The U.S. Has A Lot Of Shale Oil - So What?

[phantom power]

commentators are making waves about a Government Accountability Office statement (PDF) which says that 1.5 trillion barrels of shale oil in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming may be recoverable.

Their reactions are all along the same lines: this shale-oil reserve could “by itself supply domestic oil consumption for more than 200 years”, and “will Obama, in a possible second term, block the development of the resources that can assure America’s economic supremacy for generations?”

...Two pages later, it mentions that there are two ways to get the oil out of the shale.

The first involves massive strip-mining to get the rock out, then heating it to 650 degrees plus to release the oil. That method has three major commercial problems: it can never get at the bulk of the reserves, which are buried under thousands of feet of non-oily rock, the cost of the power (and water to make that power) to heat the rock makes the oil it produces very expensive, and there are no roads suitable to get the equipment needed for large-scale mining. These all add up to a trickle of oil at very high prices, not the economic-powerhouse gluttony the right wing think these shale reserves represent. It also has non-commercial problems: the strip mining of vast areas of what is currently nature preserve, massive regional air and water pollution and of course the runaway effect dumping so much carbon (from burning all that oil) into the earth’s atmosphere would have on global warming.

The second method involves drilling holes, then lowering very powerful heaters to free the oil from its shale matrix in situ and pumping the oil out. In theory, this opens up even deep-buried reserves but as the reports states, the biggest commercial problem there is that there is no proven commercially-viable way of doing this. Everything done so far has been “pilot”, “experimental”, “small scale”. Best estimates say commercial technology for this method of extraction are 10-20 years away. Even then, it will mean expensive oil for the same reason strip-mining does: the cost of power needed to heat and the cost of ever-scarcer water both for power-generation and in this case for fracking. The same non-commercial problems still apply, and you can add likely massive contamination of ground water reserves that are essential for urban areas and agriculture across several states.

http://ivn.us/2012/05/16/the-u-s-has-a-lot-of-shale-oil-so/

[edcantor]

1. Recoverable at what long term cost?

Do those states like further limitations upon their supply of fresh water?

[progressoid]

2. Or we could work on alternative forms of renewable energy for the next 10-20 years.

IMHO

[NickB79]

3. Just drill a borehole, drop in a nuke, and viola! Liberated shale oil

Might be a little radioactive, though

[joshcryer]

4. Once oil hits $150 a barrel, and stays there, which it will soon enough...

...shale oil will be viable on the market place.

The oil companies know this.

This is why the oil companies are against fee and dividend.

They're just biding their time with their hundreds of thousands of square miles of Green River land.