How could America extract over 2 trillion barrels of domestic oil without releasing dangerous carbon emissions in the process? That’s what scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and American Shale Oil are trying to figure out.
The target is oil shale. Found in and around depleted oil wells, oil shale is a sedimentary rock that contains kerogen—a mixture of organic compounds that can be converted to oil by subjecting it to high temperatures and high pressures.
The process, when oversimplified, is like making yourself a hearty bowl of tomato soup. The soup represents the oil. After heating it up and eating the soup, a film of soup remains all over the bowl. This is similar to the oil shale.
During the energy crisis in the 1970s, oil shale was considered as a potential new source of power. In Estonia, it is used to provide 95 percent of the country’s electric power. But in the U.S., the technology was never sufficiently developed to make using oil shale economically viable.
Oil shale extraction has historically been known to affect the air and water surrounding the extraction site, including heavy emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur oxide and nitrogen oxide, and the contamination of groundwater. If scientists could find a way to avert these problems, an estimated 2 trillion barrels of oil could become available.
How much energy does 2 trillion barrels of oil equal? Enough to meet current U.S. demand for the next 250 years, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Why put it in the air, when we can bury it?
The most common method of recovering oil shale is a process where shale is mined up to the surface and then transported to a facility for further processing. However, this causes a significant disturbance in the land. Large quantities of shale must also be disposed of as waste.
What the Livermore scientists are trying to develop is a way to process the shale underground, which would allow fewer waste products and reduce the impact on the land. Once the oil is extracted from shale, the depleted pocket of heated, rubblized underground shale may be suitable for capturing the carbon dioxide that is produced during the process.
“Imagine bubble wrap,” said Anne Stark, a spokesperson at Livermore Lab. “You pop one of the bubbles and get the oil out of it, then fill the CO2 in that hole basically.”
American Shale Oil has named the process “conduction-convection-reflux” or CCR. Heat is introduced to the rock formation through a horizontal well in CCR. The heat causes the organic material in the rock to slowly heat up to a boiling point. The resulting hot oil vapors will then condensate and be removed through a production well drilled into the area, and the process will repeat until all the oil is extracted and the rock breaks down and becomes rubblized. The oil is being sweated out of the shale, and once the pocket becomes empty, carbon dioxide will be pumped into the depleted holes.
But is pumping CO2 underground economically safe?
“The results have been pretty positive,” Stark continued. “We have researchers who are doing some research in shoving CO2 in geological formations. There are certain types of rock that take it up better than others, but there hasn’t been found anything negative about shoving it under ground.”
If successful, a new domestic supply of oil would lower prices for consumers across the country, and also secure access to sufficient oil at a time of global competition for limited resources. This in turn would ease the pressure on American dependence of foreign sources of oil, while giving breathing room to develop alternative energy sources without the worry of running dry.
With over 70 percent of viable oil shale deposits in the U.S. found on federal lands, the competition is heating up. In 2005, the Bureau of Land Management sought out proposals by commercial interests to develop the oil shale resources in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. Five leases were granted to three companies in Colorado (AMSO, Shell and Chevron), and one in Utah (OSEC). The leases provide for ten years to prove the technology; if successful, the plots expand to 5,120 acres. At this rate, AMSO anticipates transitioning to the commercial stage by 2014, and to be producing 100,000 barrels per day by 2018.
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