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Practical Method for Getting Oil from Oil Shale?
ConfigurationManager writes "An article in the Rocky Mountain News describes how Shell has demonstrated a practical way to extract oil from the shale deposits in Colorado. Since it describes those deposits as "the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world," that could be a very good thing for those of us who are currently paying anywhere from $3 on up for a gallon of regular unleaded."
To make re-useable energy sources more and more attractive, we find a way to just heat this planet just a bit more.
Just place solar energy/wind energy systems on these shale places instead. It will yield more than oil in the long run (Break even point wind power: 6 years at current US energy prices).
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Don't complain about 3 Dollars. In order to have some decent effect agains global warming it should be IMHO closer to 20 Dollars!
Why don't the big networks talk about that in the long term it could be cheaper do seriously do something about global warming than give up a third of the northamerican continent due to increasingly hostile climat?
Where did you get that figure from? In the 'fifties and early 'sixties, the energy ratio was around 1:50, now it's closer to 1:5. Given that TFA states;
you'd have to say extracting from tar sands will be ballpark with existing or near future conventional supplies.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Bye Planet Earth, it was nice knowing you. The last thing we need is another hundred years of oil. Even normal oil will last another 50-100 years, as technology enables us to retrieve it more efficiently and new supplies are found.
You're right. It's their own choice to keep gas that expensive. But it's a choice that is serving them well right now, as it has pushed their economies towards more consolidated land use, more mass transit, and smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. It's as though they've been preparing for this for decades.
Damn. I need to make a tin foil hat now, but all they sell is aluminum these days. Something veeeeeerrrrrrrry suspicious about that....
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The USA is doubtlessly the source of this abysmal misuse of 4x4 vehicles, but it's certainly spreading to the UK where mothers drive huge 4x4s to drop off their single child to the school a 5 minute walk down the road.
Just make the minimum required fuel efficiency far lower than it is currently. It's possible to build a 4x4 around an efficient engine, why not make it compulsory and if you feel the need to pay 150% for the fact your car is 3' taller and makes you feel 'safer' on the road then more fool you.
Alternatively, just make SMART cars compulsory.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Wow, 1.549 euro per liter in usd per gallon (that's Shell's list price here in the Netherlands now) and you get $7.34 a gallon
I am car-less, and have lived, pretty much, car-less all my adult life.. its not difficult to have a lifestyle which promotes simpler forms of transportation, and i am proud to say that i was able to hone this skill in even a car-hungry metropolis as Los Angeles ..
.. but i could never, ever, see myself driving an SUV to work on a daily basis, and find the whole idea to be a preposterous example of the excesses of modern living. decadence defined.
i walk to work every day right now, and have a bicycle when i need it. i don't accept involvement in any business or company (workplace) which requires heavy commuting; i eschew all forms of long-distance car-only commuting; if i can't take the train somewhere, or walk somewhere, i don't get there. simple enough, and i would say my quality of life is superlative as a result.
every day i see people arriving at work in that 'just wasted an hour of my life on the freeway' zombie mode, for which they have all sorts of quick fixes and snake-oil remedies, like 4cups of coffee, bitchin' out their co-workers, etc. i say to them, walk to work; enjoy your health, fight your own personal laziness at all fronts. it really does improve ones life, to abandon cars altogether.
that said, if i want to go on a trip somewhere inaccessible, i do use cars. my vacations in the australian desert wouldn't be nearly as fun if it weren't for the (proper) use of a 4WD/SUV to get to certain long-distance places
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Personally I wish gas was more expensive, so people would be forced to take mass transit.
Problem is that at least in Fort Wayne, Indiana, mass transit does not run after 9 PM on weekdays, after 6 PM on Saturdays, or at all on Sundays or holidays.
Yeah, me riding a bike 27 miles, one way to work, in single digit temps isn't entirely my cup of tea. Especially since most of that way doesn't have bike paths, so I'd be contending with traffic on 55mph country roads.
Sounds less like a viable plan and more a like a recipe for roadkill.
Can't live much closer to work, housing prices get ridiculous. Rent is insane as well.
Don't get me wrong though, I wish I could - an easy daily non-impact aerobic workout is just what my ticker could use.
