 | Bloomberg: Goldman's Murti Says `Peak Oil' Risks Sending Prices Above $105 | The Oil Drum | Well I never . . . . |  |
Denver Post: Oil shale may be fool's gold
Posted by Prof. Goose on December 19, 2005 - 5:00pm
"Buried underground in western Colorado are a trillion tons of oil shale. For a century, men have tried and tried again to unlock this energy source. But the rocks have proved stubborn, promising much, delivering little." (link)
“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
This reminds me of a comment by a big industrial gas user in Canada, "using natural gas to obtain oil from tar sands is like burning $100 bills to light candles."
Having said that, the engineers at Shell claim that they think the underground oil shale process is energy positive. One of the things that was not mentioned in the Post article is that (at least insofar as I understand the process) they are going to freeze the underground perimeter of the sites in order to keep groundwater from leaching out the contaminants, i.e, a "freeze dam."
They are heating up cubic miles of dirt to 700 degrees and freezing the perimeter.
I love their great environmental concern about the groundwater but I think it's typical horseshit. What they really want is to keep the oil from leaching away from their drill holes and also to keep groundwater from leaching IN to cool their heaters.
What are they going to do on the surface? Foam it with heat insulating plastic? Gets pretty cold in the winter.
My hunch says this dog won't hunt. It's hilarious that we're even discussing such a ludicrous and 'on the face of it' Rube Goldberg proposal.
You were mighty quick on the draw with those comments - they're exactly what I was thinking .
I'm sure they will conveniently leave out the small matter of the energy required to make their big ole hockey rink but it will surely cost a fortune...
Hello Oil Drum - thanks for checking out my first comment on your site.
This is a link to a somewhat more positive report on oil shale on the Daily Reckoning (via the Energy Bulletin). If this does work, we are going to see the biggest oil/mining boom in history. However, for the time being, I'm in the skeptics' corner.
If you find it I would love to see it because my copy of the same (or similar) article is also misplaced.
Some sanity, finally, from one of my local newspapers.
He has been drumming it in the Listeners ears for over a decade that the Oil Shale of our western states Is trillions of barrels of oil. But like most others that spout the glories of the Plenty, he lacks the understanding that energy is not money in getting things out of the ground. If this were a money issue, we would be rolling in Tubs of oil before dinner, but this is an energy issue.
If I have to climb 7 flights of stairs to get my Breakfast toast and coffee every morning, I am not going to over time gain a lot of fat energy from the meal.
Though I have heard that the oil shale make great fireplace bricks for the pyro in your family.
His views on the latter are particularly laughable and could be easily dismissed were it not for the fact that literally several million people religiously listen to him and take his word as The Truth From On High.
A person like him can do incalucable damage to any effort to develop an informed public understanding of what the real energy problems are. I haven't listened to him for years, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear him tout up abiotic oil as proof positive that all this peak oil baloney is just the ravings of leftist environmenal wackos bent on destroying the American Way of Life.
If the Shell process works as advertised, there are some benefits. Any excess carbon is supposed to stay in the ground along with any heavy metals that happen to be there. And there's a boatload of oil shale. But coal liquifaction can be clean too, if you work at it. And if the correct answer is that X<Y, then it would seem logical to do coal liquifaction first and get around to the oil shale later if you need it.
OK in 100 years time we can have some alternative fossil fuels when CO2 is under control.
This is a link to the full length version of the Shale Oil article.
The freeze wall concept, in theory, is a good one. As conceptualized, it keeps the ground water out and the pyrolysis gas and by products in. And I do know, that at least some of the engineers at Shell, calculate the energy required to create and maintain the freezewall in their estimates of energy balance. Overall it is not a large percentage of the total energy required (I am guessing about 10%).
Bigger errors come in estimating the efficiency of the process. Heater failure, anisotropic thermal behavior of the rock, overcooking and undercooking, in-situ coking of the resource, non-geometrical heating patterns, heat losses to the underburden, overburden, and outside the pattern, poor product recovery due to poor flow paths from heated zones to production wells, loss of heat to boiling groundwater, loss of heat due to thermal decomposition of minerals etc. etc. etc.
