Thread: Oil Sands Play

Colorado, Utah Rival OPEC Reserves, Lure Chevron, Exxon, Shell

By Joe Carroll

May 29 (Bloomberg) -- Colorado and Utah have as much oil as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Indonesia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates combined.

That's not science fiction. Trapped in limestone up to 200 feet (61 meters) thick in the two Rocky Mountain states is enough so-called shale oil to rival OPEC and supply the U.S. for a century.

Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp., the two biggest U.S. energy companies, and Royal Dutch Shell Plc are spending $100 million a year testing new methods to separate the oil from the stone for as little as $30 a barrel. A growing number of industry executives and analysts say new technology and persistently high prices make the idea feasible.

``The breakthrough is that now the oil companies have a way of getting this oil out of the ground without the massive energy and manpower costs that killed these projects in the 1970s,'' said Pete Stark, an analyst at IHS Inc., an Englewood, Colorado, research firm. ``All the shale rocks in the world are going to be revisited now to see how much oil they contain.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...rVs&refer=home

Hmmm... May have to look at oil sands again.

WASHINGTON - A vast new energy supply in hard-to-tap older oil fields may be generated simply by feeding fertilizer to some deep-dwelling, gas-making microbes, new research suggests.

Canadian and English researchers were able to convert oil into usable methane in small glass tubes during two years of lab research, instead of a process that takes tens of thousands of years underground. The next step is to do it in real oil fields.
The new method takes advantage of the natural process that occurs when microbes slowly degrade oil into methane, the chief ingredient in natural gas.
The researchers report their experiment in a study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"You're talking a very substantial amount of energy," said study co-author Steve Larter, a University of Calgary petroleum geologist. "It's potentially a game changer if it can be demonstrated."
Proving that it could work on a large scale, economically and in real world conditions is the big unknown, the researchers concede.
Larter said it was hard to come up with just how much energy they could produce, but speculated it could be near the equivalent of the world's conventional oil reserves.
The key is the microbes, which have existed underground for hundreds of millions of years. They ferment the oil and expel natural gas without requiring oxygen.
Others have tried the approach used by Larter and his colleagues before, seeking to speed up the process by injecting more bacteria. But Larter says the key is giving the microbes their own version of vitamins.
"You'd basically feed them Miracle-Gro or fertilizer to accelerate their growth rate," he said.
The new product would be natural gas, not oil, a cleaner-burning fuel that contributes far less to global warming. Such an approach would be most promising in places with heavy oil, such as Alberta, Venezuela and Utah, other experts said.
The concept makes sense and is already being applied to getting methane from coal beds, said U.S. Geological Survey research geochemist Michael Lewan, who was not part of the Larter study team.
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Article is somewhat dated, but gives promise to Oil Sands in domestic USA. Along the lines of OldCoin's post almost a year ago.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/30/maga...tune/index.htm