The U.S. economy is growing on credit. 4%-5% growth are easily eaten by the net value loss of the dollar. When your oil-dependent economy has to face climbing oil prices, it will either continue increasing debt and growth at the same time (until the creditors stop that practice) or it will hit a wall. You're betting on a stable oil price and that's a very optimistic bet. Oil taxes not only stay in the country, as opposed to higher oil consumption, which moves the money to the middle east. Oil taxes also act as an incentive to lessen the dependence on oil, which is happening in Europe. We have much higher oil efficiency than the US, so our competitiveness doesn't take as big a hit as yours when the oil price rises.
I'm happy to pay a bit more to keep SUVs off the roads. I just moved from Canada (where petrol guzzlers are on the rise) to Australia (where there are very few SUVs).
I don't know which part of Australia you're looking at, but four wheel drives (SUVs if you must) are still very common, in Sydney at least. Fortunately, social attitudes seem to be turning against the use of large 4WD vehicles like Toyota Landcruisers in urban areas. There has also been definite shift away from traditional large cars like the Ford Falcon and the Holden Commodore to smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles.
Fischer-Tropsch is the future of energy in the U.S. It produces oil from coal and generated $20/barrel oil in plants in South Africa that they used during their period of economic isolation. It is a simple process that converts coal to H2+CO and then into any kind of oil you want. It can also be used to produce fertilizer and plastics. It scales, it's simple and the U.S has the largest coal reserves in the world. This is really our ace in the hole in the upcoming global energy crisis. Expect their to be a coal to oil gold rush in the next 5 years. Apparently some people are catching on. Unfortunately for the environmentalists this is not what you wanted to happen when we started running out of oil but this is by far the most practical realistic solution that will work to give us time to find alternatives.
Care to explain how raising gas taxes would launch a recession? Assuming the government spends the money it raises in the taxes, the GDP would at worst stay the same, and most likely rise because the corporations that paid the tax would have saved a portion of the money they paid in taxes.
External oil shocks can lead to stagflation, a form of recession, but this is much less likely to happen when the rising prices are due to a tax and spend government.
I suppose you could argue in terms of the Laffer curve that raising the tax rate would actually result in less revenue for the government, but the Laffer curve is really designed for a tax like the income tax which doesn't have readily available substitutes.
I agree with almost all of this. I've driven across the USA three times, so I'm more than aware of its size -- and indeed there are plenty of places you just couldn't get to without a car.
... and how very American of you to equate "Success" exclusively with GDP ;)
My only major obejection is that a lot of rural Americans making those routine 30 mile drives you refer to, choose to do them in absolutely enormous pickups, or other massively overpowered cars.
My own car, perfectly capable of carrying two people and their luggage in comfort for all-day drives, has a 1.2 litre engine. Yes, it strains a little with passengers in the rear, but the 1.4 model would not.
Whereas, our standard midsize rental in the US was a 3 litre V6, and nobody considers this to be a powerful car. Perhaps the answer to rising fuel prices is to start driving more economical cars.
(Other minor points: Amercicans can underestimate the size of Europe too, imagining the whole continent to be crammed full of dense cities. Although we don't have anything quite like Iowa or Nebraska, we do have some areas of emptiness.
)
As a side note, there's also been talk about turning coal into diesel.
This is already being done. In South Africa, to name one country. For political stability and independance, it is in many nations' interest to secure their energy resources. Using coal to produce diesel is a very lossy (energy-wise and in account to CO2 and sulphur emissions) and a bit expensive process, but for many nations, especially those with big coal resources, it's still worth it as they're securing their energy.
The current coal resources are likely to withstand a thousand years draining at the current pace. This can be compared with the estimated 50 years (that also includes all the oil we know about but still is too expensive to harvest) for oil, so if you want to keep driving your diesel, there is no worry resource-wise.
However, it is likely that the current pace cannot continue as the greenhouse effect grows stronger by the day and the CO2 percentage in the atmosphere has by far exceeded its natural levels. To stop the atmospheric CO2 percentage at a country such as Sweden's target level, we cannot burn more fossil fuels than we have oil, and that means no coal burning at all. We don't have an energy crisis coming up, but we do have an environmental disaster growing worse by the gallon.
It should be clear that I strongly concur with the other posters noting that the USA need a pollution tax for its gas. I say we should let this country be the land of the free and not the land of the ignorant. It's of greatest importance that the USA bring the emission levels down as the country accounts for 23% of the world's total emissions.
