222 comments on DrumBeat: November 18, 2008
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222 comments on DrumBeat: November 18, 2008
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Yah, I agree. I don't think producing that oil shale is going to turn out to be a very good idea: There are two ways to produce oil from oil shale that I know of. The first is to surface mine it where on average you get about 1-30 gallons of oil per ton of waste rock. They do get as high as 100 gallons per ton of waste rock though.
To put that in perspective, to get a ton of pig iron you need 1.6 tons of banded iron formation iron ore. Just do the math there, you're getting 1-100 gallons of oil out for just about the same amount of waste rock as you get for half a ton of raw iron. On the other side of the metal spectrum is gold where you have one ounce of gold refined for every 30 tons of waste rock. Because of this, the price of gold is 735$ per ounce right now. I have no idea what the price of oil will be at one gallon oil per ton of waste rock, but it'll be too high to burn, that's for sure. Also, once mined, that gold is very profitably recycled, try recycling that oil.
The other way to mine oil shale is in situ retorting, but for that you need steam, which means you need water. For the Green River shale (which is the oil shale), the only source of water in the area that I know of is the Green River which flows into the Colorado. The Colorado's water is all spoken for already, by the time it gets to Mexico it's not even flowing any more. Anyone who wants to produce oil shale using Green River water will have to fight off LA, Las Vegas and just about every other municipality and residential area between Wyoming and California that uses that water. I don't know, maybe there's some salty groundwater they could use that would avoid this.
From the article:
But I can't guess what Obama will do until he picks his energy secretary.
How much oil does it take just to move a ton of rock around?
Seems like there is a third option -- dig a giant hole, put a thermonuclear device in and blow it up. The resulting heat and pressure should make oil out of the shale, which in due course could be pumped up out of the hole. I suppose we might have to wait a while for the radiation to go down, though.
I'm looking for investors....
that idea is not as far fetched as you might imagine, the us doe, your tax $'s at work, attempted such a stunt in western colorado. an attempt to fracture the rock with a "small" blast to stimulate gas production. and they were succesful in fracturing the rock but as you have guessed, the produced gas was radioactive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare
Now there's a justification for CO2 sequestration if I ever saw one.
This doesn't even take into account the EROEI problems that come into play... We're definitely scraping the bottom of the barrel, both figuratively and literally, if we are pinning our hopes on oil shale.
Source1 definitely says theres over 10 gallons/ton in the green river formation which means it'd be at least 7x the oil return you decided to stick with for your entire comment, which is still 1/4 of the average you claimed.
All I'm saying is even when your facts are right, perpetuating a dogma by using extremes is a terrible thing to do. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm tired of getting my facts with a side of doom (or cornucopian bs).
1: http://fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/publications/Pubs-NPR/40010-3...
On page 185 of the third edition of Resources of the Earth by James R. Craig et al., they quote the Green River shale as giving no more than "1 to 15 gallons of oil per metric tons... hence, their extraction for oil is not feasible for the foreseeable future."
Additionally, you misrepresented the intent of my comment. Here, I'll quote it for you again since you seem to have missed it:
What I said was that 1 gallon per ton is too low "for sure". I'm not entirely certain about the higher values, so I didn't say anything, which you incorrectly assumed I did. According to the above reference, even 15 gallons per ton waste rock is too low.
Finally, I have serious doubts about the objectivity of your reference -- it's an oil and gas trade magazine. I'm not entirely sure it's wrong, that's why in my comment I said, "I don't think producing that oil shale is going to turn out to be a very good idea" instead of "I know that producing oil shale isn't going to turn out to be a very good idea."
First and formost, I apologize for being rude. Once you read so much doomer crud you start to see it in everything. I was annoyed with the repeated one barrell reference, and unjustly rebutted your opinion.