So I have read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale and this http://www.dailyreckoning.com/rpt/OilShale.html, and now have a pretty firm understanding of how it works and how it will potentially affect us… but I was just wondering if anyone on here has any opinions, or if there is anything these two articles are neglecting to mention.
Is this something we will see within the next few years? If so, were in for a real treat! Thoughts/opinions/comments?
didn’t read the links, but as far as i remember, they are working on producing it up in Canada, but the problem is the cost to extract the oil from the sand is not very cost effective.
Didn’t read your links, but its not something in the next few years, and its not something that is going to drop oil prices anywhere in the near future.
People really need to be excited about alternatives, not eeking out slightly more oil.
I agree with the “alternative” part but we should find alternatives that work in current equipment.
America’s oil shale reserves are enormous, totaling at least 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. That’s five times the
reserves of Saudi Arabia! And yet, no one is producing commercial quantities of oil from these vast deposits
Shell thinks the whole thing is economic at a crude price of $30. So barring a major reversal of geopolitical trends,
they’re forging ahead.
Shell is just now moving onto the next stage to decide by 2010 whether their process is commercially feasible.
2010 Is pretty close…
“However, because the ICP process occurs below ground, special care must be taken to keep the products of the
process from escaping into groundwater flows. Shell has adapted a long recognized and established mining and
construction ice wall technology to isolate the active ICP area and thus accomplish these objectives and to safe guard
the environment. For years, freezing of groundwater to form a subsurface ice barrier has been used to isolate areas
being tunneled and to reduce natural water flows into mines. Shell has successfully tested the freezing
technology and determined that the development of a freeze wall prevents the loss of contaminants from the heated
zone.”
.
It has huge potential. From a purely scientific standpoint and considering oil reserves around the world, if we could use it right now we could cut our oil imports almost completely.
Unfortunately the only thing stopping expansion of the technology, and many others like this, is politics.
You’re thinking of the tar sands, not oil shale. They’re a bit different.
^^^ahh, ok, my bad
From what I’ve read the big question is how much is “recoverable oil”. Yes, it’s 5x the reserves of Saudi Arabia, but if you can only recover 5% it’s not so great.
You can pretty guarantee that if oil stays above $80/barrel, which it probably will, money will be spent on finding a way to get the oil out of there. Those damn oil companies and the money they make blah blah…
Well… Oil companies are going to want to stay in business and this is oil, what they do, and with that said im sure they would rather start finding new ways to keep people using oil before other energys become too much a part of our life…
Did you read the whole sentence? 2010 to decide if it is commercially feasible. Not “be in production”
:fail:
but it is a move forward. If we had done this 10 years ago it would have been in production by now. We can’t keep saying, but we won’te get it for 10 years. We plant trees and all this other stuff for our yet unborn children, why not secure oil for them as well.
Not picard worthy… The point is that This could be right around the corner. + 5 years to perfect it and boom… gas is 1.50 a gallon again.
lol interesting but true
gas will never be $1.50 again
Read this a while ago in Fortune:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/30/magazines/fortune/Oil_from_stone.fortune/index.htm
Being involved in this industry, I have attended a few shows up in Calgary about the different oil reserves they have up there. There is a lot of recoverable oil up there, the only problem is its only feasible to extract it when the price of oil is high…so its def. not going to be bringing oil prices down significantly.
This is shale oil they have that youre talking about?