One thing that you must remember is that the US is a very large country. As a result, everything is spread out much more than in Europe. To impose such high taxes on our oil, would not only be detrimental to our economy, but yours as well. I addition, because of the increased amount of travel that is necessary, it probably stings a little more to have the gas prices increase.
I agree with you about the SUV's, however. I think it is funny that the SUV drivers are having to pay so much. It seems alot of drivers of SUV's are arrogant Pr__ks... A fool and his money are soon departed.
Personally, I wish Al Gore won the Presidental election in the past. He had a plan on how to maintain the US's technological base with green auto technology. Unfortunately, it seems the current president of the US wants to, not only run the US into the ground, but also the whole world as well.
I think I understand the currents administrations thought processes, let me paraphrase: "Leave no billionaire behind", and "If Mother Nature and the less fortunate cannot fend for themselves, then they are not worth saving..."
Out here in California, prices surged as people bet the price would sky rocket and bought gas no matter what the price. The local 7/11 had people topping off their tanks because their price, usually the highest around, was 10 cents lower than in town. Most of the people buying gas didn't need it but figured the price was going higher so they bought while it was "low" at $2.90.
If the price stays high for the next few years, people will get out of their SUVs and move into more efficient vehicles. The oil markets will respond, just as it did in the 80's, and prices will drop in real terms. Eventually, people will forget and they'll buy gas hogs again. People do that - they forget.
Those of you who are certain that we're running out of oil forget as well. In 1970, it was common knowledge that we'd be out of oil by 1985. Paul Erlich at Stanford made a fortune pitching his dystopian view of the future and we bought it. The futurists who got it right were the economist who argued that the real price of commodities fall over time as producers and consumers become more efficient.
It's worth noting that the shift to SUVs wasn't due to just the cheap price of gas. Congress played a major role as well. Business used to be able to depreciate the price of cars it purchased at an accelerated rate. Small business owners used that to their advantage by buying nicer cars which angered folks who didn't own businesses and hence, couldn't get the same tax write off. Congress responded by eliminating the write off for business-owned cars. The accelerated depreciation schedule remained for trucks which GM and Ford exploited by gussing up what used to be utility trucks for hauling workers around into SUVs. I saw a lot of new SUVs in my neighborhood after my accountant sent out a flyer advising his clients of the tax advantage which was considerable. A very smart friend of mine grumbled that the "I want my children to be safe and so I have to have the biggest car available" crowd just got a tax boost and the only way to retaliate was to drive a Peterbilt to work.
Let's assume that since it's coming from a SHell PR department, they're putting the best possible spin on this. That means for each unit of energy delivered down the hole, they get back 3.5 units of equivalent heat back up, in the form of oil and gas.
But if the heat comes from electrical heaters, the electricity came from coal and oil-fired generators, said plants are only about 30 percent efficent.
So you're burning about 3 units of good oil and coal and gas to get, maybe, if the stuff really is down there, 3.5 units back up. Doesnt sound like a good deal.
I suppose they could do something a bit more efficient, like burn coal down in the hole, or put down a small cleanish nuke down the holes, but those ideas have some non-negligble drawbacks too.. :)
In theory it is a good way to decrease pollution. But in practice it can cause weird anti-environmental policies, e.g. a reluctance in Finland by the government to support alternative fuels and hybrid cars because it would decrease incomes from fuel tax.
Read about this topic on the The OilDrum a few days back. Seriously, oil shale is not really a solution at all. Why? The cost of extracting this stuff is phenomenal. You use up 1 barrel for every 3 that you extract(30 %).
First misconception " Oil Shale Will Save Us"
I worked with a major oil company for 2 years trying to develop a way to commercialize oil shale. Trust me on this, it ain't going to happen. Most oil companies know this. The few (one??) that don't are totally deluded.
Oil shale is not oil. Oil shale is rock that has a relatively high concentration of organic carbon compounds in it. Geologists call this a source rock. If you heat this shale to 700 degrees F you will turn this organic carbon (kerogen) into the nastiest, stinkiest, gooiest, pile of oil-like crap that you can imagine. Then if you send it through the gnarliest oil refinery on the planet you can make this shit into transportation fuel. In the mean time you have created all kinds of nasty by products, have polluted the air and groundwater of where ever you have extracted it. You have also created an enormous pile of superheated rock that will take hundreds to thousands of years to cool off.
