Posted by
Cary Wesberry on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 7:14:49 PM
Information such as what you will read below is exactly the sort of thing the Democrats who have banned domestic drilling do not want you to see. Once you understand the amount of recoverable oil in the Green River Formation alone, along with the environmentally sound conversion process currently developed, the solution to lowering fuel and energy prices becomes all too clear. Move incompetent politicians out of our way and allow those who know how to retrieve our natural resources do their jobs.
Commercial production of shale oil is occurring in Estonia, China and Brazil. Demonstration scale oil shale plants have been operated in the United States, but none are active at this time. However, experimental scale activities are currently under way in Colorado and Utah to test new and innovative technologies that are expected to be environmentally acceptable, economic and sustainable.
"The largest known oil shale deposits in the world are in the Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Estimates of the oil resource in place within the Green River Formation range from 1.5 to 1.8 trillion barrels. Not all resources are recoverable. For potentially recoverable oil shale resources, we roughly derive an upper bound of 1.1 trillion barrels of oil to a lower bound of about 500 billion barrels." [Bartis, James T. etal, Rand Corporation, Oil shale Development in the United States, ISBN: 0-8330-3848-6, 2005] This is an amount of shale oil that is comparable with the conventional oil reserves in the Middle East.
So how do we recover those vast amounts of oil and turn into fuel for our everyday use? Shell Oil has been doing amazing research and development into what they call The Mahogany Project. This process is a straightforward and environmentally sound way of retrieving and converting shale into the types of fuel America needs to not only lower prices but become independent from other countries. Here's how the In situ Conversion Process it works:
Electric heaters gradually heat shale
beneath surface
Rock formation heated slowly over time
to 650 to 750° F
Heat converts kerogen in oil shale into oil
and gas
Target depth zone typically 1,000 to
2,000 feet
Products are brought to surface using
traditional methods
Produces approximately 1/ 3 gas and
2/ 3 light oil
Requires fewer processing steps to produce
high quality transportation fuels such as
diesel, jet fuel and naphtha (gasoline)
Become familiar with this technology to understand just how much unused oil we have sitting beneath our feet. America's way to energy independence is here within the lower 48 States, and all we have to do is move our backwards and disconnected Congress out of the way. Nothing but paper and lies from liberal leftists in the Democrat Party is preventing real progress.
The new technology described above has been tested and proven. The In situ Conversion Process could, with proper support, be a huge part of the solution to lowering fuel and energy prices along with moving America away from dependence on foreign sources of oil.
Shell carried out a small field test known as the Mahogany Demonstration Project South on its private property in Rio Blanco County, Colorado, using an in-ground heating process to recover oil and gas from the shale formation.
Field results from past research, as evident in the MDP Research Chart, have matched our predictions, giving our engineers confidence in the In situ Conversion Process.
On only a 30 x 40 foot testing area, Shell successfully recovered 1,700 barrels of high quality light oil plus associated gas from shallower, less-concentrated oil shale layers. Our research to date has demonstrated that our In situ Conversion Process (ICP) works technically on a small scale - what remains is to prove it can work commercially.
Shell can turn small scale success into large scale commercial production if Congress would move restrictions out of their way and allow The Mahogany Project to reach its full potential. How can this technology be brought into wide scale production when we are banned from the majority of our natural resources? It can't.
The In situ Conversion Process works perfectly and is waiting to be implemented for the benefit of you and your family. This is the kind of viable process which can be used today for the benefit of the American People if only the Democrats would return to Washington and allow the Republicans currently revolting on the House floor to present a domestic drilling plan and vote on it. If Congress is not allowed to vote, then what good are they? Their only purpose for existing is to vote. It's all they do. But not this time. Not at the time we need our Congress the most. When Americans are requiring Congress to act, the majority of our politicians decided to take a five week vacation instead.
In situ Converstion could be one of many environmentally sound technologies waiting to be implemented, but restricted commercially through the Democrats' ban on domestic drilling. Not only do I believe-in and subscribe to using the technology Shell Oil has created, but I demand restrictions be lifted so that any company who wants to invest and create new methods of exploiting our natural resources can be free to do so.