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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: energyplay who wrote (50348)	5/24/2004 5:17:04 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 74559

For full scale Oil Shale production, the most significant problem is the availability of water. Most oil shale is located east of the Rockies. Water is sufficient for small projects, but looking ahead to large scale production will require a water pipeline from someplace where water is more available - desalination adds to the cost. Primitive in-situ extraction uses steam, while more sophisticated in-situ techniques use higher heat to reform the oil with hydrogen from water to create lighter oil. Alternate plans which mined the shale and transported it in a slurry to a more water-rich location actually, on paper, use more water than it saves, which brings you back to building a pipeline to bring water in. Someone may have developed an alternate extraction process, but I don't know of it. In-situ shale processing also has a peculiar minor problem of expansion. While most oil field extraction can lead to possible subsidence, shale expands. Designed correctly this can help in fracturing a shale bed, incorrectly it closes a field requiring new wells. It's clearly a potential problem if the surface land is already developed. ******* I frankly have no idea what drove the corporate culture at ExxonMobil. If I were doing impersonations of ExxonMobil employees today I'd be tempted to play them as Dr Evil. The many employees I met who were the public face of XOM didn't seem normal to me. Like they were playing a role - all dressed exactly the same in their ridiculous white shirts with suit pants cut too high and similar hand gestures (and cufflinks, who in the real world wears cufflinks?) - like Stepford Executives. They were all imitating someone, or multiple someones - all quite freakish. You occasionally might find similar anti-social attitudes in some small oil wildcatters in Texas or Louisiana, but XOM is just over the top.