The biggest deposits of oil shale in the world are in northwestern Colorado. No other deposit anywhere else in the world (China, Jordan, Australia, etc.) even comes close in terms of size and richness. There are approximately 1.3 trillion barrels of POTENTIAL oil in this deposit of oil shale. However, even those in their wildest hallucinations have never proposed that more than about 300 billion of these barrels were POSSIBLY extractable.
Of course 300 billion barrels is a very large number. Assuming $50/bbl, these $300 billion would be worth $15 trillion. Quite an enticement to go after. HOWEVER, - I still haven't seen a good analysis that shows you end up with more energy at the end of the cycle than what you put in. Moreover, it takes about 3-5 barrels of water for about every barrel of oil you get. Last time anyone seriously looked at where all this water would come from was Exxon back in the late 70's and early '80's. Their solution was to RE-ROUTE THE MISSOURI RIVER to bring water to this very arid area. I am not shitting you.
Lastly, you will be leaving the biggest superfund site you could ever imagine.
Will we eventually extract oil from oil shale - maybe, but it has always been a last resort, and for good reason. In the meantime, DON'T EVEN THINK about investing in this, even if the offer seems really good. You can't imagine how much money has been poured into trying to commercialize this resource without any success.
There was a experimental oil shale extraction project running in Australia but it shut down a while ago(don't have exact links atm). If it were me, I would be thinking about conserving oil than messing with oil shale.
It's OK for you, if you live close enough to work to be able to walk every day. Other people might not want to walk for 2 hours each way in the rain, five days a week, through dangerous run-down areas.
And god forbid you have something to take to worry, like briefcases, equipment, clothes, books (they'll get wet even in a bag), or in fact any of the millions of things people might need to transport anywhere. Such as shopping. Or kids. Or anything.
Walking might work for you, but you've made the mistake that a lot of people in discussions like this have in assuming something that works for you will work for everyone.
In one paragraph you say abandon cars altogether, then in the next you're saying you use cars? Why don't you walk through the outback, enjoy your health, fight your own personal laziness on all fronts?
* Your "always low prices" at Wal-Mart will be going up because it will cost the company millions in extra fuel expenses. Who do you think pays for that?
;-)
No. Wal-Mart Managers may not be the most avid environmentalists, but they know how to save a buck. They use the cheapest means of transport possible.
If an 18-Wheeler carries 20tons of soda cans (40,000 cans) over 1000 miles, it may use 200 gallons of diesel fuel. Doubling the price of diesel from $3 to $6 will mean the price of each can will increase by 600/40,000 cents, thats 1.5 cents per can. Still, that is probably more than Wal-Marts profit on the item, so they would look for a bottling outfit nearer by, helping the local economy. (According to google, there are 29 coca-cola bottling plants in Minnesota)
However, if you drive your 4x4 SUV (12MPG) to the nearest wal-mart (12 miles one-way) and buy 100 cans of soda (or less soda and some other goods) for a
party, you increase the price of the soda cans *for you* by 6 cents per can at current prices ($3/gallon) and 12 cents per can at $6/gallon)
* You think $0.37 is a lot to send a letter? The USPS will also need to spend millions more in fuel. This goes for UPS, DHL, FedEx, etc. as well.
I think that the fuel required to deliver a first-rate letter is neglible. Where I live, the postman drives a car up to the curb in a neighborhood and then does his round with a small cart. Most of the expense is the wage of the postman and the capital expense on the highly automated sorting facilities.
* How about higher property taxes? Yup, most school systems are funded with property taxes. They have to gas up all those busses and now it will cost a lot more, so their budget will increase, and you will pay for it.
No. Raising *taxes* on gas means less gas will be used and crude oil gets slightly cheaper. That hits the sheikhs.
* Even mass transit will become more expensive. They buy gas too.
The extra taxes can be used to fund school buses or mass transit, or reduce the tax load on the parents (Ok, admittedly, in an ideal world
Yes, in the 'states roads are hugely subsidized out of state and federal income taxes, meaning that the people who use the roads the most do not pay the most, and people who do not use the roads at all still have to pay for them. There is huge resistance to increasing fuel taxes because fuel taxes are directly and immediately visible.
