The Oil Drum

I mentioned in an earlier post that there have been over 2,000 patents filed on different ways to best extract oil from oil shale. Before going on to close this series with a discussion of the Rand report, and the Shell process, I thought I would draw a little attention to a new method being proposed in Israel. According to the report

Older technologies squeezed oil out of shale by putting the crushed rock under enormous pressure at high temperatures. But the process developed by Gvirtz costs far less. The shale is mixed and coated with bitumen, a remnant of normal oil refining, then put through a catalytic converter under relatively low pressure. The output is synthetic oil that can be refined into gasoline and other products. . . . . . That will entail construction of a pipeline from the Ashdod refinery located 80 kilometers (48 miles) to the north that would be used for transferring the necessary bitumen needed for the production process. A parallel pipeline would transport the synthetic oil back to Ashdod for refining. . . . . . . "The cost of producing a barrel of oil using the process would be around $17 a barrel," estimates Amit Mor, managing director of Eco-Energy. At that price, the proposed plant would be a veritable gold mine, with annual profits between $188 million to $317 million. Mor notes that the projections are based on the U.S. Energy Dept.'s forecasts of an average oil price of $45 to $50 a barrel in the coming 25 years.

The process is anticipated to produce 3 million tons of oil from 2 million tons of bitumen and 6 million tons of oil shale. While the idea apparently has some merit, perhaps in that it recovers otherwise unattainable oil from the shale, I think that I would need to know a fair bit more about this before I could make sense of it. Perhaps someone with more of a bent to EROI than I can comment.