The biggest problem with the freeze wall (and there are many problems) is that it has to be 100% reliable - 99.99% is not good enough. A tiny crack in the damn thing lets a stream of warm ground water through the wall that very quickly becomes a major breach. Such a leak is undetectable and irreparable until the water on both sides of the wall comes to hydraulic equilibrium. In the mean time, many millions (billions?) of gallons of water have leaked in to pyrolysis area stealing heat required for the pyrolysis reaction, getting contaminated with volatile organic compounds (BTEX) and probably creating an underground steam explosion.
Some other questions for Shell.
(I am presuming that they are more observant than some un-named company who did not notice that there was a sewer running next to a planned freeze wall in one of those large cities built around an island somewhere on the East Coast. Rumor has it (who would have a photo?) that the wall melted after the excavation had left the sewer line high in the wall. Tsk!)
Theoretically, these ice walls are self healing, but even a small trickle of 80 deg F ground water moving with any velocity at all will make it through the wall without being frozen. It can't be cooled quick enough by rock that is 20 deg F. Once it makes it through the wall the stream will continue, constantly adding heat to the conduit of the leak and making it bigger.
The calculations are not that difficult, but do a quick experiment. Drag your garden hose out on a cold dry day when it has been freezing for days and the surface of the ground is below 25 F. Turn it to a moderate trickle, and let it run down a moderately sloped concrete driveway (Caution, may make driving more hazardous) Measure how far it goes before it freezes. If it goes more than 20 ft it has breached the thickness of the wall. Now assume that the water is much warmer than your hose and is under hundreds of psi pressure pushing it through the wall.
In terms of monitoring the freeze wall itself, you have to understand the scale of things that are being considered for these oil shale projects. Oil shale in various parts of the Piceance Basin has richnesses of 1-2 million barrels per acre. Assuming 1 million barrels per acre and 100% conversion and recovery of the resource (unrealistic, but go with me here), a 100,000 BOPD project eats up an acre every 10 days. Every 3 years they go thorough about 100 acres. About every 5 years they would pyrolyze 160 acres. If you were to isolate 160 acres in one freeze wall, it would be a linear mile in length (assuming a rectangle) and it would be between 1000 and 2000 ft deep in the ground. That is a hell of a large volume of rock to try to monitor (assuming you could at all).
The other thing to understand is the nature of the rock itself. The Parachute Creek Member of the Green River Formation is a organic rich fractured marlstone. It is a fresh water aquifer, but all the water is contained within fractures in the rock. This water makes up a very small part of the bulk volume of what is under the ground. There is no appreciable matrix porosity or pore water. So when you make an ice wall of this stuff, you are really making a lot of cold rock with frozen water in the fractures.
All it takes is one small tectonic or man made event to open one of these fractures up to breach that wall. Once the wall is breached, it is over.
I'm not sure the may is needed. A person in the reality-based community can see Shale is a complete waste of resources.
Just like LNG for electricity production..a total farce.
HEY----HERE'S ANOTHER DAMNED CHART. CHECK OUT MY POINTER! IT HAS A LITHIUM BATTERY! WOOHOOOO!
We deserve to die.
I would like to say I think your conclusion is wrong but, in all honesty, I can't.
Look on the bright side though, half of us probably will pretty soon. I'll hope those left can learn from our mistakes and redeem our species.
Nor have I decided whether I do want to live through what happens soon, I will probably decide on the basis of whether I think my life will be tolerable and whether I can make a worthwhile contribution to things then. I'm a tad over 50 and have as much curiousity as fear of death; though it probably won't be a comfortable experience it's not one I feel a need to run from.
I will probably be in a better position to choose how the coin falls than over 90% of humans, so the odds are I would survive if I so chose.
