<DrumBeat: June 18, 2006 The Oil Drum A Megaproject list from the Oil and Gas Journal>

217 comments on "Oil Shale Development Imminent"

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Bubba on June 18, 2006 - 4:45pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I guess here at TOD we have to address these same issues every 6 months or so for those new individuals who haven't been involved in the previous discussions.  Sometimes it does seem like a game of "Whack-a-mole" every time these issues come up again.  

I think we need to add articles about oil shale, tar sands, renewables, ethanol, etc. to the TOD tab titled "First time here?"

Before I found TOD I started a series of blog posts at Belly of the Beast about all of the supposed technologies that were potentially going to save us from Peak Oil. The first one was called "Oil Shale will Save us".

There are also numerous comments on Shell's process at this previous TOD post called Denver Post: Oil shale may be fool's gold

Steve Mut, Shell's managing director for its oil shale progam stated at the ASPO-USA conference last November in Denver stating the following (as reported by TOD's Stuart Staniford:


In response to questions, Steve guesstimated that oil shale production would still be pretty negligible by 2015, but might, if things go really well, get to 5mbpd by 2030. He thought the chance of getting to 10mbpd was very tiny. If oil prices went to $100/barrel, there might end up being a trillion barrels of reserves recoverable.


This is the Shell's main cheerleader for their technology, so take his estimates with a grain of salt.  But even if we took them at face value, 5 mmbopd by 2030 is a drop in the bucket.  Even according to Daniel Yergin we will be past the Peak by then.  

To every investor I meet I tell then not to invest one single dime on oil shale.  It is truly "Fools Gold".

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Barb on June 18, 2006 - 5:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Under U.S. securities laws, executives and spokespersons for publicly traded companies, like Shell, must be extremely careful in what they say to the investing public.  The penalities for making false or misleading statements can be enormous.  Consequently, the statements made by this Shell executive were either completely straitforward or likely a bit pessimistic on the prospects for Shell's technology in order to avoid shareholder suits.  

This fellow's remarks were lawyered up accordingly, and should not be considered to be cheerleading by any stretch of the imagination unless the speaker has gone completely off the reservation.  

The cheerleaders in the whole scheme are analysts and brokers employed by the various and numerous investment and brokerage houses.

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Big Gav on June 21, 2006 - 7:30am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ah shale oil - they should rename it snake oil (a mere 2 consonant change).

I too have bagged shale oil before - and I agree with Robert that the EROEI is likely to be 1 or less.

http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2005/08/question-of-shale.html

Quoting M King Hubbert:

You read about "oil from shale", right? You heard about 1,000 billion barrels of oil out west? Don't get excited, it's going to stay there. Dr. Hubbert told the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs it wouldn't work, three years ago this month.

It really sounds simple. You "simply" dig up such enormous quantities of shale (1.88 million tons a day,) that it's equal to digging a Panama Canal every week. You crush it fine and heat to 1,100 degrees in a retort to boil off the oil locked in the rock. Then you get rid of the rock. Only now it's turned caustic and has increased in bulk by 20% to 33%. So you back-fill the leftovers, called tailings, into the hole you dug it out of. Since you still have a lot left over, you dump it into the empty scenic canyons of the west. To do this you need to grab off 89% of the undeveloped water of Colorado and Utah and half of Wyoming's. Oh yes, and you turn the Colorado River system into alkaline salts which means you wreck the agriculture in Colorado, Arizona and southern California. What will this get you? 1-1/2 million barrels of oil a day out of the 17 million per day that the U.S. is using!

A news item in the Milwaukee Journal of August 29, 1976,25 says that the last of the oil shale development companies, Standard Oil, Gulf, Shell and Ashland, have walked away from the projects in Colorado and Utah, asking the Department of the Interior to release them from paying any more on their leases. Standard and Gulf have already paid $126 million of the $210 million they bid, and Shell and Ashland have paid about $70 million of the $117.8 million they bid. You have to admit they tried, really tried and they spent a big buck to make it work, but it won't.

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217 comments on "Oil Shale Development Imminent"

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