Shale oil == regular old liquid oil tied up in shale strata, making it hard to get at. Considered “unconventional” when compared to normal oil drilling formations. The Bakken Formation, Eagle Ford and Barnett Shale are all this sort of formation (although the last 2 are more natural gas fields than oil fields).
Oil shale == shale that contains kerogen, which is a solid hydrocarbon compound. It has to be basically cooked in place to liberate the kerogen from the surrounding rock, at which point it is refined and is similar to crude oil. Not currently a huge player in the world energy industry due to the difficulty of extraction.
The US has HUGE oil shale reserves- something like the equivalent of 4.3 trillion barrels of crude oil, mostly in the Green River formation in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. The rest of the world has something like 0.7 trillion barrels worth, so if we can figure out a way to extract this economically, or normal oil gets really expensive, the US is sitting pretty.
I live in Colorado, we talk about that oil shale sometimes. I don’t think we’ll be mining it any time soon.
Even if we wanted to dig up big pieces of wilderness, the technology to harvest it isn’t there. It would take ten years or more, probably 20+, and many billions of dollars before we could get any oil out of it. Colorado is more likely to spend the money on cleaner alternatives than to destroy wilderness. Getting the political power to mine shale would require a much more dire situation.
Wasn’t there a plan to burn that shale oil underground? The vapors would rise and we would extract the petroleum from the condensing vapors. Although I think bio oil will come faster.
You’re just pushing soft denial, which is exactly why I posed the question. New drilling technology can only achieve marginal improvements when the fundamental situation is the end of free-flowing (i.e. cheap) oil. This is not my opinion, it’s basic geology, evidenced by the historical peak and decline of almost ever major oil field. Playing the market for oil futures doesn’t change the fundamentals of geology. Someone will always lose.
The Bakken shale makes a perfect case study in denial. People often play up the hypothetical reserves of the Bakken as roughly “500 billion barrels” when the recoverable reserves may only be 7.4 billion barrels (per the most optimistic USGS study so far). That’s still only about a year’s worth of total U.S. oil consumption, and it will take much longer than that to trickle into the supply. There is no pending technology that will allow oil to be recovered at a significantly higher net energy return, but vague pronouncements of magic drilling are the core of peak oil denial arguments, along with patriotic slogans.
It’s just like the heyday of Oklahoma or Texas, when people lived as if those fields would never peak. Oklahoma peaked in 1927 and Texas peaked in 1972. Look at the curve of Texas on this graph (Bakken’s current output is roughly at the starting point of that graph, by coincidence).
California’s Monterey shale (highly optimistic 15.5 billion recoverable barrels; roughly 2 years of U.S. consumption) is also being hyped as an oil savior, as if California never peaked in 1985 and the oil would flow fast enough to affect global prices. Shale is old news in the oil business. It’s been known about for decades and can now be recovered more easily due to horizontal drilling and fracking, but it’s not a real game-changer when you do the math. It still takes a lot more energy to extract than liquid crude.
The environmental dangers of shale oil (and gas) fracking are no trivial factor in all this. Bakken fracking is occurring in a relatively bleak area by most people’s aesthetic standards, but the Monterey shale has many scenic/wilderness elements. Likewise, if Colorado and Utah’s kerogen shale ever became cost effective (unlikely, as they’ve been trying for decades) the ruin of desert landscapes would be enormous, even if they found magic desert water supplies to sustain operations.
That is from the IEA. So if we have to choose between the estimates of people who actually know what they’re talking about or you, who do you think wins?
You’re probably referring to Shell’s in situ shale experiments, which still require untenable amounts of energy. Maybe some miracle will change that, but it’s far from a given.
The public has also been led to believe that “frackable” aka “wet” shale like the Bakken formation and California’s Monterey shale is somehow the same as “dry” kerogen shale (Colorado, Utah, etc.) which requires far more energy to yield actual oil. When (snake) oil investors talk about “trillions of barrels locked up in shale!” and “Saudi Arabia, watch out!” they are referring to hypothetical kerogen reserves, not recoverable yields. If a trillion potential barrels requires 999,000,000,000 barrel-equivalents of energy to extract, you’re only left with a 1,000,000,000 barrel yield, or about 2 months of U.S. oil consumption. But people will act like you’re unpatriotic for doing the math.
