Shale has approximately the energy density per ton as Captain Crunch. It’s all about the flow rate.
“Despite a century of trying, and $10 billion in investment, oil shale currently provides an infinitesimal .0001 of world energy, said Randy Udall, director of the Community Office for Resource Efficiency in Aspen. The (Shell) technology is incredible – incredible in an insane way, incredible in a fantastic way, maybe both.
Shell decided that previous efforts to exploit oil shale used too much energy, too much water and displaced too much land. Instead of taking rock out of the ground, heating it inside enormous retorts and releasing unstable hydrocarbons that must immediately be refined into oil, Shell plans to do something different, said Jill Davis, public relations director for the Shell Mahogany project.
Imagine a football field, Udall said. Now, imagine that they freeze the perimeter of the field to about 2,000 feet deep. Then, they take the water out of the middle of the field. Once the water is removed, they will drill wells 30 to 40 feet apart, and insert long electric heaters. Shell then plans to heat the rock to about 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and keep it that hot for three years – completing the work that nature would have done if the oil shale had been buried deeper, Udall said.”
“But with today’s technology, the potential energy comes with a steep price, says Udall and others who are opposed to producing oil from shale. The energy required is a ‘gigabunch,’ Udall said. To produce 100,000 barrels a day, would require raising the temperature of 700 billion tons of shale by 700 degrees Fahrenheit. How much coal, how many power plants? One million barrels a day would require 10 new power plants, five new coal mines. Given the expenditure of energy just to get the kerogen out of the rock, oil shale is a poor contender to solve the nation’s energy problems, Udall said.”
You know the oil companies are desperate when it comes down to this. That’s a lot of environmental destruction for very little energy and they still don’t know where the coal or water will come from.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, what we are left with is a federal government fiscally unable to act in ways that respond effectively to the growing energy crisis (even if it now wanted to), a financial system under tremendous stress that is geared primarily to moving funds into investments that encourage further dependence on fossil fuels, and a public that collectively has enormous amounts of capital it cannot effectively move into areas that will reduce fossil fuel dependence or create an infrastructure that runs on renewable energy.
We have in essence a dysfunctional investment system, both public and private, that seems to be providing the equivalent of very expensive end-of-life care to the moribund fossil fuel economy without much consideration for what comes afterward.
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