200 years of oil and we hear squat from Barry

[airdvr 210]

200 Year Supply Of Oil In Green River Formation
http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2012/05/12/200-year-supply-of-oil-in-green-river-formation/

It's huge and has been mostly ignored by the media and the administration. Wonder why that is? Perhaps they hate big oil...

Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

[SkyDekker 1,465]

No, probably more because they understand the difference between shale oil and oil shale.

[billvon 3,121]

200 years? We have an infinite amount of oil. We can make it from air and water - specifically carbon dioxide and water.

Why haven't we heard about this from Willard? Does he want to make sure the oil companies keep their monopoly on energy? Will he not be happy until gas prices are $20 a gallon?

[sfzombie 3]

i'm not sure if i read that right...making oil? from water and air?

http://kitswv.com

[billvon 3,121]

>making oil? from water and air?

Yes. The first step is hydrolysis - breaking water into oxygen and hydrogen. Then the Sabatier pricess transforms hydrogen into methane (CO2 + 4H2 -> CH4 + 2H2O.) The water is recycled.

Next, the oxygen is combined with the methane under pressure to create syngas (CO+H2.) This is then converted to basic hydrocarbons via a process called Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. This liquid is effectively oil; it can be used directly by diesel engines or refined to a gasoline like fuel.

[Andy9o8 2]

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>making oil? from water and air?

Yes. The first step is hydrolysis - breaking water into oxygen and hydrogen. Then the Sabatier pricess transforms hydrogen into methane (CO2 + 4H2 → CH4 + 2H2O.) The water is recycled.

Next, the oxygen is combined with the methane under pressure to create syngas (CO+H2.) This is then converted to basic hydrocarbons via a process called Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. This liquid is effectively oil; it can be used directly by diesel engines or refined to a gasoline like fuel.

Pfft. Big deal. Superman can extract gold from sea water.

[RonD1120 62]

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>making oil? from water and air?

Yes. The first step is hydrolysis - breaking water into oxygen and hydrogen. Then the Sabatier pricess transforms hydrogen into methane (CO2 + 4H2 -> CH4 + 2H2O.) The water is recycled.

Next, the oxygen is combined with the methane under pressure to create syngas (CO+H2.) This is then converted to basic hydrocarbons via a process called Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. This liquid is effectively oil; it can be used directly by diesel engines or refined to a gasoline like fuel.

I believe that and I totally accept it as the truth. Ah, that is science, right?

Look for the shiny things of God revealed by the Holy Spirit. They only last for an instant but it is a Holy Instant. Let your soul absorb them.

[Bolas 5]

Quote

>making oil? from water and air?

Yes. The first step is hydrolysis - breaking water into oxygen and hydrogen. Then the Sabatier pricess transforms hydrogen into methane (CO2 + 4H2 -> CH4 + 2H2O.) The water is recycled.

Next, the oxygen is combined with the methane under pressure to create syngas (CO+H2.) This is then converted to basic hydrocarbons via a process called Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. This liquid is effectively oil; it can be used directly by diesel engines or refined to a gasoline like fuel.

I'll bite.

How much does this process cost per gallon?

Stupidity if left untreated is self-correcting
If ya can't be good, look good, if that fails, make 'em laugh.

[airdvr 210]

So it's your position that it can't be done?

Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

[GeorgiaDon 381]

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200 Year Supply Of Oil In Green River Formation
http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2012/05/12/200-year-supply-of-oil-in-green-river-formation/

It's huge and has been mostly ignored by the media and the administration. Wonder why that is? Perhaps they hate big oil...

Did you read the comments following the article? Actually they are quite well informed, for a change. Here are some examples from the very forst page of comments:

Comment 1 (the very first one, right there at the top of the list):
"oil shale is neither oil nor shale, it is a waxy carbon substance called Kerogen. I’m not aware of any refineries currenlty tuned to refine kerogen into oil. Except for a few small experiments where kerogen has been heated to a few hundred degree C and some condensate has been skimmed off, it has never been done. To be a proven reserve it must be technologically recoverable. The technically recoverable oil from oil shale is exactly zero until you invent a way to do it and build the machine to do it."

Comment 3:
"I’m sure there are many trillions of barrels of oil in Green River. I’m equally sure that it doesn’t matter at all.

The reason for this, is that there’s no such thing as magic. It takes energy to get the kerogen out of shale. Lot’s of it. You have to grind rock and heat it. The energy return, is, to put things mildly, lousy (http://www.westernresourceadvocates.org/land/oseroi.php). It’s barely above 1:1, making it as big a boondoggle as ethanol. In all probability, you couldn’t even make drilling and production energetically self-sustaining, much less produce enough excess energy to run and industrial civilization.

As it stands today, the place only serves to generate penny stock to sell to suckers."
[penny stocks to suckers! I like that.]

