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By Jon Birger, Fortune senior writer
November 1 2007: 11:12 AM EDT
But now the veil of secrecy has lifted. With some 200 Shell (Charts) oil shale patents already filed and approvals needed from Colorado and the U.S. Department of the Interior to proceed with commercial production, Shell knows it has to make the public case for developing the country's oil shale potential.
So after months of negotiations, Shell and Vinegar agreed to give FORTUNE an exclusive look at a new technology - inelegantly dubbed the In Situ Conversion Process, or ICP - that could vindicate Shell's 28-year, $200 million (at least) bet on oil shale research.
In a nutshell, ICP works like this: Shell drills 1,800-foot wells and into them inserts heating rods that raise the temperature of the oil shale to 650 degrees Fahrenheit. To keep the oil from escaping into the ground water, the heater wells are ringed by freeze walls created by coolant piped deep into the ground; this freezes the rock and water on the perimeter of the drill site. Eventually the heat begins to transform the kerogen (the fossil fuel embedded in the shale) into oil and natural gas. After the natural gas is separated, the oil is piped to a refinery to be converted into gasoline and other products.
I think it would be a good short term goal to help reduce our dependance on fossil fuels. I think we need to further alternative fuels and unlock the key to getting Ethanol out of field grasses, which would be our key.
We also have a TON of oil sands in Colorado along with the shale. It is becoming more profitable to get this oil out. And i believe we will start gathering it here soon as the foreign oil gains in price.
Mining the sand/shale deposits makes sense if the energy is used to build nuclear power plants to replace all the oil and coal fired facilities. Unfortunately for the economy $100 per barrel prices are needed to make it sufficiently profitable. IMHO the Saudi’s will not tolerate the competition and will drop the price to around $50 per barrel just after the oil shale mining starts in order to teach Exxon a lesson.
Quoting myself on Ethanol:
“I have been reading a book titled "Dirt" about the soil that makes farming possible on a worldwide basis. We are, with our industrialized farming, making the same mistake of destroying the soil for the instant financial demands of our farming technology that destroys the fertility of the soil, despite artificial fertilizers, to maximize the short term yield. Farming corn for ethanol is only the latest and most unsustainable example of this trend. It is a very foolish use of a priceless and, thus ignored, resource.” GregW
Growing fuel instead of conserving and improving soil is just about the most foolish thing we can do.
Mining the sand/shale deposits makes sense if the energy is used to build nuclear power plants to replace all the oil and coal fired facilities. Unfortunately for the economy $100 per barrel prices are needed to make it sufficiently profitable. IMHO the Saudi’s will not tolerate the competition and will drop the price to around $50 per barrel just after the oil shale mining starts in order to teach Exxon a lesson.
Quoting myself on Ethanol:
“I have been reading a book titled "Dirt" about the soil that makes farming possible on a worldwide basis. We are, with our industrialized farming, making the same mistake of destroying the soil for the instant financial demands of our farming technology that destroys the fertility of the soil, despite artificial fertilizers, to maximize the short term yield. Farming corn for ethanol is only the latest and most unsustainable example of this trend. It is a very foolish use of a priceless and, thus ignored, resource.” GregW
Growing fuel instead of conserving and improving soil is just about the most foolish thing we can do.
If demand decreases, they'll have to lower the price anyway, right?
I agree with you about 'growing' the ethanol - it's part of the reason that I think hydrogen is really where we should focus more. Aside from that though, I read a while back about a company in Canada that is focusing on getting ethanol from bacteria. I think there's one in the US also. (I saved the links on my old computer - I can dig those up if you're interested.)
Hopefully - the the article deals specifically with shale, though. Here are a couple of clips from the article:
"Vinegar and the Shell team of chemists, engineers and physicists eventually figured out why the oil they collected early in that 1981 field test was so light and clean and the later samples so dark and dirty. They found that a slower, lower-temperature process - 650 degrees Fahrenheit, versus the 1,000 degrees required in the retorting process - allows more of the hydrogen molecules that are liberated from the kerogen during heating to react with carbon compounds and form a better oil.
This was a crucial discovery, because one of the hallmarks of a light oil - the most valuable kind because it costs less to refine - is its elevated hydrogen content.
Best of all, Shell was able to replicate the lab results in several field tests; the most recent one, in 2005, yielded 1,700 barrels of light oil. In that test, carefully engineered heating rods were inserted several hundred feet into the ground in order to gradually raise the temperature of the oil shale to 650 degrees Fahrenheit. Now Shell had a proven technology that it believed could produce a barrel of oil for $30."
"All this cooling and heating, of course, consumes energy. Can it possibly be worth it? Yes, says Vinegar, who estimates ICP's ratio of energy produced to energy consumed will range from 3-to-1 to 7-to-1, depending upon the scale of the project. Moreover, the power needed to perform the heating and cooling will be generated entirely from natural gas produced onsite by the ICP process. Shell plans on building its own large power plant and is exploring ways to sequester any CO2 produced."
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short term.
