Technology of getting oil from shale

[Optimist]

This is an interesting new way to produce oil, but like TDP it is not really an energy source like the oil we can get ready-made out of the ground is.

CORRECTION: Since TDP converts waste into oil, is is a source. A source that is not currently used. To be precise, the source is the sun that drove the photosynthesis that ultimately produced the waste.

Think of it this way: Currently the waste is just rotting away, releasing heat, CO2, methane and bad odors into the environment. The only thing that benefits is a few microbes. With TDP all that energy is captured, methane release is avoided and fossil CO2 release is replaced by carbon neutral CO2. Sorry, microbes, we are going to eat your lunch!

[Dezakin]

Untill TDP actually gains credibility, its not a source or a sink, but a non-sequiter. I dont know (and neither do most other people) if TDP has any chance of being a viable hydrocarbon source outside a very select type of feedstock... currently turkey waste. If we can turn general garbage into useful stuff with some return on capital, then certainly it will be helpful.

This is the reason I allways bring out nuclear fission as the trump card; Not necissarily because I'm reflexively pro-nuke (although I do find much of the technology facinating) but because the economics and engineering are tractible and essentially solved problems, and the fuel situation for nuclear is secure for one hell of a long time.

I believe solar will eventually displace nuclear because its my hunch that the economics will eventually become more favorable to large solar concentrator farms utilizing economies of scale, but we don't have any idea when it will be competitive economically or how to illustrate when or why it will become less expensive than nuclear.

[Ming]

Shell's ingenious approach to oil shale is pretty slick

On one small test plot about 20 feet by 35 feet, on land Shell owns, they started heating the rock in early 2004. "Product" - about one-third natural gas, two-thirds light crude - began to appear in September 2004. They turned the heaters off about a month ago, after harvesting about 1,500 barrels of oil.

While we were trying to do the math, O'Connor told us the answers. Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world.

Wow.

This article gives the casual reader the idea that there is 1000 Giga barrels of oil to be had from Shell's new shale technology. But if the stated recovery data is accurate and one does one's own arithmetic based on 1500 bbls recovered from a plot of land 20 by 35 feet (i.e 700 square feet) one gets 93,000 bbls per acre , 60 million barrels per square mile and 60 Giga barrels per thousand square miles. Now that's a goodly amount of oil (especially for Shell Oil' share holders) but it falls a bit short of the Wow and promise (1000 Giga barrels) implied by the article. There is an apparent factor of 16 discrepancy here. If my own arithmetic is wrong someone please correct me?

Seems obvious that they turned the heat off before fully "milking" that spot.
That seems reasonable, since it was just a reduced scale trial...

[Ming]

According to Jean Laherrere the electricity costs alone for this Shell project are $200/Barrel.

There are probably huge improvements in heating costs if the process is scaled up to commercial size: The heat loss in each heated patch is used as heat input in the adjacent patches...
One cant be this negative on everything: If Shell did this small scale test and now is willing to apply the necessary investment to do a commercial scale test, it surely means that they believe it might be worth it…

[Optimist]

Untill TDP actually gains credibility, its not a source or a sink, but a non-sequiter. I dont know (and neither do most other people) if TDP has any chance of being a viable hydrocarbon source outside a very select type of feedstock... currently turkey waste. If we can turn general garbage into useful stuff with some return on capital, then certainly it will be helpful.

Yes, you are right - we don't know what TDP can and cannot do. CWT certainly is not interested in enlightening us. Can you blame them? They are milking this technology for all it is worth. And they are definitely exaggerating about the efficiency.

However, the concept behind the technology is the thing of the future in my opinion. Waste to energy, more precisely waste to liquid fuel. It solves all manner of problems, it uses a feedstock that is not currently used and it is sustainable. I believe TDP or a similar technology (such as "green diesel" from the University of Wisconsin-Madison http://www.engr.wisc.edu/news/headlines/2005/Jun02.html ) is the future.

[pstarr]

This is an interesting new way to produce oil, but like TDP it is not really an energy source like the oil we can get ready-made out of the ground is.

CORRECTION: Since TDP converts waste into oil, is is a source. A source that is not currently used. To be precise, the source is the sun that drove the photosynthesis that ultimately produced the waste.

Think of it this way: Currently the waste is just rotting away, releasing heat, CO2, methane and bad odors into the environment. The only thing that benefits is a few microbes. With TDP all that energy is captured, methane release is avoided and fossil CO2 release is replaced by carbon neutral CO2. Sorry, microbes, we are going to eat your lunch!

here we go again. The waste product of an entropic industrial food system is somehow going to power that entropic industrial food system AND drive mom and the kids to the soccer game. will you stop alreADY!

