Drop heaters down the shaft. Cook the rock until the hydrocarbons boil off, the lightest and most desirable first.
So around the perimeter of the productive site, you drill lots more shafts, only 8 to 12 feet apart, put in piping, and pump refrigerants through it.
The production with 50 workers on site (+100 at headquarters) is rumored to be 10 b/d with an electric bill of 2000 $/d!
bobbyboy wrote:According to Jean Laherrere the electricity costs alone for this Shell project are $200/Barrel.The production with 50 workers on site (+100 at headquarters) is rumored to be 10 b/d with an electric bill of 2000 $/d!
Link:
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/laherrere/OilShaleReview.pdf
He also points out the 3.5:1 EROEI claim is for the heating only, other energy costs such as the refrigeration seem not to have been included.
backstop wrote:WildSparrow -
Last Monday I saw the British government's cheif scientist interviewed on TV over Katrina. He was very clear on the strong probability that the unprecedented GoM sea temperatures (that changed the storm from a Cat.1 to a Cat 5 in just 24 hours) were an outcome of Global Warming.
He spoke of the growing global scientific consensus of this origin for Katrina's destructive power. The implication is that what we now see in sudden global oil problems is a shock of Climate Destabilization interacting with the stresses of Peak Oil.
I suggest that being committed to action over one while being complacent over the other is pointless and, as in NO, lethally dangerous and economically ruinous. I'm not accusing you of complacency by the way, but rather those who hype the likes of tar sands and oil shales for profit.
They ignore the fact that far from increasing our CO2 pollution via these options, we urgently need to cut it globally by 2/3rds, just to stop making the problem of excess atmospheric CO2 worse.
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.
My emphasis.In-situ retorting
In-situ retorting entails heating oil shale in place, extracting the liquid from the ground, and transporting it to an upgrading or refining facility. Because in-situ retorting does not involve mining or aboveground spent shale disposal, it offers an alternative that does not permanently modify land surface topography and that may be significantly less damaging to the environment. Shell Oil Company has successfully conducted small-scale field tests of an insitu process based on slow underground heating via thermal conduction. Larger-scale operations are required to establish technical viability, especially with regard to avoiding adverse impacts on groundwater quality. Shell anticipates that, in contrast to the cost estimates for mining and surface retorting, the petroleum products produced by their thermally conductive in-situ method will be competitive at crude oil prices in the mid-$20s per barrel. The company is still developing the process, however, and cost estimates could easily increase as more information is obtained and more detailed designs become available.
Development Timeline.
Currently, no organization with the management, technical, and financial wherewithal to develop oil shale resources has announced its intent to build commercial-scale production facilities. A firm decision to commit funds to such a venture is at least six years away because that is the minimum length of time for scale-up and process confirmation work needed to obtain the technical and environmental data required for the design and permitting of a first-of-a-kind commercial operation. At least an additional six to eight years will be required to permit, design, construct, shake down, and confirm performance of that initial commercial operation. Consequently, at least 12 and possibly more years will elapse before oil shale development will reach the production growth phase. Under high growth assumptions, an oil shale production level of 1 million barrels per day is probably more than 20 years in the future, and 3 million barrels per day is probably more than 30 years into the future.
Lehyina wrote:Shell's ingenious approach to oil shale is pretty slickOn 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?
According to Jean Laherrere the electricity costs alone for this Shell project are $200/Barrel.
sicophiliac wrote:Go5star - Do you work in the energy industry or something? Your post ending is intruiging me.
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