Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Carolyn Tucker, Colorado, energy, kerogen, oil, oil shale, peak oil, pie in the ground, proven reserves, Royal Dutch Shell
Said spokesman Martin Skrtel, speaking at Shell’s headquarters in Den Hague, “It was always just a really stupid, non-starter of an idea. You’d have to be a scientific illiterate to believe that cooking “oil shale” to create crude oil could have a positive energy balance. Still, we thought we could buy off enough legislators to create, how should we say, a conducive fiscal atmosphere that would make the scheme a profit-maker for us. But now we have abandoned even those plans…”
Ha ha that was satire. What they really said was different:
A month after Royal Dutch Shell’s U.S. subsidiary said it would pursue its oil shale research project in Colorado while selling off other oil and gas assets, the company has reversed its decision.
“There’s been a shift in our oil shale project,” spokeswoman Carolyn Tucker said Tuesday.
“The energy market has evolved since Shell first started its oil shale research project in 1981. We plan to exit our Colorado oil shale research project in order to focus on other opportunities and producing assets in our broad global portfolio,” she said in an email.
“Our current focus is to work with staff and contractors as we safely and methodically stop research activities at the site,” she said.
The announcement regarding the closure of Shell’s oil shale research and development work comes as the company announces plans to put its assets on the market across the United States, including oil and gas assets in northwestern and southeastern Colorado.
Shell on Aug. 1 reported a 60 percent drop in second-quarter results — largely due to a $2 billion write-down of its North American shale assets due to “the latest insights from exploration and appraisal drilling results and production information.”
via Shell pulling out of Colorado oil shale research project – Denver Business Journal.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Enefit, eroei, Hrenko, kerogen, oil shale, Orrin Hatch, tons of sense, WTF
The Bureau of Land Management has initiated an environmental review of the right-of-way Enefit needs for its proposed utility corridor, which would connect its mine and processing plant to the Bonanza Power Plant outside Vernal. The corridor would also carry a 16-inch pipeline to Chevron’s east-to-west line that runs 11.5 miles north of the mine, as well as an 8-inch natural gas line, a 30-inch water line and a second 138-kilovolt power line. The pipelines would run underground.
…
The story goes on…
But Hrenko stressed that Enefit’s “retort” process uses no water, although some will be needed for dust control and returning spent shale to the mine for reclamation….
And…
“It’s an extremely efficient process where we produce all the power to operate the project and we’ll put power into the grid,” Hrenko said.
via Hearings set as firm moves forward with Utah oil shale development | The Salt Lake Tribune.
Don’t need water or power but we need a 30-inch water pipe, a natural gas pipeline and a mainline to the nearest power plant.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, enegy, frack, fracking, IEA, oil journalism, oil production, oil shale, oil supply, Peak Demand, peak oil, shale oil, tight oil, Tom Gjelten
As NPR’s Tom Gjelten reports:
“Petroleum engineers have always known about the untapped underground oil in the United States, but it was unreachable, trapped in tight shale rock. Then the engineers figured out how to crack the rock. Hydraulic fracturing — fracking — got that ‘tight oil’ finally flowing in places like North Dakota.”
via Huge Boost In U.S. Oil Output Set To Transform Global Market : The Two-Way : NPR.
Wrong, Tom. The tight oil has been ‘reachable’ for several decades, it was just such an expensive process that it made no sense to do it when oil was cheap — a money-losing proposition. Now, all the cheap oil is gone, and out comes the ‘unconventional’ oil.
Gjelten also said that the decline in oil consumption in the US was due to efficiency (check the VMT chart Tom). There was no mention of depletion of existing fields, or the striking decline rate of fracked shale wells. And he reported that cheaper oil is just over the horizon.
Would it hurt Mr. Gjelten to do just a tiny bit of research on the topic of his reports so he doesn’t sound like a complete idiot?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, Bakken Shale, crude oil, energy, horizontal drilling, James Hamilton, Jeffrey Brown, marginal costs of production, natural gas liquids, Niobrara, oil price, oil shale, peak oil, shale oil, shale plays, tight gas, tight oil, tight oil formations, unconventional oil, westtexas
Throwing a little cold water on some recent, loudly reported unscientific predictions. When you read Hamilton, always be sure to read the comments by Jeffrey Brown for an important Big Picture view.
In addition to the uncertainties noted above about extrapolating historical production rates, the rate at which production declines from a given well over time is another big unknown. Another key point to recognize is the added cost of extracting oil from tight formations. West Texas Intermediate is currently around $85/barrel. With the huge discount for Canadian and north-central U.S. producers, that means that producers of North Dakota sweet are only offered $61 a barrel. Tight oil is not going to be the reason that we return to an era of cheap oil, for the simple reason that if oil again fell below $50/barrel, it wouldn’t be profitable to produce with these methods. Nor is tight oil likely to get the U.S. back to the levels of field production that we saw in 1970. But tight oil will likely provide a source of significant new production over the next decade as long as the price does not fall too much.
via Econbrowser: Shale oil and tight oil.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Estonia, kerogen, minimal surface disturbance, oil shale, open pit mining
These are the same people who claim “minimal surface disturbance.”
From Google Earth.
And here’s one of those areas from about 100,000 feet:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American Petroleum Institute, kerogen, oil shale, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell
Hey, with “the right policies,” we can make this resource available to Royal Dutch Shell. “Right policies” would include taxpayer subsidies and environmental de-regulation. Then they can sell 100k bpd or so. Never mind that it could very well take over 100k bpd equivalent to make 100k bpd of oil out of Colorado kerogen. And there is no water available to do anything, let alone process “oil shale.” But with the “right policies” … anything is possible.
Note — “oil shale” is not “shale oil.” “Oil shale” is not oil and usually not shale either.
Filed under: maps, Uncategorized | Tags: Eagle Ford shale, frac, oil, oil shale, shale gas, shale oil, Texas, tight gas, tight oil, tracking, water
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204528204577009930222847246.html
Piece in WSJ on oil versus water in Texas. The inconvenient reality of hydro-fracking. The article itself claims 6 million gallons needed for each Frac in the Eagle Ford. (The article is behind the paywall.)
Industrialized Cyclist Notepad 