[pstarr]

Oh, right. as for the original question. how do we get energy out of shale? Well the best way is to throw the shale into a camp fire and watch it burn. That is the best way. And the only thermodynamically and economically feasible way.

You can then roast marshmellows over the burning shale. They wouldn't taste good however.

[go5star]

Oil shale can be processed efficiently, economically and with little environmental impact. Shell is not the only player in town and as many of you have noticed there is quite a bit of information missing from their equations. Let me first start of by saying, I think the Rand report was CRAP! It would have received a failing grade by any university professor for lack of documentation. Come on guys (and gals), did any one not notice the prediction for the price of oil in 2025? $50 per barrel, or how about the price for the Shell process footnote on page 43, "RAND calculation assuming specific heat of oil is 0.5 and average deposit richness of 25 gallons per ton." Why didn't they actually publish their calculations and the entire set of assumptions they used. Utter CRAP. Oil shale, lest I sound repetitve is ready to be used and can be processed economically. I'll tell you how later but I have to run for now.

[sicophiliac]

Go5star - Do you work in the energy industry or something? Your post ending is intruiging me.

[Googolplex]

This is an interesting new way to produce oil, but like TDP it is not really an energy source like the oil we can get ready-made out of the ground is.

CORRECTION: Since TDP converts waste into oil, is is a source.

No, not a correction. You are wrong, it is not a source. TDP is nothing more then a way to convert our existing energy, mostly in the form of electricity to run the plant, into oil (and at a loss too, as its only 85% efficient overall). The waste is another required ingredient, yes, but its not where the energy input for TDP is.

Think of it this way: Currently the waste is just rotting away, releasing heat, CO2, methane and bad odors into the environment. The only thing that benefits is a few microbes. With TDP all that energy is captured...

...but only through the use of even MORE energy drawn from our existing supplies, thus resulting in an overall loss.

Any process with an EROEI of less then 1 can NOT be an energy source. PERIOD.

[Googolplex]

However, the concept behind the technology is the thing of the future in my opinion. Waste to energy, more precisely waste to liquid fuel.

I agree it sounds good at first, but how do we power it? It would only serve to suck up more energy overall. Once you think about it, the real answer is to reduce both our waste production AND our energy use. Making TDP a significant source of our oil would require us to drasticly increase them!

It solves all manner of problems, it uses a feedstock that is not currently used and it is sustainable.

Actually no, Im afraid not, on all counts. It really only creates more problems, it takes "feedstock" away from recycling centers and power generating incinerators, and it deffinatly NOT sustainable.

[go5star]

Go5star - Do you work in the energy industry or something? Your post ending is intruiging me.

We are working with a new process. Before I tell you about the new process. Let's examine why the old processes did not work.

1. Pollution and Environmental issues. a. Problems arose from the use of oil shale as a heat source. (the assumption was it was readily available and cheap) It burns very dirty. Major CO2, CO, NOx and other emissions. b. The expansion of shale when heated (popcorn effect) made restoration and mitigation difficult or impossible especially because contaminants from the burning shale were attached to the spent shale. Significant amounts of kerogen were also left in the shale. This forced the companies to maintain tailings piles which were ugly to look at and had the potential to pollute ground water.

2. No redundancy. All of the old retort processes used one BIG retort. When there were issues with the one BIG retort, everything ground to a halt. This killed productivity and profits. Issues with the retorts included channeling where the heat just like water would find the path of least resistance in a retort and would not heat all the shale evenly. This caused some of the aforementioned pollution problems, was not very efficient at extracting all the oil and even made it so that they had to shut down some of the retorts and jackhammer carbon deposits off the sides.

3. Lost economic benefits. By burning shale as a heat source and letting those vapors come in contact with the other shale many of the light ends were being burned off. This typically left a thick oil and heavy tars as the end product. This product would then have to be hydrogenated and refined.

4. Use of water. Old methods used (or polluted) 3 barrels of water for every one barrel used.

[pstarr]

Debating with optomist is a unqiue experience. It gets shriller and then he disappears for a while soon to return with more company press releases. You have to wonder how and where he sourced them.

[Antimatter]

go5star,

What do you think of Shell's project, compared with your process, which uses coal gasification for heat to cook the shale and power on the side if I recall correctly. What sort of energy return are you expecting, keeping in mind that the shale has to be mined if not done in-situ?