Kerogen oil production is sort of like trying to get permanently free-flowing wax from a candle. With a candle, combustion is self-sustaining but the wax will re-solidify when it cools. With kerogen, they have to use the equivalent of a butane torch that never shuts off. Unlike the candle, the kerogen oil will remain liquid afterward, but the EROEI losses are already very large by that point. Kerogen is basically rock and takes a ton of energy to burn, yet people refer to it as “oil” because they want to appear optimistic. Optimism without evidence is no different than denial.
If “bio oil” is ever going to be feasible, the scale of plant growth (algae?) would have to be far larger than is likely to be physically possible. Biodiesel is only workable because most people aren’t scavenging Mexican restaurant castoffs, etc. It’s similar to the corn ethanol fallacy. Net energy losers are hyped as miracle cures by ignoring the total scale of oil consumption.
I agree that the danger of Peak Oil might be overhyped, but only at the moment, which is not the real point. This has to be thought through well beyond the present. Unconventional oil is still (barely) keeping pace with world demand, but once conventional oil starts to precipitously decline (the IEA says crude oil peaked in 2006) unconventional sources won’t be able to keep up at any price. That’s the point when “doomer” Peak Oil scenarios will kick in. Just imagine if the U.S. had to only rely on oil produced in North America. Our economy would collapse in short order because the flow-rates aren’t close to meeting our ~20 mbpd habit. We are in a temporary position of luxury because we can still draw from OPEC, etc.
Free-market proponents have always claimed that oil prices will tell us what’s going on, yet when oil prices rose sharply in 2008 (and followed a “bumpy plateau” thereafter; a classic Peak Oil prediction) they claimed that conspiratorial or market-manipulation forces were at work, not geology. The point I’m trying to make is that many people can’t cope with evidence of physical scarcity. They’ve known oil abundance since birth and never questioned its permanence.
I could also get into the topic of how this global recession was triggered by oil prices, not just bad U.S. mortgages. When energy exceeds a certain percentage of daily business costs, it becomes impossible to maintain the status quo without more borrowing, but money can’t fix physical resource depletion. Financial debt mirrors physical debt in the long run. I think it’s dangerous to pretend growth-as-usual can continue in the absence of historically cheap oil. Natural gas may also be overhyped with “100 years” claims that don’t stand up to current well peaking rates. The best quality anthracite coal is also past peak.
The current approach to fixing the economy is to pretend that energy will keep growing as it had before, just with “green” sources that may never match fossil fuel scales. That approach is likely to get us into a deeper mess vs. trying to scale back overpopulation and economic growthism.
Of course, “optimists” will never admit that this ~200 year industrial experiment could ever collapse under its own weight. That psychology weighs heavily on this topic.
Oil production decline is not likely to follow a smooth curve, but rather a series of descending plateaus- possibly a very shallow series. That is, once wholesale prices rise enough to make previously unprofitable reserves exploitable, the new supply will temporarily stabilize the price.
The worry isn’t that commercial oil production will someday cease- that’s a given; but that without any economical substitute for oil, industrial civilization will enter a death spiral as rising energy costs make any possible substitutes too expensive to develop. That’s a little too plausible for me to be complacent but overall I consider it overly pessimistic. I’m pretty sure we’ll muddle through somehow.
eg8576736: Like most people with an ax to grind, you’re long on the blah-blah and short on the facts. The only cites you’ve provided are to sources of questionable reliability while the evidence against your position which you dismiss with a Jedi hand wave is overwhelming - another characteristic of the uninformed doomers.
Some Shell Oil figures show that 1 km squared of land per year would need to be industrialized just to get 50,000 barrels per day from kerogen shale, which is only about 3.5 minutes of U.S. net oil consumption! People who call that “energy independence” are deluded.
My fear is that people who don’t respect nature will try to green-light this desperation oil, as a “God given” birth-right. You can already see that mentality in gas fracking operations.