Careful with those assumptions, Eugene ;)
You are right, we are programmed to think that way: that we will survive. But that doesn't make us correct in thinking so.
For Brook... Yes, we are almost certainly in overshoot, and the sooner we go through the pain of adjustment the better. The odds for everyone alive now get worse the longer it is postponed. Could be it can be done in a managed way if we get our act together now, but unlikely. Also unlikely that we will choose to do it in a fair and managed way, if current policies are anything to go by.
You've done the first step - you've opened your eyes.
So, priority 1 for you, in your son's interest, is to spread awareness and annoy your politicians into waking up about this and get them to do something constructive. It may be the difference between one third and two thirds die off, or 10% and 90%, who can tell yet? Put together a CD of mp3s of lectures and interviews about peak oil and its consequences, make lots of copies, give them to your friends and family, ask them to give a copy to theirs.
Priority 2 is to let your awareness guide your own lifestyle in society as it is now. Do your bit to minimise fossil hydrocarbon use.
Priority 3 is to prepare, in case. Develop skills that may become useful, become able to grow vegetables. Money may or not have any currency in future; useful and practical items and (manual) tools always have worth. What is most appropriate will depend on how things unfold, I think there is time (several years) yet.
But don't throw out Cherenkov's words: "We deserve to die". In the abstract context he used them they're probably a fair judgement, don't take it personal. Who lives or dies is rarely a question of who deserves what. Think more of the future and being / becoming one deserving of life if you have that fortune, and do your best to raise your son in that way, too.
If I wanted to give up and prepare for the End Times there are a lot of other blogs I could read.
If we are in overshoot, then there will be a lot less people alive in 2100 than there are now. Nothing we do can stop that. What we might yet be able to do is have some control over how population is reduced. If shale oil is a practical energy source, then it might give us more time to work out solutions to our population problems without billions of people dying of starvation, disease and war.
Environmentally it will be a disaster, I don't doubt. But we are in a situation where there are no clean solutions, I think.
First, to speak to your instinct to survive. You see, giving up is not in the lexicon of any healthy species. Sure, a few mentally ill people kill themselves and/or willingly go to war, but they are insane. (I know, I know. The soldiers, each and every one, believe someone else will die, not them.) Your stating, "I don't plan to give up that easy," is missing the point. The techno apologists are not giving up. They are striving as best they can to maintain business as usual, and, as for myself, I'm not giving up. My world is narrowing to a low energy use paradigm. I am looking to solidify and develop a working local network of producers of life's goods. And, most importantly, I try to shake up the complacent techno worshippers who seem to believe in technology much like Easter Islanders believed their technology would never let them down. There will be rough times ahead, but to call them end times is one of our particular society's peccadilloes, believing ourselves to be somehow special, too smart to be part of a dieoff, too full of Hollywood style gumption to watch our entropy machine die a simple death. In fact, the typical American's "go it alone" mentality is exactly why the machine will tilt and fall slowly to the ground in a spectacular crash that will blacken this society's outlook for centuries.
The problem with not preparing for the inevitable "rough times," is that it is actually a form of "giving up" -- a stupid and macho type of giving up. Not preparing is like standing in a tunnel with your son in your arms while a whistle blows far down the tunnel. You say, "I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to run. I'm going to put my son down on these cross ties and read this cheery article about hydrogen cars in my latest issue of "Head in the Sand News." Meanwhile, the circle of light at the end of the tunnel dims then disappears. A roar deafens you, but you are determined to do the "Happy Tech Times Crossword Puzzle." Hmmm. What's a four letter word for too macho to heed an obvious and dire warning? Hmmm....dead?
I have sad news. Call it what you may, but there is a change a comin' and it won't be pretty.
Remember, technos are only too willing to kill one part of the natural system in order to maintain another unhealthy part. Now that we have hit the cheap energy summit, there is nothing left but devolution from techno-man to nature-man. We either realize the simple physics of entropy, or we can continue to live in the techno fantasy that we can support 6.8 billion people with infinite growth.