BTW, I am under the impression that in Europe, fuel taxes go to pay not only for roads but also for rail infrastructure; not so?
Sure, it's a compromise, like most things are. It's nice to have a big back yard, at times. But that compromise begins to look less favorable when you have to drive 5 kilometers to even get food or go to otherwise basically available services. At some point, maybe it's good enough to have an appartment of your own, and a common green area that you can share with others...
If you believe the reason to have land is to live like you do in the city but with more room then your philosophy makes sense.
I have a well, a septic system, solar panels, chickens for meat, eggs and fertilizer, a garden for fruit and vegetables, cultivated bass for meat and fertilizer and a wood stove and axe.
That covers a good chunk of the basics. I have to make up reason to go out sometimes. Hell, I only go shopping every 3-4 weeks and I am very disorganized. Basic self sufficiency is not really difficult when you have some land and a little knowledge.
But for me, none of this would be possible without the internet.
I would still be packing myself into that one bedroom apartment sharing that common green area just to have newspapers, books, music and commerce. No more.
Cities are dead, cars are dead, centralization is dead.
The internet changed the world.
Long live information/technology based, distributed self sufficiency.
I don't undertand why this opsession with getting fuel out of the ground when instead of gasoline one can use ethanol http://runningonalcohol.tripod.com/ Which requers no vehicle modification. Most gasoline now is 15% Ethanol. You probablythink that its hard to make it. Guess what--NO! it cost about $1.50 per gallon. One can make it at home,this is basicly alcohol. Similarly, with Biodiesel one canmake fuel very cheaply around from corn oil and the like. Not only can you use plants like corn, to produce the fuels which far,ers know how to grow,and we are not dependant on Saudi Arabia to get it. Bio-Fuels have much less of the pollution then fosil fuels. And what-ever pollution they do have,it is not really a "pollution" since it came from plants around us, and is part of bio-system (Unlike Oil which is NOT). So why we still using this expensive poison in our vehicles? The problem is not that people drive tanks on the street the pproblem is --fuel. Why should I care if people fuel up their $50K Hummer with biodisel?
Don't know about Teddy, but I'm sure he's not representative of all idiot liberals when it comes to using wind power. As for ANWR though, even if the optimists are right, it'll only run the country for about a year going by the mean average of the estimates, if the actual amount ends up in the low end we're talking about just 6 months of gas. US consumption is ~8 billion barrels per year, mean average in ANWR is 7.7 billion with a low of 4.3 and a high of 11.8. Even if the high end is right we're still talking less than 2 years. US consumption is escalating while domestic production continues to fall, and we haven't even mentioned China yet, whose middle class is already bigger than our entire population, with a desire for the same kind of lifestyle we have now, and they're importing the oil to make it happen. By 2020 China will be consuming more energy than us. So gunning for ANWR to us idiot liberals looks like a a doctor suggesting a band-aid for a patient with a ruptured aorta. Global demand and consumption has now so far outstripped all known supply, that there is no silver bullet anywhere left that can rescue us. No mythical multi-trillion barrel oil deposits that can save us from the wall we're about hit head on (no new major finds in nearly a decade now). We have got to kick the oil addiction completely, starting now, period. Raping what's left of the planet for those last few drops of cheap oil, knowing it only delays the final reckoning instead of avoiding it, is the act of a desperate addict who no longer cares about the consequences of his actions. We usually put people like that in jail (unless you're POTUS of course).
PS: 2000 acres of desolate land is a bald-faced lie sir. Its not 2000 contiguous acres, its 2000 acres spread out over a much larger area (that would require hundreds of miles of crisscrossing pipes and service roads - no roads exist in ANWR right now, none) which is far from desolate considering the tens of thousands of caribou and moose and various other creatures that move into that area during the summer, along with the predators that depend on them. That's why its critical: those open fields next to the Artic Sea is a lynchpin location for the entire ecosystem of Alaska's Northern Slope. I don't see the point of destroying that for less than a year's worth of gas. By just putting off the pain, we're only making the pain worse when it finally does arrive. In fact, this idiot liberal actually suspects, due to your willfull refusal to think beyond your next tank of gas, that your IQ is somewhere south of his own.