You ignored the content of my post. I got into Bakken heavily. It only puts out about 5% of U.S. daily consumption (800 kbpd currently) and may only yield 7.4 billion barrels per this 2013 USGS report, which is only about a year of total U.S. consumption, spread over much longer than a year. That’s why Bakken has done almost nothing to affect fuel prices on the global shared market.
You are also glossing over massive kerogen shale EROEI losses, which is exactly why I posted this topic. I challenge you to learn about the actual energy (and water) inputs needed to extract kerogen shale, then come back here and post a scientific assessment, not faux patriotic propaganda. No honest geologist will side with your claims. They know that all forms of shale are tight oil, with kerogen being far tighter than Bakken-type “wet” shale. They know that you can’t just rattle off potential reserve figures and pretend they’re the same as recoverable oil. (That’s all you’re doing above.)
Shell has been trying to extract oil from kerogen for decades, with mining and in-situ experiments. As pointed out in another reply, the best scenario they’ve come up with so far is a yield of 50,000 barrels per day from a 1 km square land area, or about 3.5 minutes of U.S. daily oil consumption, which requires huge external inputs of energy (possibly from coal or gas, which isn’t free) and lots of water.
Even if there were magic water supplies in the desert, kerogen oil potential is nothing close to U.S. daily flow-rate needs. The oil has to come out of the ground fast enough to matter. We’d need to industrialize about 400 square km (or 155 square miles) of land per year just for our 20 mbpd daily oil fix, and more land would be ruined all the time as old kerogen fields depleted. It would be a losing battle for energy, the landscape and water supplies. Gas fracking is also a big competitor for water. Cornucopian false-optimism always assumes infinite supplies of anything we want.
The thing I don’t understand is why such claims about shale keep getting repeated despite evidence entirely to the contrary. Then again, 20% of the population still smokes cigarettes knowing it can kill them. And evidence for AGW is ignored, likewise.
To expand on that, a Gaussian curve is not a time series distribution, and has nothing to do with increasing or decreasing rates of production or availability. It is a model of the distribution of characteristics or Production of oil or other finite resources generally follows a skewed logistic time series as a first approximation, but the actual details of resource availability and production are complex enough that no simple model will accurately predict production at any time, and prediction of any threshold or ultimate peak value is highly dependent upon a large number of parameters.
However, it is really without question that there will be a peak resource utilization after which availability declines and cost increases to the point that it is no longer viable as an energy or production resource. This can be seen historically in other scarce resources which are used past the point of sustainability such as peat, whale oil, and timber.
I can say without fear of contradiction that Colorado isn’t going to be pumping water into the ground to get oil.
If we decide to go for that shale, it will be with other methods.
This is an example of how hard it is to predict since one item will affect many others.
If the USA becomes self-sufficient or a net exporter, that means that all the oil imported today will no longer be imported. Since the US is one of the biggest users of imported oil, this means the world will be awash in a sea of oil that has to go somewhere or will become worthless.
Which will depress world prices something fierce.
Which may make imported oil cheaper that domestic oil. Don’t you think that will keep the price of domestic oil down and encourage re-importing?
There are too many variables here to make an accurate, long-term prediction.
Huh? Not sure what your logic is there but I suppose you think the IEA just pulls these numbers and dates out of their ass? OK. If that’s what you want to believe, don’t let me stop you.
As to there being a lot of variables, indeed there are. For example, have you ever looked at the disparity between the price of WTI and Brent? Of course you haven’t. What variables explain that do you think? And why do you think the US still exports oil when we’re a net importer of the stuff? Want to explain that? By all means, please vanquish our ignorance.
We don’t have enough water in Colorado as it is.
Pumping it down a hole in the ground- to get oil- isn’t going to happen.
There’s simply no way that’s going to be approved.
We may use other methods to harvest shale. I don’t personally think so- strip mining isn’t popular either.
But maybe. Water-based methods, not feasible. We just don’t have the water.
Calm down. It’s hard enough to predict the stock market next month or the price of corn next year. Predicting 20-30 years into the future is unlikely to be highly accurate, no matter how good your basic data is. Compare my assessment of Vance Packard’s 1960 book in earlier posts.