As for my children....it is tough. My kid in college holds onto the techno view -- something will save our butts and allow her to keep buying cheap crap from the local Mal-Wart. I don't know what to tell my son. He is a head in the clouds kind of kid, an artist. He has high hopes about becoming a CGI artist. I urge them both to get practical skills, just in case. They look at me like I'm crazy. Horseshoeing? Ironworking? ARE YOU NUTZ?
Yes, telling the average American that the party is about to end is like telling a child their hamster died -- many tears, tantrums, pleading. Then comes the bargaining. "I'll be good. I'll clean my room."
Still, the hamster is dead. No amount of techno babble, social posturing, or wishful thinking will bring it back.
Bye-bye hamster.
You can call me a "techno apologist", but I'm hardly in favor of business as usual. I just don't think it's sensible or even sane to see reality as darker than it is.
The eventual end of fossil fuel (which won't be for a while) means much less than most people think. Sure, it means having to live on income instead of savings, but that income is far greater than most people appreciate. The USA uses about 100 quads of energy/year, or about 340 million BTU of energy per capita per year. The sun dumps 4.9 BILLION BTU of energy on a 66 by 150 foot lot around Topeka, KS. Each year, every year. And similar amounts on the millions of square miles around it.
If you put the ~300 million population of the USA four to a house on 66x150 foot lots (17.6 people/acre, 11264 per square mile), you'd get the whole population onto less than 27,000 square miles. That's an area a bit over 163 miles square. Center that area around Topeka and the sunlight alone which falls on it could more than satisfy all our demands, inefficient as we are.
We're a ways from being able to capture solar energy that efficiently, but not that far. I'd guess 20 years. We are doing a really good job of capturing wind, of which there's about 1.2 terawatts available in the US (36 quads/year, representing over 100 quads of fossil energy for generation).
We've got plenty of time if we move now.
Assuming that new in-situ recovery technique proposed by Shell is working. What kind of throughput can we hope from oil shale? 100,000 bpd? Like tar sands it's peeing in the Grand Canyon!
Correct, the probability of biofuels, oil shales and sands, providing as much as 10% of current gasoline usage in the next 20 or 30 years is pretty miniscule.
Nor do I question your assessment of the US, though I wouldn't have put it quite like that. Being blunt, most of the developed world, and partcularly the US, has raped this planet's resources and crapped in its environment at the expense of the less developed world. Sadly they mostly aspire to do the same.
You know your answer to your final question. Even if things continue on a fairly even keel for 20 more years China will almost certainly eclipse the US by then as the pre-eminent global economic power. Ends of empires are usually messy.
But see my post currently about 6 back where I suggest to Brook some things to do.
Ultimately we need a 'humanity mindshift', nothing less stands a chance. So let's get working on it. Surely us monkeys are not as dumb as Head Lem thinks? (reference to:
http://lemmonledge.blogspot.com/ )
Having suggested to Brook to make a CD of mp3s on peak oil I feel it my duty to provide a set of links to same. Hope to post that tomorrow in the ' "Good gifts" for the holidays' thread. I'll be taking my own advice, too, which is surprisingly rare for me, and inflicting CDs on my friends - so thanks, Brook, for prompting the idea.
(I'll bet a lot of that was for A/C in the record-hot summer. I wouldn't expect that trend year over year.)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html
Anyhow, would you agree with my overall assessment of the future need for changes in the production of electricity in this country? I know this is off topic a little but I am trying to get a handle on total environmental impact of non-conventional oil and electrical production combined for the next twenty or so years.
2004 was up 1.8% over '03, '03 was up 0.6% over '02, '02 was up 3.2% over '01, '01 was DOWN 1.7% over '00.
Hell, yes we need to change generation, and management, and a host of other things. I have my own ideas about this, of course.
We could use electric heat to warm the tar sands, but then we would have to burn coal or uranium to generate the power and lose 60% of the heat in the coal or uranium.
We probably will when we run out of natural gas.