[go5star]

Debating with optomist is a unqiue experience. It gets shriller and then he disappears for a while soon to return with more company press releases. You have to wonder how and where he sourced them.

No press releases just the facts and I don't remember debating anyone just yet. However on that note.

Our process uses coal gasification for a heat source. Coal gasification creates a syngas at 2500 degrees fahrenheit. The syngas is typically somewhere between 25-40% hydrogen. The syngas needs to be cooled before it can be burned in a gas turbine and some of that is accomplished through steam power cogeneration. However before it is sent off for steam cogen we borrow that syngas and run it through a rotary kiln where the heat from the syngas extracts the kerogen from the shale. The resulting gas stream is then sent through a distallation tower where the petroleum cuts are taken (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, fuel oil etc.) and the hydrogen is passed back on to the gas turbine units for electricity. The CO2 can be captured and stored for use in sequestration in oil wells in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado thus eliminating the global warming issue and increasing the output of the oil wells. The syngas doesn't necessarily have to be used for electrical generation. It can be used to create other chemicals (Eastman Kodak, Dakota Gasification), artificial natural gas or in a Fischer-Tropsch conversion to liquid fuel.

Why is this different than the older technologies?

1. It gives a clean shale extraction. The resulting shale has enough kerogen extracted and was exposed to burning shale affluent that it can be used in cement as an extender or base ingredient. This eliminates the disposal problem as well as helping with aggregate and cement shortages.

2. Because the shale isn't burned and the CO2 is captured in the gasification process it is much healthier for the air and environment.

3. Our shale never comes in contact with water and therefore doesn't pollute the water. The only water we use is for steam for the cogeneration of power.

4. We don't burn off our light ends by burning shale for our heat source but instead have a very light resulting product. If it is reconstituted instead of being sent through a distillation tower it is 26 api at 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

5. We have many potential sources of revenue.
a. Sulfur from the coal gasification process that is extracted.
b. Electricity
c. Oil and Oil products
d. Aggregate for sale to cement and construction industries
e. CO2 sales for the increase of oil production
f. Instead of electricity additional liquid fuels from the syngas via Fisher-Tropsch.

[go5star]

go5star,

What do you think of Shell's project, compared with your process, which uses coal gasification for heat to cook the shale and power on the side if I recall correctly. What sort of energy return are you expecting, keeping in mind that the shale has to be mined if not done in-situ?

We look at the Shell project as cooking your dinner in the freezer. It doesn't make a lot of sense to us so far. Shell has inferred that they have problems finding a heating element that will last and is economically resuable. Also putting a freeze wall around an area doesn't prevent oil seeping down on the bottom side into ground water.

As for Eroei, we feel we have a very positive equation. Exactly what the equation is, its difficult to tell. If it is just the production of oil the equation isn't that great. However when you consider the energy necessary to create all of the other products we are creating such as electricity, hydrogen, CO2 for sequestration, sulfur, and cement/road aggregrate it seems to be a very eroei positive process. Keep in mind that Eroei is an equation that does not adjust for dollar equivalencies. In other words one ton of Uintah basin coal contains 23400000 btus. The one ton of coal costs $31.00. From this one for every one ton of Uintah basin coal we are using we are creating 37800000 btus as well as other profitable byproducts as well. Our figures indicate that for one ton of $31.00 coal and 5.4 tons of $2.50 shale we produce $651.00 of saleable product.

[Optimist]

TDP is nothing more then a way to convert our existing energy, mostly in the form of electricity to run the plant, into oil (and at a loss too, as its only 85% efficient overall). The waste is another required ingredient, yes, but its not where the energy input for TDP is.

You know nothing about power generation, do you? A coal power plant converts between 15 and 20% of the energy in the coal to electricity. Compared to that 85% capture is staggering.

Note that the only electricity needed to operate the plant is about 3.6% of the energy produced by TDP, and that is only counting the oil. I believe that is an ERoEI of 99.5/3.6 = 27.6. Way bigger than 1.0 you will be glad to know. See Figure 6, p8 at http://www.itcnet.org/Fire%20web%20site ... rocess.pdf

Pete may call the above a "company press release" but educated observers will notice it is actually a scientific paper, presented at the Power-Gen Renewable Energy Conference, Las Vegas, NV, March 1-3, 2004. Granted, the presenters have ties to CWT and thus have an incentive to make TDP sound good. However, there is no way around that. This is one of a small number of technical documents on TDP available on the web.

