More than half the
world’s oil shale is found in Utah and Colorado, and for a
century, men have tried to unlock this energy source. The rocks
have proved stubborn, promising much, delivering little.
“I find it disturbing that we import oil from Canadian tar sands,
even though our oil shale resource remains undeveloped,” complains
Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch.
Oil shale is a poor
fuel. Compared to the coal that launched the Industrial Revolution
and the petroleum that sustains modern life, oil shale is the
dregs. Coal seams a few feet thick are worth mining because coal
contains lots of energy. If coal is good, petroleum is even better.
And oil shale? Pound per pound, it contains just one-tenth the
energy of crude oil and one-sixth that of coal.
Searching
for appropriate analogues, we enter the realm of Weight Watchers.
Oil shale yields about 30 gallons of petroleum per ton. An equal
weight of granola contains three times more energy. The vast
deposits of shale in Colorado have the energy density of a baked
potato. If someone told you there were a trillion tons of tatertots
buried 1,000 feet-deep, would you rush to dig them up?
There are two ways to produce shale oil. Historically, the rock has
been mined, crushed and roasted in an enormous kiln. This is costly
and polluting. The slag, swollen in volume and contaminated with
arsenic, must be safely stockpiled. The entire process is so
laborious that global production has never exceeded 25,000 barrels
a day. Yet recently, Royal/Dutch Shell has experimented with a new
way to produce oil shale, a way that is, at first glance,
promising.
Humor columnist Dave Barry once infamously
demonstrated that if you put a “strawberry Pop-Tart in a toaster
for five minutes and 50 seconds, it will turn into a snack-pastry
blowtorch, shooting flames up to 30 inches high.” Putting a chunk
of oil shale into your toaster would not offer similar excitement,
but Shell’s experiments near Rangely, in rural western
Colorado, resemble something Barry might attempt if he had the
money to build the world’s largest underground oven.
Shell’s plan is audacious: The company proposes to
heat a 1,000-foot-thick section of shale to 700 degrees over a
100-acre production plot. Inside that area, the company would drill
up to 1,000 wells. Next, long electric heaters would be inserted in
preparation for a multi-year “bake.” If all went well, the company
would eventually harvest $6 billion worth of oil at today’s
prices.
Although Shell’s method avoids the need to
mine shale, it requires a mind-boggling amount of electricity. To
produce 100,000 barrels per day, Shell would need to construct the
largest power plant in Colorado history. The $3 billion power plant
would consume five million tons of coal each year and produce 10
million tons of greenhouse gases, some of which would still be in
the atmosphere a century from now. To double production,
you’d need two power plants. One million barrels a day would
require 10 new power plants, five new coal mines.
As
Shell continues its experiments, Congress is spurring an oil shale
land rush. So far, 10 companies have expressed interest in leasing
federal lands. The RAND Corp., however, warns that if initial
development overstresses the environment, “we may never see more
than a few hundred thousand barrels per day of production.”
Nonetheless, one scenario recently proposed by the U.S. Department
of Energy is less a vision than a nightmare of open-pit mines 2,000
feet deep, with all of Colorado’s surplus water dedicated to
the oil shale industry.
Americans love panaceas. We want
thinner thighs in 30 days, a pill to cure baldness, an ultrasonic
carburetor that will double our mileage. Since domestic oil
production peaked 30 years ago, the need for energy efficiency,
conservation and renewable energy has long been obvious. But like
an addict on a binge, we continue to pursue a policy of strength
through exhaustion.
Producing 100,000 barrels per day of
shale oil does not violate the laws of physics, though it would
cost a great deal for a small return. Increasing the efficiency of
America’s automobiles by two miles per gallon would save 10
times as much fuel and also save consumers $100 billion at the
pump.
Oil shale contains far less energy than than hog
manure, peat moss or even household garbage. A meager amount of
energy tightly bound up in an enormous volume of rock, oil shale
seems destined to remain an elusive bonanza, the petroleum
equivalent of fool’s gold.
Randy Udall is
a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He runs the Community Office for
Resource Efficiency in Aspen, Colorado.
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