Saturday, November 18, 2006

 

More Reason for the Saudis to Hate the Jews

The stuff we call oil shale out west here is a total misnomer. It's neither oil (kerogen) nor shale (dolomites and limestones) but our state certainly has a lot of it--North America has an estimated 3.34 quadrillion tons while the rest of the world combined has a mere 105 billion tons--that's a ratio of 33 to 1. Our recoverable oil shale reserves are estimated to be 3 times the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. The problem has always been extracting the kerogen from the rock. We've in the past tried to squeeze it out with heat or high pressure or both, a costly, difficult procedure with no small amount of environmental downside.

So the clever Israelis of the A.F.S.K. Hom Tov energy company have come up with a patented method for extracting the kerogen by coating the rock with a byproduct of crude oil refining, bitumen. The Israelis (who have no oil reserves but some inferior oil shale) estimate that the recovery process they have invented will extract at a cost of $17 a barrel, which is incredibly low compared to the cost of the extraction we have tried out near Parachute, CO.

The company estimates it will consume 6 million tons of oil shale and 2 million tons of refinery waste each year, for an annual production of 3 million tons of product.

Sure hope this pans out.

(h/t Instapundit)

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