Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

[Verrocchio]

Shell shelves oil-shale application to refine its research


The front-runner energy company in the effort to unlock oil shale in northwest Colorado has slowed down its research by withdrawing an application for a state mining permit.

Shell's method involves heating shale over a period of years and encircling it in a wall of frozen water to prevent groundwater contamination.
Shell has been researching heating methods on its property in the Piceance Basin for several years and is now in the process of freezing a test wall. Research on that wall will continue.


Davis said the freeze-wall test should be completed by 2009 or 2010.

++++++++++++++++++++

This is a development worth noting. It's bad news, of course, not to meet a projected milestone, but Shell is continuing with the method that they think will allow them to tap western Colorado's estimated 1.3 trillion barrels of oil. Their persistence could be an indicator of their confidence or this may be one of the few remaining games to play for an oil major.

[mlg120856]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Anyone familiar with global resource corporation microwave technology for extraction of oil from shale, old tires, etc.?

[Verrocchio]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Anyone familiar with global resource corporation microwave technology for extraction of oil from shale, old tires, etc.?

Mig, that's something new for me. What's the energy equation on that technology?

[Starving Steve]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Extracting oil from Colorado shale makes about as much economic sense as extracting the gold out of a cubic metre of seawater. That is why Shell Oil pulled-out of the project: it costs more energy to extract the oil in shale than the oil in the shale yields in energy...... Dahhhhhhh.

Gosh, this pot-head economics sounds familiar. It sort of reminds me of the energy economics of solar panels, windmills, burning tires, ethanol from corn, hydrogen cars, solar-thermal-electric power plants using mirrors, fussion power, anti-matter, geo-thermal, and other goofy projects.

Is it the pot in the universities that is making students think like this, or is it the government research grants?:rolleyes:

[Guest]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

I don't know. Burning tires sounds pretty good Steve. Lots of BTU's in that idea and we've got lots of tire-stock out there in North America. Of course the air pollution people might not like that one much. Seems like whatever practical idea we come up with to replace petroleum, some constituents are going to complain, eh?

[mikedev10]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

isn't shale oil economically viable at $130 oil?

forgot the stock but i invested in one company per agora's recommendation that is using microwave technology to try and coax the oil out of shale. working on tires with it at the moment, don't burn them just yet!

[mlg120856]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

"The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum and gas hidden inside everyday objects—or at least anything made with hydrocarbons, which, it turns out, is most of what’s around you. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste—tires, plastic, vinyl—into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running)."

Source: Popular Science article from Global Resource web page.

[Jayhawk]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Interesting article I just read-

The Politics of Oil Shale.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

"The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum and gas hidden inside everyday objects—or at least anything made with hydrocarbons, which, it turns out, is most of what’s around you. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste—tires, plastic, vinyl—into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running)."

Source: Popular Science article from Global Resource web page.

Do you mean to say that every hour using microwaves that 10 tonnes of auto waste can be zapped at a cost of <1million BTU, and 17 million BTU of energy can be harvested in the form of natural gas?

So electricity is made on site at the junk yard, or is the natural gas sold on site?

Seventeen-to-one on my money at the junk yard.... Fancy that! And the Holy Grail appears there too.

I bought Epcor (EP.UN) which burns tires to make electricity at Edmonton, but my Epcor income trust did not make much money for me. Now why was that? :rolleyes:

[c1ue]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste—tires, plastic, vinyl—into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy

And what comes out the other end besides energy?

Isn't burning plastic how dioxins get made?

[GRG55]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

And what comes out the other end besides energy?

Isn't burning plastic how dioxins get made?

Apparently incinerating human remains in crematoriums is also a dioxin producer...:eek:

[maybe it's coming from the increased use of plastic replacement heart valves?]

[GRG55]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Shell shelves oil-shale application to refine its research


The front-runner energy company in the effort to unlock oil shale in northwest Colorado has slowed down its research by withdrawing an application for a state mining permit.

Shell's method involves heating shale over a period of years and encircling it in a wall of frozen water to prevent groundwater contamination.
Shell has been researching heating methods on its property in the Piceance Basin for several years and is now in the process of freezing a test wall. Research on that wall will continue.


Davis said the freeze-wall test should be completed by 2009 or 2010.

++++++++++++++++++++

This is a development worth noting. It's bad news, of course, not to meet a projected milestone, but Shell is continuing with the method that they think will allow them to tap western Colorado's estimated 1.3 trillion barrels of oil. Their persistence could be an indicator of their confidence or this may be one of the few remaining games to play for an oil major.

Pretty difficult to imagine major investments in shale oil while this is going on...

California Outlines Largest U.S. Global Warming Plan

By Adam Satariano
June 26 (Bloomberg) -- California outlined for the first time the largest U.S. attempt to regulate greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, calling for the creation of a new emissions- trading program and increased renewable-energy production...

