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

To: Sweet Ol who wrote (48611)	9/7/2005 9:54:08 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206184

To turn tar into oil you need a hydrogen donor. That has to come from a lot of natural gas or a lot of water. There is no "recycling the water". Chevron built a small scale retort to bake the mined shale, mostly to test out how the reactions might vary in real life from the tests done back at the Chevron Chemical Labs. As expected, larger scale introduced potential problems of unevenly reacted shale due to heat variations, leading to some shale with properties too toxic to dispose of as a landfill. Shell and Unocal before them tried to solve this problem with in-situ processing. They unsuccessfully tired burning the shale underground, and have decided to content themselves with injecting steam. With steam extraction you might release the lightest 5% of the oil fraction at a very great cost. This might be marginally profitable, but cannot be scaled up very far due to lack of available water. It still leaves the other 95% or so of the oil deposit behind, except now missing the light oil fraction, it will be even more difficult and expensive to extract. .