The Peakist

Tue 10 Apr 2007

3 Responses to “Shale Oil”

1. diderot Says:
   April 10th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

   Phew, I’m back to normal … worrying about both again.

   The Illusive Bonanza: Oil Shale in Colorado “Pulling the Sword from the Stone”
   by Randy Udall, Resource Efficiency in Aspen and Steve Andrews, ASPO-USA
   http://www.aspencore.org/images/pdf/OilShale.pdf

   Excerpt:

   Although Shell’s plan is fresh and bold and audacious, some aspects of it seem inspired by Star Trek. Time will tell whether the company’s “in-situ” process is madness or genius. The vision is breathtaking. The company proposes to electrically heat a 1,000 foot-thick section of the Green River Formation to 700 degrees Fahrenheit, then keep it that hot for three years. Beam me up, Scotty, but first share some details. Imagine a ten-acre production plot, 2,000 feet on a side. Inside that area, the company would drill up to 200 closely spaced wells. After those wells are lined with steel casing, 1,000 foot-long electric heaters would be inserted in preparation for the “bake.” Before the fire comes the ice. Since it’s impractical to heat the rock if it’s in contact with groundwater, Shell has to dewater the production area first. To do that, it proposes to construct a “frost wall” to isolate the production zone from the surrounding area. (Frost walls are routinely used in skyscraper foundations, but of course few foundations are 2,000 feet deep.) To build the frost wall, the company will drill a narrowly spaced line of wells, case them, then circulate a frigid coolant until the rock freezes solid. If the frost wall holds, the company will drill dewatering wells inside the production zone. Once the shale is dry, it will be heated, and if all goes well, three years later oil and natural gas will flow. The company hopes to recover up to one million barrels per acre–$60 million worth at today’s prices. It’s a high-stakes gamble, but if it works a six mile-by-six mile area could produce twenty billion barrels, roughly equal to remaining reserves in the Lower 48.

   The World’s Largest Utility Bill

   Although Shell’s method avoids many of the negative impacts of mining oil shale, it requires a mind-boggling amount of electricity. To produce 100,000 barrels a day would require raising the temperature of 700,000,000,000 pounds of shale by 700 degrees F. How much power would be needed? A gigabunch—in rough numbers, about $500,000,000 per year. The least expensive source for electricity is a coal-fired power plant. How much coal, how many power plants? To produce 100,000 barrels per day, the RAND Corporation recently estimated that Shell will need to construct the largest power plant in Colorado history, large enough to serve a city of 500,000. This power plant, costing about $3 billion, would consume five million tons of coal each year, producing ten million tons of greenhouse gases, some of which would still be in the atmosphere a century from now. To double production, you’d need two power plants. One million barrels a day would require ten new power plants, five new coal mines. How soon will we know whether any of this is feasible? Shell plans to do more experiments, before making a go/no go decision by 2010. If the company pulls the trigger, it would be at least three or four years before first oil would flow, perhaps at a rate of 10,000 barrels a day. That’s less than one-tenth of one percent of current U.S. consumption. In the near term, oil shale is not a silver bullet. It will not delay the imminent peak of world oil production. It will not reduce global oil prices. It will do little to enhance U.S. energy security. By 2020, oil shale might yield 100,000 barrels a day, but that remains uncertain. Finally, if it turns out that Shell needs more energy to produce a barrel of oil than a barrel of oil contains, all bets are off. That is a fool’s bargain, the equivalent of burning the furniture to keep the house warm. Energy is the original currency, electricity its most valuable form. Using coal-fired electricity to wring oil out of rocks is sort of like feeding steak to the dog and eating his Alpo.

2. diderot Says:
   April 11th, 2007 at 4:10 pm

   Monbiot is in no doubt about his major worry, and having watched the incredible shrinking ice caps on TV the other night he has my sympathy. He believes that there’s a fair amount of oil left and then ‘the powers-that-be will do everything they can to move to a syn fuels economy based on coal’. They will. Or shale. Or tar sands. Or biofuels. And it will be an environmental nightmare. Ranged against these forces are the West Wales Soil Association, and I truly wish them well.

   Monbiot on Peak Oil and Global Warming
   “Over the past two or three years or so, I’ve become pretty sure that peak oil isn’t as imminent as I first thought. There are a couple of reasons for this. First off…”

   Catch the rest here:
   http://www.energybulletin.net/28494.html

   Preparing West Wales for a Future Without Oil.

3. Dan Welch Says:
   April 16th, 2007 at 2:53 am

   Letter in 7 April 2007 New Scientist Print Edition.

   David Humphrey believes that trying to reduce the harmful effects of aviation on the atmosphere is futile, because we will run out of oil in the next 30 years or so (17 March, p 26). Apparently, widespread, cheap intercontinental travel is just a passing phase.

   Consider that the synthesis of oil from coal becomes economically attractive when the price of crude oil is $60 per barrel - roughly the price as I write. All that is required for oil companies to start switching their focus from exploration to synthetic oil production is for synthesising oil to become more profitable and less risky than drilling.

   This would require a sustained period of high oil prices; coincidentally, this is exactly what the OPEC countries would also like. But oil producers want us to keep buying their oil, not finding substitutes for it - because once the substitutes gain economies of scale, oil reserves become economically unrecoverable and worthless.

   So one might predict that the cost of oil will remain roughly the same as synthesising it from coal, until such time as depletion of reserves causes scarcity and a sustained higher price. Until then the decision to invest in synthetic petroleum plants would be harder to make if the price of oil fluctuated wildly, so that the mean price over an extended period was much lower than the occasional peaks. This would also help oil producers to maximise income from their reserves. It seems very much like the situation at the moment.

   From issue 2598 of New Scientist magazine, 07 April 2007, page 20

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