The Illusive Bonanza: Oil Shale in Colorado: “Pulling the Sword from the Stone”(pdf warning)
It has a good set of references to reports from DOE, RAND and the University of Colorado. Unfortunately, it also contains commentary like this:
Buried beneath the ground, in Colorado and Utah, are a trillion tons of oil shale. Throughout the 20th century, men have tried and tried again to unlock the energy contained in these rocks. To date, all efforts have failed. But every twenty or thirty years, when energy prices spike, a new attempt is mounted. The persistence is understandable: whoever unlocks this resource would capture a trillion dollar prize. But oil shale’s track record is not encouraging. The rocks are stubborn, an illusive bonanza, promising much, delivering little. Despite a century of trying and $10 billion in investment, oil shale currently provides an infinitesimal 0.0001 (or one ten-thousandth) of world energy. This paper explains why oil shale is so difficult to unlock, and why the “rock that burns” may never provide more than one percent of U.S. energy.
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As a rule, nations don’t tap oil shale unless they are destitute. The world’s primary producer has been Estonia, a Baltic nation lacking in coal, natural gas, oil, or hydropower. When Russian natural gas and nuclear power became available, Estonia began to phase out its shale oil industry. Elsewhere, small amounts of shale have been mined in China, Brazil, and Russia. Most recently, a well-funded and much-ballyhooed Australian oil shale experiment failed. Tellingly, one partner in that bankrupt project was Suncor, a successful developer of Canadian tar sands. After losing $100 million, Suncor now appreciates the critical distinctions between tar sands and oil shales. There are two ways to produce shale oil. Typically, the rock is mined like coal. After being loaded and trucked to a processing plant, the shale is crushed and fed into an enormous kiln (or “retort”), where it is roasted to 1,000 degrees F. The heat “cracks” the kerogen, whose distilled vapors can be refined into a liquid fuel. Retorting oil shale is capital intensive, messy, inefficient, and polluting. It consumes lots of energy and water. The slag, swollen in volume and contaminated with arsenic, must be safely disposed. The entire process is so costly and laborious that global production has never exceeded 25,000 barrels a day, compared to today’s 84,000,000 barrels of total oil production. Retorting a million barrels each day, as some propose, would entail mining and disposing of 700 million tons per year, digging the world’s deepest open pit mines, constructing a hundred retorts, and planning new cities to house tens of thousands of workers. In sum, it would be the largest mining operation in the world. In the last ten years, Royal/Dutch Shell has experimented with a new way to produce oil shale, a way that is, at first glance, less destructive and more promising.
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Although Shell’s method avoids many of the negative impacts of mining oil shale, it requires a mind-boggling amount of electricity. To produce 100,000 barrels a day would require raising the temperature of 700,000,000,000 pounds of shale by 700 degrees F. How much power would be needed? A gigabunch—in rough numbers, about $500,000,000 per year. The least expensive source for electricity is a coal-fired power plant. How much coal, how many power plants? To produce 100,000 barrels per day, the RAND Corporation recently estimated that Shell will need to construct the largest power plant in Colorado history, large enough to serve a city of 500,000. This power plant, costing about $3 billion, would consume five million tons of coal each year, producing ten million tons of greenhouse gases, some of which would still be in the atmosphere a century from now. To double production, you’d need two power plants. One million barrels a day would require ten new power plants, five new coal mines.
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What contribution can oil shale make to energy security? Producing 100,000 barrels per day of shale oil does not violate the laws of physics, if the price of conventional crude rises high enough it might be economic. But the nation is currently consuming 100,000 barrels of oil every seven minutes. Increasing the efficiency of America’s automobiles by two miles per gallon would save ten times as much fuel each year, saving consumers $40 billion at the pump. The National Academy of Sciences has stated that bolder efficiency targets—cars, trucks, and SUVs getting 30, 40 or 50 miles per gallon—are doable and affordable. An aggressive national commitment to fuel efficiency is not optional, it’s inevitable. In time, a more efficient fleet could save 20 times as much petroleum as oil shale will ever provide. Dreams and hype aside, oil shale is the poorest of the fossil fuels, containing far less energy than crude oil, much less even than hog manure, peat moss, corn pellets, household garbage, or Cap’n Crunch. A meager amount of energy, tightly bound up in an enormous volume of rock, oil shale seems destined to remain an illusive bonanza, the petroleum equivalent of fool’s gold.
With all due respect to your fighter-pilot dad, this looks like a truly horrible idea. Fortunately it also looks like it's too hard to do.
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