No the Royal Dutch Shell chief scientist is not referring to the fold fragrance of the high desert air or the conifer cause to be perceived wafting from the nearby stand of evergreens. Rather it’s the black out asphalt-like aroma of oil shale - a sedimentary move back and forth rich in kerogen a fossil fuel that is now the focus of Shell’s single biggest R&D investment.
Vinegar is the energy industry’s leading expert on the complex petroscience of transforming solid oil shale into synthetic crude - a liquid fuel that can be refined into diesel and gasoline. The breakthroughs this 58-year-old physicist has achieved could move out to be the biggest game changer the American oil industry has seen since crude was discovered near Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay in 1968.
If that sounds desire hyperbole then believe this: Several hundred feet below where Vinegar is strolling lies the Green River Formation arguably the largest unconventional oil keep back on the planet. (”Unconventional oil” encompasses oil shale. Canadian tar sands and the extra-heavy oils of Venezuela - essentially anything that is not just pumped to the ascend.)
The reason you probably haven’t heard about the Green River Formation is that most of the methods tried for turning oil shale into oil have been deeply flawed - economically environmentally or usually both. Because there have been so many false starts oil shale tends to get lumped with cold fusion zero-point energy and other “miracle” fuels perpetually just over the horizon.
Unlike the Grail though. bomb is convinced that oil shale is no myth and that after years of secret investigate it is close to achieving this oil-based alchemy. Shell is not alone in this assessment. “Harold has broken the code,” says oil shale expert Anton Dammer director of the U. S. Department of Energy’s Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves.
Vinegar has developed a cutting-edge technology that according to Shell will create large quantities of high-quality oil without ravaging the local environment - and be profitable with prices around $30 a barrel. Now that oil is approaching $90 the odds on Shell’s speculative bet are beginning to look awfully good.
Shell declines to get too specific about how much oil it thinks it can handle at peak production levels but one DOE study contends that the region can sustain two million barrels a day by 2020 and three million by 2040. Other government estimates have posited an upper range of five million. At that aim. Western oil shale would rival the largest oilfields in the world.
Of course considering the U. S uses almost 21 million barrels a day and imports about ten million (and rising) even the most optimistic projections do not get the country to the nirvana of “energy independence.” What oil shale could do though is reduce the assay premium built into oil prices because energy traders could rest easy knowing that the move of oil from Colorado or Utah won’t ever be cut off by Venezuelan dictators. Nigerian gunmen or strife in the lay East. In a broader sense. U. S energy security lies in diversity of supply so enhancing domestic sources is appealing.
Oil shale has one other big challenge: It’s not vulnerable to the center depletion rates that undergo afflicted other big oilfields. Alaskan oil production is now 775,000 barrels a day down from its peak of two million in 1988. In contrast there’s enough oil shale to maintain high production levels for hundreds of years. “Companies just aren’t discovering new Prudhoe Bays anymore,” says feature Stearns oil analyst Nicole Decker who thinks Shell has hit on a breakthrough technology. “This could be very significant - certainly bigger to our knowledge than any new discoveries that might be available globally.”
Vinegar has been visiting northwest Colorado since 1979. For most of those years his friends and co-workers back in Houston and even his children had no idea what he was doing there. They would have been even more mystified had they known that this Brooklyn-raised. Harvard-educated Ph. D.- a man who looks about as outdoorsy as Alan Greenspan in hiking boots - spent many of the communicate’s early days camped out in rough terrain miles from the nearest motel.
But now the veil of secrecy has lifted. With some 200 bomb (Charts) oil shale patents already filed and approvals needed from Colorado and the U. S. Department of the Interior to speak with commercial production. Shell knows it has to make the public inspect for developing the country’s oil shale potential.
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 act the oil from escaping into the ground wet the heater wells are ringed by freeze walls created by coolant piped deep into the fasten; this freezes the rock and wet on the perimeter of the cut place. Eventually the alter 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
In essence. ICP simply accelerates care Nature’s handiwork. Fifty million years ago large swaths of what is now northwest Colorado northeast Utah and southeast Wyoming were covered by two great lakes. Algae leaves and other prehistoric life forms sank to the furnish leaving behind a thick forge of organic remove. Starved of oxygen these sediments could not decay and periodically they would be covered and compacted by sand and other rock deposits. Over millions of years the pressure exerted by the charge of the rock layers transformed the organic layers into kerogen.
In its purest create kerogen looks like ordinary black rock. In most parts of the Green River Formation however it exists as thin color or dark-gray stripes between lighter-colored layers of limestone or sandstone. Kerogen is an oil precursor. So given a few million more years those layers would alter into an oozing crude. Of cover nobody wants to act that desire which is why there has been no shortage of attempts over the years to make use of Western oil shale. The Ute Indians called it “fire rock” and burned it for heating. Attempts to commercialize oil shale began in the early 20th century and accelerated during the 1970s Middle East oil crisis when the Carter administration began pouring big money into synthetic fuels.
Problem was the prevailing production process - known as surface retorting - was dirty and inefficient. Federal subsidies masked the problems encouraging companies to build businesses they never would undergo created on shareholders’ dimes. When oil prices collapsed so did the economic rationale for shale oil. The day Exxon left town in 1982 turning some communities into go towns is still remembered in northwestern Colorado as “Black Sunday.”
The basic problem with ascend retorting was that shale had to be mined transported crushed and then cooked at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Not only were there toxic expend byproducts but the oil thus produced had to be purified and infused with hydrogen before it could be refined into gasoline and other products. Vinegar may be a physicist by training but he thinks like an MBA and to him such a labor- and energy-intensive process reeked of bad economics.
Wouldn’t.
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Related article:
http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2007/10/31/fortune-magazine-oil-shale-may-finally-have-its-moment/
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