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

To: Bearcatbob who wrote (48625)	9/8/2005 12:04:52 AM
From: Elroy Jetson	Respond to of 206184

Most "kerogen", extracted from oil shales by heating to 400 to 600 degrees, is either not a liquid or barely a liquid at room temperature. Each deposit is somewhat different If you extract nearly all the kerogen, it is usually a solid tar at room temperature. If you extract only the lightest 10% or less of the kerogen, it is a liquid oil, but you have left 90% of the kerogen in the shale. This is Shell's solution. You can retort nearly all of the kerogen with either water or natural gas at higher temperatures with a catalyst and end up with light oil which can be easily sent via pipeline, but here you're short on water and need an expensive facility. Hence the realization that its cheaper to mine oil shale and send it to Texas in a water-slurry pipeline, next to a pipeline bringing in water from Texas. This way you avoid having to build an expensive retort and cat cracking refinery at near the shale mine. The traditional way to use oil shale, around the world, has been to dig it up and burn it like coal. It's inter-changeable with coal, except you end up with a bunch of puffed up shale instead of a little bit of ash. As with shale, if you wish to turn coal into light oil, you need a lot of natural gas or a lot of water. We had really bright people working on this project at Chevron, and there's no magical solution. Shell has smart people too and they're trying to salvage some of their investment by making it work in a small way by skimming the cream off the shale deposits. .