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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: energyplay who wrote (48607)	9/7/2005 9:33:12 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206184

Shell's in-situ heat process to extract oil form shale has no application for gas bearing shale. To extract gas from gas shale deposits in-situ you need to severely fracture the shale to give the gas avenues of extraction. Without fracturing, even gas extraction from shale is far less than 10% of the total available gas. Heat is used in oil shale because the oil is basically a tar which is bonded to the shale. Heating it around 600 degrees will vaporize the tar. Cooling it leave you with tar. Heating it hotter, with water or natural gas present as a hydrogen donor, can give you oil. It may sound flippant to you to point out that Chevron makes more money leasing the Debeque project water rights to the city of Las Vegas, but that is the absolute truth. The economics of shale oil are almost impossibly bad -- far worse than the economics of high or low temperature geothermal. Given the available water supply, small scale production is entirely possible, but not profitable industrial scale production. Our model in 1981 showed that a water pipeline from Texas made oil shale economic somewhere around $140 per barrel. If you did build the pipeline, it was cheaper to also build a larger transport pipeline and avoid having to build a Colorado refinery. Those are the simple facts. I did much of the work in acquiring the town of Debeque, parcel by parcel, when I worked in Land Department. It was less expensive to buy the existing town than to build a new facility for employees. When I was promoted to Chevron Industries, which was the division handling alternate energy and mining, I discovered what a boondoggle oil shale had turned out to be. Our Tar sands model correctly showed marginal profitability. The Shale Oil model showed we were so far out of the money that Debeque was the first alternate energy project closed when it became clear in 1982 that oil prices were headed for the basement. Don't discount the problem of disposing of Shale Oil Puffs. Oil Shale puffs many times its original size when heated to extract the oil. The resulting puffs float on water, are unsuitable to use for road or building material and can't be used for most land fill uses. Additionally, in processing some of the shale the shale can become too toxic to simply pile up as it will contaminate the water table. Can you imagine the cost of dumping all of those puffs in a Class One Dump? You'd have to be very desperate for oil to mess with oil shale. Shell is suggesting a process that will extract a tiny percentage of the oil at a very high price. You can be certain the extraction percentage is below that for gas. . .