Posted on 05/13/2012 7:36:35 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
In case you missed it – and you very well might have, since the media was too busy talking about gay marriage to be bothered – a rather remarkable thing happened in Washington this week. An auditor from the GAO testified before the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment on the subject of energy. But instead of hearing about how horrible things are, she calmly delivered something of a bombshell.
“The Green River Formation–an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming–contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale,”Anu K. Mittal, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment said in written testimony submitted to the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment.
“USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions,” Mittal testified.
“The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered,” Mittal told the subcommittee. “At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”
Read those last two sentences again and think about it for a moment. The largest remaining reserves of oil on the planet are not in Saudi Arabia or buried under the frozen steppes of the former Soviet Union. They’re here in the United States. Combined with the massive resources in western Canada, that means that North America is the King of Oil for the future. But what – if anything – will we do about it?
The vast majority of this supply is shale oil, a form which was essentially useless to us only a few decades ago, but now we know how to get it. And if you want to avoid ripping up the entire landscape, that means horizontal drilling and fracking. Unfortunately for us, this is one of those rare areas where the government actually can make a difference, for better or worse. The Obama administration continues to claim that they are pursuing an “all of the above” energy policy, but at the same time they are jumping in with new regulations regarding fracking.
If we move forward on this aggressively, the industry can safely access these resources which would significantly strengthen our hand on the international stage. But with the wrong approach, Washington could hog tie energy developers with excessive, expensive regulations or shut the entire process down by failing to issue permits to develop resources on these federal lands.
The public disclosure of these reserves is good news, but it’s only the beginning. And while I feel some trepidation in saying it, I’m afraid the ball is in Barack Obama’s court.
Don't forget, much of the continental shelf off the eastern and west coasts of the continental USA has yet to be touched by any oil rig--and geologists estimate there may be HUGE reserves of oil sitting there. And that's not including the continental shelves off the coasts of other continents, and the fact most of Siberia has yet to be explored for oil and natural gas reserves. And finally, developments in growing oil-laden algae on a huge scale could make it a base to make all known motor fuels.
In short, the whole idea of Peak Oil--which has been pronounced as far back as 1911--is total baloney.
yep.
And I thought the only way to get the oil was to cook it.
Pretty much. It is locked in a near or at surface shale, too shallow to frac and with no overburden pressure to force it into a reservoir. Much of the Book Cliffs area has exposures of the Green River Shale.
As an aside, the US Govt. tried freeing the hydrocarbons a few decades back with a small nuclear device. That didn't produce the desired results. There was also a pilot project to cook the oil out of the mined shale at Parachute, CO, (UNOCAL, I think). It shud down in the '80s when the price of oil crashed, and would likely be EPA'd out of existence today.
Reading the actual report, there are ‘challenges’
“Uncertainty about viable technologies. A significant challenge to the development of oil shale lies in the uncertainty surrounding the viability of current technologies to economically extract oil from oil shale.
To extract the oil, the rock needs to be heated to very high temperatures—ranging from about 650 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit — in a process known as retorting. Retorting can be accomplished primarily by two methods. One method involves mining the oil shale, bringing it to the surface, and heating it in a vessel known as a retort.
Mining oil shale and retorting it has been demonstrated in the United States and is currently done to a limited extent in Estonia, China, and Brazil. However, a commercial mining operation with surface retorts has never been developed in the United States because the oil it produces competes directly with conventional crude oil, which historically has been less expensive to produce.
The other method, known as an in-situ process, involves drilling holes into the oil shale, inserting heaters to heat the rock, and then collecting the oil as it is freed from the rock. Some in-situ technologies have been demonstrated on very small scales, but other technologies have yet to be proven, and none has been shown to be economically or environmentally viable at a commercial scale. According to some energy experts, the key to developing our country’s oil shale is the development of an in-situ process because most of the richest oil shale is buried beneath hundreds to thousands of feet of rock, making mining difficult or impossible.
In addition to these uncertainties, transporting the oil produced from oil shale to refineries may pose challenges because pipelines and major highways are not prolific in
the remote areas where the oil shale is located, and the large-scale”
Nothing, until we get a Republican President and a reasonably conservative to moderate Congress.
Peak oil is not about the amount of oil as much as it is about the cost of procuring it. There will always be oil, but many will be priced on of access to it and it’s products .... unlike the boom years.
Obama? No. It's the new technology of fracking and the boom of new energy found on private lands.
Remove Obama, and the liberals in Congress, and we could potentially be a net exporter by 2040, or sooner.
Reading the actual report, the oil is buried very deep, not at the surface.
Actual report here:
http://science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/hearings/HHRG-112-%20SY20-WState-AMittal-20120510.pdf
Ping.
Sarah Palin for Energy Secretary in a Romney administration.
bflr
Where were these "bipartisan NIMBYs" when the Powder River Basin became the world's largest strip mine?
The actual good news is here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-rig-workers-nearly-100-140600665.html
I saw a guy on TV once who had this medium sized box, like a breadbox, with a spigot on it.
He put a rock in the box, a beaker under the spigot, and turned it on - a few minutes later, the beaker was half filled with fairly clean oil.
It was a modded microwave - it literally boils the oil out of the rocks without actually heating the shale.
It is not really crude oil, but a substance that can be converted to oil called kerogen. The cost in both money and energy are excessive as I discussed in this thread yesterday.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2882771/posts
Many confuse it with the shale oil being produced in North Dakota and Montana. They are not even close to being the same.
Up to one half or more of it is presently recoverable using horizontal drilling and fracking technology. But one problem, almost all of it lies under federal land. IMO, we can kiss it off, for no way will the *^%$#&@! asshats in congress and this administration allow it to be developed.
Horizontal drilling and fracking will not work for the Green River formation.
From the report:
“• Uncertainty about viable technologies. A significant challenge to the development of oil shale lies in the uncertainty surrounding the viability of current technologies to economically extract oil from oil shale. To extract the oil, the rock needs to be heated to very high temperatures—ranging from about 650 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit— in a process known as retorting. Retorting can be accomplished primarily by two methods. One method involves mining the oil shale, bringing it to the surface, and heating it in a vessel known as a retort. Mining oil shale and retorting it has been demonstrated in the United States and is currently done to a limited extent in Estonia, China, and Brazil. However, a commercial mining operation with surface retorts has never been developed in the United States because the oil it produces competes directly with conventional crude oil, which historically has been less expensive to produce. The other method, known as an in-situ process, involves drilling holes into the oil shale, inserting heaters to heat the rock, and then collecting the oil as it is freed from the rock. Some in-situ technologies have been demonstrated on very small scales, but other technologies have yet to be proven, and none has been shown to be economically or environmentally viable at a commercial scale. According to some energy experts, the key to developing our country’s oil shale is the development of an in-situ process because most of the richest oil shale is buried beneath hundreds to thousands of feet of rock, making mining difficult or impossible. In addition to these uncertainties, transporting the oil produced from oil shale to refineries may pose challenges because pipelines and major highways are not prolific in the remote areas where the oil shale is located, and the large-scale infrastructure that would be needed to supply power to heat the oil shale is lacking.”
Yep, they are invested in solar panels and wind turbines.
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