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.

In posting about oil shale, one of the points that needs stressing is that the oil is not really oil. And this creates a problem when it comes to getting the kerogen (or oil for simplicity) separated from the rock around it. As I said in the first post on this, the oil can be separated in a retort, after being mined. The retorting can be self-energized and, by heating the oil it can be transformed into a form of butumen that can then be further refined into a commercial grade of shale oil that can be similar to a more conventional crude.

Mining shale, however, is fairly expensive, both in terms of energy, and hard dollars. At the same time, once the oil is extracted, the spent shale has to be disposed of. That costs more money. Considering all these potential expenses and potential problems, it is therefore not surprising, from the beginning, that the idea of trying to create the initial retort in the rock, and making that transition to oil in-place looked as though it might be a winner.

Well, as Gazprom consolidates its grip on Russian gas it could be that we may need access to all that oil locked up in the oil shale somewhat sooner than the four years that Shell have said it needs before it can even decide if their process is viable (and I'll cover that in a later post). Now before I get into the piece that follows I should explain that I don't hold any particular animus towards the states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming or Idaho and so when I start talking about disposing of nuclear weapons in those states by making use of them it should be taken as merely a technical discussion (grin).

The need for a relatively rapidly available resource to allow us to continue being able to supply the worlds needs for oil, even as it increases into the future, will require some fairly rapid and agile production of resources, and as I noted in the first post of this series, with some 2 trillion extractable barrels of oil locked up in the oil shales of the above four states, there lies a potential answer to the problem. But conventional means for extraction, particularly the levels of capital required, and other issues that I will discuss later, make it unlikely that these normal means will produce any significant impact on the gap in economic supply that will develop in the near future. The use of nuclear explosives has the potential to solve that problem. And to explain, rather simply how this might be done (as with the other techie talks), I will explain how, conceptually, this might be achieved.