Comment 4:
"the USGS very carefully qualified their estimate by saying AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGY, not today’s technology. Nor, did they say economically recoverable.
I was assigned to a team that worked on a US government shale oil project at Rifle, Colorado in 1950 while I was employed by DeGolyer & MacNaughton (world renowned petroleum consutlting firm located in Dallas, Texas). Even then, we found it was possible (not practical) to process, refine and obtain crude oil from the oil saturated shale. However, a larger problem was how to get rid of the enormous amounts of powdery flour-like residual material. I am sure the kerogen can be processed and refined for maybe couple of thousand dollars per barrel. I am still at a loss about how to dispose or make use of the residual material. I’d bet some starryeyed academic will come up with the idea that it can be made into some sort of solid material by using water. This is desert type country – where is the water?"

One more for the moment:
"There are massive barriers to this, as a mix of both technological and regulatory. The regulatory ones stem from the technical barriers – simply put, there isn’t a way to produce the oil at scale without causing significant pollution or using up massive amounts of water that the region doesn’t have. This is a major limitation holding back output levels from Canada’s oil sands as well – its a hugely water intensive process. Given that the Colorado River has routinely failed to reach the Gulf of California in recent years, among other regional water issues, the odds that the volume of water needed to produce this resources at a scale you are suggesting is highly unlikely with current technologies. Many of the regulatory barriers that are in place revolve around these water issues – interstate water agreements are highly complex and centered on protecting water suppliers for agricultural and direct household consumption."

There's a lot more in the comment section for those who wish to read.

It would behoove some people to dig a bit deeper before succumbing to the knee-jerk impulse to post any and all crap, no matter how moronic, just to get a dig in at Obama and/or "liberals".

Don

_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

[airdvr 210]

Never said it was easy...but if we could have the government picking winners and losers like they do with solar and coal maybe we could figure this one out. To ignore the possibility is moronic, and we don't need to get a jab in at Barry, he supplies all the fodder necessary all by himself.

Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

[kelpdiver 2]

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Never said it was easy...but if we could have the government picking winners and losers like they do with solar and coal maybe we could figure this one out. To ignore the possibility is moronic, and we don't need to get a jab in at Barry, he supplies all the fodder necessary all by himself.

Solar suffers because it can't compete with the Chinese labor costs and being 2 or 3 times more expensive per watt than conventional approaches. But if you're willing to invest in something that may be 20-30 times more expensive than the current 100$/barrel oil, surely you'd want to spend on the cleaner solution that is only 2-3x?

[GeorgiaDon 381]

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Never said it was easy...we could figure this one out.

Have at it. All those petroleum engineers must be stupid, or perhaps they're secretly Kenyan muslims who've been working for a century (since the oil industry first started trying to tap shale oil) to ensure that America fails. Anyway, I'm sure if you train your vast intellect on the problem you'll have it licked in no time.

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To ignore the possibility is moronic

What is moronic is to favor a "resource" that costs more energy to harvest and process than it yields, and along the way requires strip mining of tens of thousands of square miles of land and far more water than is available in that arid landscape. Kerogen isn't fluid, so the rock has to be mined, ground to a fine powder, mixed with a lot of water, and heated to several hundred degrees to harvest a low yield of kerogen (several tons of rock per barrel of kerogen). At the end of the process you have to figure out what to do with the waste; the pulverized cooked rock takes up a lot more volume than the original rock, so you can't just put it back in the hole, and the waste water is so contaminated it has to be held in leak-proof containment ponds essentially forever.

Tell you what, why don't you volunteer to have your home/neighborhood/state strip-mined, pulverized, then buried under hundreds of feet of rock dust and irretrievably poisoned water. Since you wish this for the residents of Kansas and Colorado, it's only fitting that you should offer to go first, don't you think?

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...we don't need to get a jab in at Barry, he supplies all the fodder necessary all by himself.

Yet for some reason you chose to title your thread "200 years of oil and we hear squat from Barry". So you use this astonishingly ignorant article to criticize "Barry", then claim you weren't making a jab? Maybe you're so blinded by your ODS you can't even see how ridiculous your statement is. Or maybe to you being honest just takes second place to stroking your obvious hatred.

Don

_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

[StreetScooby 5]

Quote

"oil shale is neither oil nor shale, it is a waxy carbon substance called Kerogen. I’m not aware of any refineries currenlty tuned to refine kerogen into oil. Except for a few small experiments where kerogen has been heated to a few hundred degree C and some condensate has been skimmed off, it has never been done. To be a proven reserve it must be technologically recoverable. The technically recoverable oil from oil shale is exactly zero until you invent a way to do it and build the machine to do it."

In 1986, I worked at a shale oil "semi-works" facility for Chevron Research. This was a "small production" facility that was run around the clock. The process was economical when oil was $70/bbl (in 1986 dollars).

We are all engines of karma

[GeorgiaDon 381]

Quote

In 1986, I worked at a shale oil "semi-works" facility for Chevron Research. This was a "small production" facility that was run around the clock. The process was economical when oil was $70/bbl (in 1986 dollars).

Where did you get the water from, and what did you do with the waste? Do you think it would be feasible to run a full-scale production facility and not take up all the water needed for agriculture, household use, etc in much of the area where the shale oil is accessible (almost all semi-arid high desert or grassland)?