Once you think about it, the real answer is to reduce both our waste production AND our energy use.!

BINGO! And since oil demand would be lower under such a scenario, TDP would be able to supply an even larger fraction of the total demand.

pstarr wrote:

Debating with optomist is a unqiue experience. It gets shriller and then he disappears for a while soon to return with more company press releases. You have to wonder how and where he sourced them.

No press releases just the facts and I don't remember debating anyone just yet. However on that note.

Thanks, go5star! You are exactly right. I have showered Pete with a range of independent sources of information. His only reply so far has been a reference to a paper by Pimentel. One sparrow does not make it spring. If all you need is a single author, you can prove all sorts of things.

I would ask for a moment of silence for Pete's position: he is emotionally tied to a point of view not supported by the FACTS. My deepest sympathies. Ever consider changing your point of view, Pete? Won't it be nice not to be believing that the end of civilization is around the corner?

[NuclearJoe]

Shell's ingenious approach to oil shale is pretty slick

On one small test plot about 20 feet by 35 feet, on land Shell owns, they started heating the rock in early 2004. "Product" - about one-third natural gas, two-thirds light crude - began to appear in September 2004. They turned the heaters off about a month ago, after harvesting about 1,500 barrels of oil.

While we were trying to do the math, O'Connor told us the answers. Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world.

Wow.

This article gives the casual reader the idea that there is 1000 Giga barrels of oil to be had from Shell's new shale technology. But if the stated recovery data is accurate and one does one's own arithmetic based on 1500 bbls recovered from a plot of land 20 by 35 feet (i.e 700 square feet) one gets 93,000 bbls per acre , 60 million barrels per square mile and 60 Giga barrels per thousand square miles. Now that's a goodly amount of oil (especially for Shell Oil' share holders) but it falls a bit short of the Wow and promise (1000 Giga barrels) implied by the article. There is an apparent factor of 16 discrepancy here. If my own arithmetic is wrong someone please correct me?

the factor of 16 discrepancy is easily accounted for; the Green River formation (where 89% of US shale is located) is 42,700 square kilometers, which translates to about 16,000 square miles!

[sicophiliac]

So Go5star, its not really a new way of extracting the oil shale itself, but rather a creative and environmentally friendly way of using surplus energy that normally wouldnt be utalized during coal gasification to extract the oil shale correct? Isnt that pretty similiar to what Shell is doing ? I dont quite understand all together how and why they freeze the shale for extract other then its got to do with ground water contamination or something. Perhaps you could explain that a bit too.
So far I like what I am hearing... this is good for America.. very good for America economically anyways.

[go5star]

So Go5star, its not really a new way of extracting the oil shale itself, but rather a creative and environmentally friendly way of using surplus energy that normally wouldnt be utalized during coal gasification to extract the oil shale correct? Isnt that pretty similiar to what Shell is doing ? I dont quite understand all together how and why they freeze the shale for extract other then its got to do with ground water contamination or something. Perhaps you could explain that a bit too.
So far I like what I am hearing... this is good for America.. very good for America economically anyways.

The pieces of the puzzle we use have been around for quite some time. It is the unique combination of our process that is different. The difference between our process and Shell's is that our process is ex-situ or above ground and theirs is in-situ or in the ground. The reason they use ice walls surrounding their site is so that the liquefied oil doesn't leak into ground water. But like I said its like creating a box with no bottom because they can't freeze the bottom 1000 feet down. Thus a continued possibility of ground water leakage with the Shell process. The Shell process is also not very intuitive. First they use a lot of energy to drill the holes 1000 feet deep. They then take (probably dirty) coal generated electricity and have to use that electricity to create heat over a long period of time all the while freezing the entire area around their field of processing. Then they have pack up all of their heaters and all of the cooling equipment and set it up all over again. The manpower and energy needed to accomplish all these tasks seems to us to be substantial. Anyway, Shell is pretty tight lipped about 98% of the details of their process so we are all pretty much guessing or surmising from their patents what they are up to.

Our process is very good for the US and its economy. It is also good for the world economy. This will go a long way to creating wealth for the nation, correcting trade imbalances/deficits and will strengthen the dollar. However, make no mistake, it will take time to get enough plants built to make a difference. It also continues our dependence on gasoline, diesel etc. that help cause global warming. We are very strong supporters of alternate forms of energy. We just feel that this will give us another 50-100+ years to safely transition to a new energy based economy without seeing the fabric of civilization destroyed by wars over resources.