Technology

For as long as I can remember there has been big talk about the “Oil Shale” in places like Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. According to Wikipedia “The largest oil-shale resource in the world is contained in the Eocene Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming in three basins: the Piceance Basin, Green River Basin, and Uinta Basin. The Green River oil shales have been the focus of most efforts of the past hundred years to establish an American oil shale industry.”  The first attempts to exploit the Green River Basin shale deposit was made by the “Oil Shale Mining Company” way back in 1916. But oil from oil shale is notoriously uneconomical and hard to extract. Generally, the shale is mined and then heated to at least 300 °C (570 °F) to extract the oil, but it works better at between 480 and 520 °C (900 and 970 °F)! The usual process involves massive amounts of super-heated steam (which requires lots of water). The key to economical shale oil is not locating the oil it is developing the right technology to make the process economical (and preferably environmentally friendly). In today’s article Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com looks at a new method of doing exactly that.