My understanding is that the Alberta oil sands (which is bitumin, much closer to useful oil than kerogen is) require a LOT of water to extract, and an enormous amount of waste tailings and contaminated water is produced. Water is not nearly the limiting resource in northern Alberta that it is in Wyoming and Colorado.

Sometimes economies of scale work for you, and sometimes against. Enough water for a research-oriented pilot plant may not be an issue, but things can be quite different if you want to scale up a thousand-fold or more to a production facility. I don't work in the field so I don't know, which is why I'm asking this as an honest question.

Don

_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

[kenthediver 0]

mmmm - South Africans developed a process during th 70's that converts coal to petrol - called SASOL. Been supplying approx 30% of the SA petrol requirements since then.

[airdvr 210]

Quote

Quote

In 1986, I worked at a shale oil "semi-works" facility for Chevron Research. This was a "small production" facility that was run around the clock. The process was economical when oil was $70/bbl (in 1986 dollars).

I don't work in the field so I don't know, which is why I'm asking this as an honest question. Don

I guess when you say it's a moronic idea and undoable you should qualify your statement by saying you don't really know what you're talking about.

Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

[GeorgiaDon 381]

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Quote

Quote

In 1986, I worked at a shale oil "semi-works" facility for Chevron Research. This was a "small production" facility that was run around the clock. The process was economical when oil was $70/bbl (in 1986 dollars).

I don't work in the field so I don't know, which is why I'm asking this as an honest question. Don

I guess when you say it's a moronic idea and undoable you should qualify your statement by saying you don't really know what you're talking about.

Not really. Everything I have read about the issue indicates that problems with scale-up to an actual production facility (as opposed to a very small scale pilot plant) make the process unfeasible. Kind of like, just because I can jump over a three-foot hurdle doesn't mean I can jump over the moon, or even a small building, or maybe not even over a SUV. It's telling that no commercial oil company has developed a commercial shale oil production facility (as opposed to oil shale and fracking, which is a different resource and process altogether). Since StreetScooby has worked on the process, I suspect he could offer an informed opinion on the magnitude of the problems with the resource.

What is "moronic" is favoring an energy source that is fraught with problems (water consumption, waste production, having to strip-mine thousands of square miles) while denigrating energy sources that are proven, renewable, and generate far fewer waste and land use issues, such as solar, wind, etc. What is "moronic" is doing so for obviously political reasons ("if Obama is for it, I'm agin' it" and all that.)

Of course, if you can figure out how to get the kerogen out without using much water, generating excessive waste, or using more energy than you get back, you'll be a very rich guy. I'm much less optimistic than you seem to be though, as it seems petroleum engineers have been working at it for some time and we still don't have a commercially viable process.

Also, I still can't for the life of me see how your thread title is not a jab at Obama.

Don

_____________________________________
Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

[airdvr 210]

Quote

Quote

Quote

Quote

In 1986, I worked at a shale oil "semi-works" facility for Chevron Research. This was a "small production" facility that was run around the clock. The process was economical when oil was $70/bbl (in 1986 dollars).

I don't work in the field so I don't know, which is why I'm asking this as an honest question. Don

I guess when you say it's a moronic idea and undoable you should qualify your statement by saying you don't really know what you're talking about.

Not really. Everything I have read about the issue

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You've only read from sources who say it can't be done. I'm sure.

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while denigrating energy sources that are proven, renewable, and generate far fewer waste and land use issues, such as solar, wind, etc.

Solar and wind...you don't want to go there do you?

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Of course, if you can figure out how to get the kerogen out without using much water, generating excessive waste, or using more energy than you get back, you'll be a very rich guy. I'm much less optimistic than you seem to be though, as it seems petroleum engineers have been working at it for some time and we still don't have a commercially viable process.

Of course they don't. It won't be picked as a winner by this administration. They're too busy jacking off over Solyndra.

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Also, I still can't for the life of me see how your thread title is not a jab at Obama.

Ya think? Don

Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

[billvon 3,121]

>So it's your position that it can't be done?

What can't be done? Converting water and air to oil or kerogen to oil? Both can be done.

Do you want to pay for it?

[billvon 3,121]

>How much does this process cost per gallon?

On the order of $30-$50 per gallon, assuming separated CO2.

[billvon 3,121]

>but if we could have the government picking winners and losers like they do with
>solar and coal maybe we could figure this one out.

We probably could.

So what do we go with - solar, a technology that gives us free clean energy for as long as the sun shines? Or kerogen processing, that switches us to a different kind of polluting fossil fuel that will run out just as oil has? Actually I'm OK with funding the science for both, since liquid fuel still has a lot of advantages. (All three, actually - processing water into oil could probably use some research as well.)

[CygnusX-1 43]

Bill,

Haven't you heard that the sun will eventually go super-nova and burn out? Then what good will your precious solar panels be good for...

[billvon 3,121]

>Haven't you heard that the sun will eventually go super-nova and burn out? Then
>what good will your precious solar panels be . . .

Then they'll be REALLY good. For at least a short time.

[kallend 2,156]

4 billion years of fusion energy in the oceans. Fusion reactors are the power source of the future - always have been, always will be.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.