Tar sands tech breakthrough?

[Bruce McAuley]

<http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4051709,00.html>
This is from Rocky Mountain News, and I didn't see it anywhere else here.
If true, it could provide many more years of "oil economy" at $30 a barrel.
Do we really want it?

Bruce

[Teaser]

1. Doubtful.

nt

[niallmac]

2. Sounds energy intensive, environmentally questionable and...

another delay of the inevitable. Apparently a crises is the only thing that will get us to consider reality and future energy sources and ...can the boy and girls say CON SER VA TION?

[Bruce McAuley]

5. On the other hand..

This oil will come from areas not able to be used now, and will be way more environmentally responsible than digging it up and washing it off, which is what they do in Alberta at their tar sands operation, which is also just barely profitable and horribly destructive.
As a plus, we have enough tar sands for many many years of home-grown oil, and can tell the Middle East to go screw themselves.

Bruce

[niallmac]

10. OK. I'll watch the magic happen but

can we at least also pretend it is a limited resource?

[Massacure]

11. It is a limited resources.

You don't need to pretend.

[NNadir]

12. Let's not watch "the magic."

Let's use the opportunity to move away from fossil fuels. Even if the core of the earth were composed of 100% hydrocarbons, the atmosphere cannot support the waste products of burning oil.

All of this knashing of teeth about oil is conservative thinking and we are not conservatives.

We can - we should - we must end the age of oil. Looking under the cushions like a bunch of drunks and dopers will get us no where.

[Bruce McAuley]

13. I agree we need to end the "age of oil"...

But first we need to get out from under the thumbs of the Saudis, and if the tar sands process can do just that, all the better. I think we need to go to electric cars for transportation, and use the oil strictly for plastics and such. I was never a big fan of nuclear plants, but they're looking more attractive as we get better and safer methods to use it. I like the idea of siting them underground for safety, and I'm a big fan of solar panels for reducing electrical usage overall.
How hard would it be to have a series of electrified trains all over the country for public transport, as in Europe?

Bruce

[NNadir]

14. Let's be clear on danger.

Burning oil has proven to be more dangerous than any other form of energy. Millions have died for it already and millions more will die for it in the coming years.

(For the record, in 1941 Japan attacked the United States over - you guessed it oil.)

Global climate change is just one reason to abandon oil as soon as is possible.

I can't really see why so many people are focused on the "safety" of nuclear power plants rather than contemplated the "danger" of oil.

US nuclear plants are one of the safest forms of energy production known. I keep asking nuclear opponents to produce one dead body from this form of commercial energy, and consistently they can't. There is no reason whatsoever to site plants underground. They work perfectly well and perfectly safely above ground.

Solar power is great - for rich people.

[Bruce McAuley]

17. Solar power depends on public subsidies to work right now...

I used to live with solar power as my main source of electricity off the grid, and while they're pricy, I liked having no power bill. Now that I have grid power I sure like it, but I would convert back to solar if the price was right.
We know some folks who are getting a solar power set-up from the local PUD worth $40,000, true cost is $20,000, the PUD gives them a 20 year pay-back at $1000 a year, and maintains the set-up. The people pay $80 a month for the payback, and a flat $30 a month for the power, which has a max potential of 7,500 watts, with their own generator as backup if the batteries get too low. A sweet deal, all told. They're not rich.

Bruce

[Turbineguy]

3. How To Buy Oil......

with no money down!

[Ready4Change]

4. 3.5 to 1 energy return. Not bad at all.

Current ME oil wells are at least 10 to 1. But, at 3.5 to 1, you're still gaining energy.

And involves much less environmental destruction than mining and cooking the material above ground.

Continues the vehicular emissions problem, though.

Thanks for the info!

[tocqueville]

6. Oil shale extraction is extremely polluting

remember that in all mining, 95% is waste. I have been working with tat stuff previously. To make it a $30 the barrel you'll need to dig most of Colorado and Wyoming. Left would be a place looking like Mars, good training ground for NASA. The water supplies would be polluted with sulfur for ever. And oil shales normally contain a certain - non negligible - amount of uranium, which when exposed is released by oxidation.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

7. Links for gas to liquids.... Fuel Cell breakthrough news.....

www.Rentechinc.com

www.CH2BC.org

[NNadir]

8. This would be a terrible disaster.

The writer, a conservative, has no idea what he's talking about as usual. The technology is not particularly new or interesting either.

[Dogmudgeon]

9. The method seems inefficient, at best

Not being a civil engineer, petrologist, or geologist, I am going by intuition on this, which is supposedly a "counterintuitive" method anyway. I fail to see how this can be an energy-efficient, clean, or even productive method for extracting petroleum chemicals embedded in rock. Though I could be wrong.

Drill shafts into the oil-bearing rock. Drop heaters down the shaft. Cook the rock until the hydrocarbons boil off, the lightest and most desirable first. Collect them.

...

And we've hardly gotten to the really ingenious part yet. While the rock is cooking, at about 650 or 750 degrees Fahrenheit, how do you keep the hydrocarbons from contaminating ground water? Why, you build an ice wall around the whole thing. As O'Connor said, it's counterintuitive.

But ice is impermeable to water. So around the perimeter of the productive site, you drill lots more shafts, only 8 to 12 feet apart, put in piping, and pump refrigerants through it. The water in the ground around the shafts freezes, and eventually forms a 20- to 30-foot ice barrier around the site.

Next you take the water out of the ground inside the ice wall, turn up the heat, and then sit back and harvest the oil until it stops coming in useful quantities. When production drops, it falls off rather quickly.

...

Then you pump the water back in. (Well, not necessarily the same water, which has moved on to other uses.) It's hot down there so the water flashes into steam, picking up loose chemicals in the process. Collect the steam, strip the gunk out of it, repeat until the water comes out clean. Then you can turn off the heaters and the chillers and move on to the next plot (even saving one or two of the sides of the ice wall, if you want to be thrifty about it).

