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.”
The problem is that it has to be commercially viable, that is it has to compete with the price of oil from other sources. If it costs $200 per barrel to produce and the current oil price is $100 you can only lose money by doing it becuse no one will be standing in line to buy your $200 oil.
I am in the oil business and I know plenty of places that I could go drill a well, be it a very low volume, and produce it at a $200 per barrel cost, but I am sane.
Maybe someday when all the oil from other sources is gone it will work.
And the key word is “thousands.” Kerogen in nature converts to oil under sufficient pressure and temperature. There is a temperature gradient as depth increases, using present horizontal drilling and fracking technology shale oil is now being produced around the world.
If in-situ heat was introduced at depths where the richest deposits are located and temperatures are already moderately high. It would not take that much to artificially tip the scales and create the process.