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jlf1961 -> RE: Perry Promises Increased Drilling and Decreased Regulation (10/16/2011 1:04:32 PM)
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15,389 Days to the end of oil, or 42 years, 1 month and 22 days.
http://www.worldometers.info/
http://www.eia.gov/international/reserves.html
The United States has the largest known deposits of oil shale in the world, according to the Bureau of Land Management and holds an estimated 2.175 trillion barrels (345.8 km3) of potentially recoverable oil Oil shale does not actually contain oil, but a waxy oil precursor known as kerogen. There is no significant commercial production of oil from oil shale in the United States.
The crude bitumen contained in the Canadian oil sands is described by Canadian authorities as "petroleum that exists in the semi-solid or solid phase in natural deposits.
Bitumen is a thick, sticky form of crude oil, so heavy and viscous (thick) that it will not flow unless heated or diluted with lighter hydrocarbons. At room temperature, it is much like cold molasses".
quote:
Bituminous sands are a major source of unconventional oil. Conventional crude oil is normally extracted from the ground by drilling oil wells into a petroleum reservoir, allowing oil to flow into them under natural reservoir pressures, although artificial lift and techniques such as water flooding and gas injection are usually required to maintain production as reservoir pressure drops toward the end of a field's life. Because extra-heavy oil and bitumen flow very slowly, if at all, toward producing wells under normal reservoir conditions, the sands must be extracted by strip mining or the oil made to flow into wells by in situ techniques, which reduce the viscosity by injecting steam, solvents, and/or hot air into the sands. These processes can use more water and require larger amounts of energy than conventional oil extraction, although many conventional oil fields also require large amounts of water and energy to achieve good rates of production. This is because heavy crude feedstock needs pre-processing before it is fit for conventional refineries. This pre-processing is called 'upgrading', the key components of which are as follows: - removal of water, sand, physical waste, and lighter products
- catalytic purification by hydrodemetallisation (HDM), hydrodesulfurization (HDS) and hydrodenitrogenation (HDN)
- hydrogenation through carbon rejection or catalytic hydrocracking (HCR)
As carbon rejection is very inefficient and wasteful in most cases, catalytic hydrocracking is preferred in most cases. All these processes take large amounts of energy and water, while emitting more carbon dioxide than conventional oil. Catalytic purification and hydrocracking are together known as hydroprocessing. The big challenge in hydroprocessing is to deal with the impurities found in heavy crude, as they poison the catalysts over time. Many efforts have been made to deal with this to ensure high activity and long life of a catalyst. Catalyst materials and pore size distributions are key parameters that need to be optimized to deal with these challenge and this varies from place to place, depending on the kind of feedstock present. At the present time, only Canada has a large-scale commercial oil sands industry, though a small amount of oil from oil sands is produced in Venezuela. Because of increasing oil sands production, Canada has become the largest single supplier of oil and products to the United States. Oil sands now are the source of almost half of Canada's oil production, although due to the 2008 economic downturn work on new projects has been deferred, while Venezuelan production has been declining in recent years. Oil is not produced from oil sands on a significant level in other countries.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands
Yup, oil sands are the answer. It costs more to recover, refine AND the refining process has far more pollution than normal oil refining. In other words, it is going to RAISE the cost of gasoline and diesel at the pump.
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