There's no mention that heaters and chillers require large amounts of energy themselves to heat and chill things. The method also would seem to require vast amounts of water, which would become filthy with petroleum waste, and not "clean" as the author insists. A an EROEI of 3.5 is claimed, but there's no support or this figure. Higher EROEIs were claimed for shale oil extraction until it was actually tried, which is why shale oils have not been developed.

Then, too, it's the same old problematic carbon-releasing source of energy. If it does work, the challenge of carbon resequestration remains. As a temporary expedient, it would be fine if it works, but I shudder to think of the effects 300 more years of burning petroleum would have on the climate.

It seems that it would be a lot simpler to just build nuclear reactors underground as a way to isolate the nuclear material. Nuclear energy itself is carbon-free and subterranean siting could become an attractive method of getting around "actinophobia".

(As always, the scientists and better-informed lay people in this thread should assume I neglected some essential element in my analyses and proposals; counter-arguments are welcomed, although I am not likely to argue back!)

--p!

[democracy eh]

15. considerations

peak of cheap conventional supplies is upon us, but from a technical perspective this Shell work is interesting.

I think the energy inputs for heat/cool are part of the 3.5:1 ratio

I could also see solar being employed as part of the heating model.
Irony of clean energy being used to produce dirty energy is ironic. (same thing with natural gas being used to provide energy to produce oil out of the Alberta tar sands.)

freezing could be achieved by using thermosyphons as opposed to refrigeration.

big sealed tubes drilled into the ground. with liquid CO2 inside. Much lower vaporization point than water or oxygen, therefore at the subterranian levels it turns into a vapor, rises, draws heat up, rises above ground in a tower, heat is released, gas becomes liquid, falls down and cycle is repeated. Once they are in place, they theoretically just work with no inputs of additional energy.

used to maintain permafrost in the arctic, but could be employed in other areas
http://epubl.luth.se/1402-1536/2002/07/
http://epubl.ltu.se/1402-1617/2002/358/

[Strelnikov_]

16. Does Not Add Up To Much Of An Energy Source

At 300 kWh/bbl electric for in-situ heating, 5.2x10⁶ BTU/bbl net from refined product, we have to invest 1 unit of electric energy to obtain 5.1 units of refined product. Of course, this does not include drilling 25 holes/acre, an ice containment wall, infrastructure and clean up.

Considering that internal combustion engines are about 30% efficient, whereas electric is 63% (70% storage battery/pumpback hydro/compressed air, 90% motor), we are down to about 2.5 units of equivalent useable energy for every unit of electric energy used, again not including drilling 25 holes/acre, an ice containment wall, infrastructure and clean up.

Sounds like we never have to worry about running out of petroleum as a chemical feedstock. As an energy source, though, this seems like a lot of environmental damage (both local and atmospheric) for little additional (if any) energy gain.

Can't we just get 120 mpg PHEV's developed, and use the electricity (and cogeneration) as a process energy input to utilize ethanol and biodiesel as a liquid fuel energy carrier?


Oil Shale Development In The United States
2005
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG414.pdf

In Shell’s approach (Figure 3.2), a volume of shale is heated by electric heaters placed in vertical holes drilled through the entire thickness (more than a thousand feet) of a section of oil shale. To obtain even heating over a reasonable time frame, between 15 and 25 heating holes will be drilled per acre. After heating for two to
three years, the targeted volume of the deposit will reach a temperature of between 650 and 700 degrees F. This very slow heating to a relatively low temperature (compared with the plus-900 degrees F temperatures common in surface retorting) is sufficient to cause the chemical and physical changes required to release oil from the shale. On an energy basis, about two-thirds of the released product is liquid and onethird is a gas similar in composition to natural gas. The released product is gathered in collection wells positioned within the heated zone.

. . .

How down-hole heating is supplied affects costs. As currently configured, the Shell in-situ retorting process uses electric power as the source for down-hole heating. About 250 to 300 kilowatt-hours(1) are required for down-hole heating per barrel of extracted product. Assuming electricity at $0.05 per kilowatt-hour, power costs for heating amount to between $12 and $15 per barrel (crude oil equivalent). An operation producing 100,000 barrels per day requires approximately 1.2 gigawatts of dedicated electric generating capacity.

(1)(RAND calculation, assuming specific heat of oil shale is 0.5 and average deposit richness of 25 gallons per ton.)

Sources for electric power include coal, natural gas (produced from the oil shale), nuclear power, and wind energy (listed in presumed order of increasing costs in the general area of the Green River Formation). With abundant supplies nearby, coal can be used for power generation. While coal is the least expensive choice, its use will result in a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions compared with conventional petroleum production or surface retorting. If natural gas were to be selected, roughly all the natural gas coproduced with the shale oil would be consumed in power generation.19 In the future, however, the value of natural gas may preclude its use in stationary power generation, leaving coal or nuclear as nearer-term choices and wind as a longer-term option. Requirements to sequester carbon dioxide produced by power plants could result in power cost increases of 30 percent (Buchanan, Schoff, and White, 2002), but the net impact on shale-derived oil costs would likely be less than 15 percent. An alternative to electrical heating is to heat the shale by down-hole natural gas burning. Compared with using electric power produced by natural gas, this approach halves natural gas use. Implementing down-hole gas burning requires the development of appropriate combustion technology. Presently, the net impact on shale oil production costs is uncertain.


I found the following humerous in how it prominently featured peak oil as a reason for oil shale development. Seems the Government is more than willing to discuss peak oil when it supports their agenda.

Strategic Significance of America America’s Oil Shale Resources
April 12, 2005
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/conf/pdf/dammer.pdf