumption without further growth.
I hope Shell is successful, but I also want everyone expecting a miracle to get the picture about scale required to make a big difference, the investment required even for the first pilot, and what is likely over the next five of ten years [a period which if we are at or close to peak is going to be nasty.]
It is time for those Colorado politicians to be recalled!
If you check Shell’s site you’ll find they have been buying water rights.
Well, Shell sure as hell thought it could be so, having already poured some $130 billion into R&D on it, and developed a nifty in-situ production process that generated light sweet crude. They only wanted to have the federal/state issues resolved before sinking any more money into leases, which Salazar effectively stopped.
With oil at $140/barrel, it’s probably economical to truck it in from Manitoba.
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