Don Winterstein" wrote:
Unocal was more persistent than any other company in trying to get oil
from shale. They shut down their research on that only a few years ago.
They must have had encouraging results to keep at it so long. Does
anyone know details?
AK:
A google search gave the following sites::
WEC Survey Of Energy Resources 2001 - Oil Shale
... In 1981, the opening of a nuclear power station in the Leningrad
district of Russia
signalled the beginning of the decline in Estonian oil shale production.
...
www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/ publications/reports/ser/shale/shale.asp -
60k - Cached - Similar pages
[PDF] GLOBAL OIL SHALE ISSUES AND PERSPECTIVES
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
... Under the pressure of competition, oil shale production has ceased
in Canada, Scotland,
Sweden, France, Australia (where it restarted in 1999), Romania 7 and
...
www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/ global/downloads/estonia2002.pdf - Similar
pages
[ More results from www.worldenergy.org ]
The first site looks like a nice one for some general information about
energy as well as a quick introduction to oil shale.
The second web site has a 10 page paper on oil shale written for a
conference in Estonia in 2002. Estonia accounts for about 70% of the
world's oil shale use, which sure surprised me. I tried to figure out
why, but that was not clear. As one place in the article pointed out,
it is difficult to know what the bottom threshold of kerogen percentage
is for shale to be called oil shale; that is, what is the minimum amount
of kerogen you can have per ton and still be called oil shale or marl (I
guess). Obviously if one shale site has twice the kerogen as another it
is going to be a whole lot easier to be economically viable with the
material that is richer in kerogen.
Estonia uses most of the oil shale to generate heat and electricity.
The paper has a nice graph of world use over time. Looks like getting
anything out uses a lot of water to process the rock and it generates a
greater volume of residues than what you start with. Not clear yet that
it can be a viable replacement for conventional oil.
Received on Sat Jul 3 23:22:23 2004
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sat Jul 03 2004 - 23:22:23 EDT