Oil Shale, What's up with that?

[IDMclean]

I recently ran into something that looks very much like a scam to me, however upon researching it I have learned some rather interesting things regarding it, first is that it is at current a scam. Second is that it has it's fesiblities if the proper thought was put into it.

 

http://www.stansberryonline.com/OIL/20060405-OIL-COL.asp?pcode=EOILG431&alias=200604OIL Is the suspected Scam.

 

However I was reading, http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/12-13/oil-shale-article.htm, and it occured to me while readin the part regarding the Shell project of heating the Shale locally, that they could both generate the power and heat nessary for their project by the use of a nuclear power plant and have the waste heat from the Rankine cycle cool in the shale that they purpose to heat up...

 

I just wanted to know what everyone thought about this. I know that it's like terribly Enviromentally unfriendly but I like brain teasers and so.

[UncleAl]

Oil shale isn't shale and it contains no oil. Oil shale is calcareous marlstone low rank coal: 10-30 wt-% organics, though mostly closer to 10%. Lightly fossilized lake sediments. Varves. You must warm it up to decompose the solid organics and liberate a petroluem-like fluid. When you do, the stone puffs up and releases CO2, generating lime. Imagine cubic miles of oily lime being leached into the watershed. It won't all fit back into the original hole if you remove it for processing. If you process it in situ, it plugs its own drainage by swelling. If you blast and mine some porosity into it, you get uneven product flow which can be exciting depending on how you generate the heat.

 

Shale oil product is about 1% nitrogen, 5-20 ppm arsenic, heavily unsaturated, and with a pour point not too far below room temp. It is also loaded with abrasive rock dust. Petroleum manufacture into usable products uses catalytic cracking to transform heavy bottoms (asphalts are the worst of it) into gasoline and diesel cuts.

 

1) Cracking catalyst support is acidic zeolite. Nitrogen kills that dead.

2) Cracking catalyst is noble metal. Arsenic kills that dead.

3) The most expensive refinery consummable is hydrogen. Yer gonna need boatloads of hydrogen to remove the unsaturation.

4) If the stuff won't pour it must be heated to transport and process.

5) Rock dust abrades away valves and elbows.

 

In the late 1970s to early 1980s Occidental Petroleum and others were lavishly spending Department of Energy $billions near Rifle, Colorado. Shale oil to save America! The guys in hard hats called shale oil "the perfect refinery poison." They never Ames tested it (and especially never with liver microsomes) for mutagenicity. One might imagine it woud set revertant records.

 

Now for the good news! The world's most productive gold mines, the African deep mines, are buried remnants of prehistoric swamp. It would be interesting to take a few kilos of organic-rich oil shale and pulverise it to say -20/+40 mesh. Hot Soxlet extract with toluene, pyridine, and methanol in that order to remove bitumens. Vacuum dry. Digest with aqueous HCl to remove inorganic carbonates. Digest with aqueous ammonium hydrogen bifluoride, NH4HF2, to remove silicates and aluminosilicates. That will leave you with naught but unaltered kerogen organics and... gold dust?