Green River shale: "In just 1,200 sq miles of northwestern Colorado's Piceance Basin there lies, already discovered, 1 trillion bbls of light, sweet crude, equal to all the world's proved oil reserves. With similar deposits in Utah and Wyoming, that resource base is 1.5 to 1.8 trillion bbls. If only 60% is recoverable, at 5-mil b/d it would still provide one-fourth of current US oil demand for 400 years."
[Source: James Norman (Platts-New York), "New Frontiers", Platts Oilgram News, October 3, 2005, p. 4

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Sept 7, 2005

High oil prices makes oil shale look pretty attractive

17 companies have applied to BLM for the newly offered 160-acre research plots. If granted, those test tracts could turn into 5,120-acre leases. In the thickest Piceance shale, drilling just 150 acres a year could sustain output of 500,000 b/d of oil and 500 Bcf/yr of gas. And the new Energy Policy Act expands the one-company limit to 50,000 acres per state. About half the applicants are small firms proposing conventional underground mining in Utah, then crushing and cooking the shale in retort ovens to the nearly 1,000 degrees needed to quickly free the kerogen. Mining giant Kennecott has proposed an open-pit test. But oil majors ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, Anadarko Petroleum propose in-situ recovery. Shell's In-situ Conversion Process (ICP) requires a dedicated 1,200 MW of electrical generation capacity for every 100,000 b/d of oil output capacity. Shell thinks ICP could be economic at $30/bbl WTI. That is less than half the $40 to $95/bbl break-even cost of conventional mining and retorting shale at the surface, according to a Rand study this year.