...Capped sectors would include electricity, transportation fuels, natural gas and large industries, the report said. The first industries to be regulated under the system will be utilities such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and oil and gas refiners including San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp., with the other sectors following, said Stanley Young, a spokesman for the air board...

[Starving Steve]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

Pretty difficult to imagine major investments in shale oil while this is going on...

California Outlines Largest U.S. Global Warming Plan

By Adam Satariano
June 26 (Bloomberg) -- California outlined for the first time the largest U.S. attempt to regulate greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, calling for the creation of a new emissions- trading program and increased renewable-energy production...

...Capped sectors would include electricity, transportation fuels, natural gas and large industries, the report said. The first industries to be regulated under the system will be utilities such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and oil and gas refiners including San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp., with the other sectors following, said Stanley Young, a spokesman for the air board...

While idiots in the state government were doing this, the temperature at SF Airport for May 2008 was exactly normal: 58.7F. Not since November 2007 has any month been above normal in temperature, and there is a string of months before November that are at exactly normal or below normal, just like May.

Go check: www.wrh.noaa.gov/mtr
And be sure to click the CLIMATE-LOCAL on the left of the page.
When the next page comes up, scroll to SF Airport, and then adjust the inquiry box to MONTHLY statistics.

If the world is getting warmer, why isn't the temperature going up at SF? And why isn't the sea flooding into downtown SF because downtown SF is just a foot or two above mean sea level?

[GRG55]

Re: Shell Oil Shale Research Slowed

...If the world is getting warmer, why isn't the temperature going up at SF? And why isn't the sea flooding into downtown SF because downtown SF is just a foot or two above mean sea level?

Maybe it will happen yet.

Then again, maybe not...

The argument advanced by the global warming climate change proponents regards sunspots is that "correlation is not causation". That is certainly true, but I think it does work the other way also. What we think we know about our world is highly uncertain...and perhaps more subject to chance than the human species is willing or comfortable acknowledging?

The Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is “Dead”—What Does it Mean for Earth?
Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.

Although periods of inactivity are normal for the sun, this current period has gone on much longer than usual and scientists are starting to worry—at least a little bit. Recently 100 scientists from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and North America gathered to discuss the issue at an international solar conference at Montana State University. Today's sun is as inactive as it was two years ago, and solar physicists don’t have a clue as to why.

"It continues to be dead," said Saku Tsuneta with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, program manager for the Hinode solar mission, noting that it is at least a little bit worrisome for scientists.

Dana Longcope, a solar physicist at MSU, said the sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now, Longcope said. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. But so far nothing is happening.

"It's a dead face," Tsuneta said of the sun's appearance.

Tsuneta said solar physicists aren't weather forecasters and they can't predict the future. They do have the ability to observe, however, and they have observed a longer-than-normal period of solar inactivity. In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots.

That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.

Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA, said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by
about 0.7C.

"This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930," Dr Chapman noted in The Australian recently.

If the world does face another mini Ice Age, it could come without warning.

Evidence for abrupt climate change is readily found in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. One of the best known examples of such an event is the Younger Dryas cooling, which occurred about 12,000 years ago, named after the arctic wildflower found in northern European sediments. This event began and ended rather abruptly, and for its entire 1000 year duration the North Atlantic region was about 5°C colder.

Could something like this happen again? There’s no way to tell, and because the changes can happen all within one decade—we might not even see it coming.

The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when orbital forcing should have continued to drive climate to the present warm state. The unexplained phenomenon has been the topic of much intense scientific debate, as well as other millennial scale events.

Now this 11-year low in Sunspot activity has raised fears among a small but growing number of scientists that rather than getting warmer, the Earth could possibly be about to return to another cooling period. The idea is especially intriguing considering that most of the world is in preparation for global warming.

Canadian scientist Kenneth Tapping of the National Research Council has also noted that solar activity has entered into an unusually inactive phase, but what that means—if anything—is still anyone’s guess.

Another solar scientist, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, however, is certain that it’s an indication of a coming cooling period.

Sorokhtin believes that a lack of sunspots does indicate a coming cooling period based on certain past trends and early records. In fact, he calls manmade climate change "a drop in the bucket" compared to the fierce and abrupt cold that can potentially be brought on.

[Spartacus]

Re: SUN IS DEAD !!!!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES !!!!!!!!!

I read this

[INDENT][INDENT]The Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is “Dead”—What Does it Mean for Earth?

and my first thought was "the neutrinos have gone missing again".

For a long time some scientists (science sensationalists, actually) thought the sun had substantially stopped doing nuclear fusion and we would soon have a dead sun - for real - a cool ball of gas like Jupiter - I used to read the occasional article about how we were due to wake up to no sunshine one day soon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrino_problem