2 thoughts on ““Hydrocarbon Deniers””

    1. Oh, come on! Those wacky lawyers over at Powerlineblog can’t tell their oil shale apart from their shale oil, and Rand is in full echo-chamber mode over this.

      For gosh sakes people, we are not a bunch of technology challenged Dartmouth attorneys they have over there. We are space exploration and technology geeks, if we are not practicing engineers, we live and breathe tech.

      This Green River Formation is oil shale, as Mike Meyer’s recurring SNL character “Linda Richman” would say, “I give you a topic. Oil shale is neither oil nor shale. Please discuss it amongst yourselves.”

      OK, OK, for the plebe-class geeks here, oil shale is this kind of hydrocarbon bearing rock that is not coal and it is not the tar sand stuff up in Canada either. You have to mine the rock, heat it to liberate the hydrocarbon residue in it to get a kind of “oil” out of it, and you might have to do more things to turn it into usable #2 Diesel and high octane gasoline to run our trucks and cars. You also need to figure out what to do with the spent rock and other waste streams when you are done.

      In Estonia, owing to getting cut off from below-market-price oil with them getting independent from the former Soviet Union, they burn this rock to power their power plant boilers as if it were a particularly low-BTU coal.

      Shale oil, on the other hand, is an entirely different hydrocarbon resource, and Robert Zubrin who is our space-guy-expert-in-energy is going to strip all of you of your geek credentials in a humiliating ritual out in the California High Desert, a ritual that involves digging hole and then sticking your head into it.

      Shale oil is like shale gas, it is oil like any other oil but bound up in tight rocks, where they have to use “fracking” to get it out. Oil shale is in the Green River formation on the Colorado border; shale oil is something they are developing in the Bakken Formation in North Dakota running into Canada. They tell me that the shale oil from the Bakken is of quality comparable with the prime grade North Sea as well as Saudi “sweet light” crude — it is just that you need the new drilling tech to get it out.

      This oil shale (Colorado/Green River stuff) was also the subject of the Jimmy Carter Synthetic Crude Oil boondoggle. We may have to exploit this resource at some point, but it is not without both cost and environmental problems putting it farther out of reach than the Canada tar sands, on which they have at least come down the learning curve on costs although the environmentalists complain about everything. That 1-3 trillion barrels of domestic oil resource has been widely known for over 30 (add word that rhymes with fracturing) years.

      As to the Bakken, President Obama got into a male-ego contest described in the WSJ with one of the prominent oil men, Howard Lam, who was arguing that the Bakken was going to save our bacon whereas the President was dismissive of the importance of what is taking place in North Dakota (North Dakota, people, shale oil, people, not that tired old story of what is locked up in the Colorado/Wyoming oil shale). Mr Obama is quoted “Oil only has a few years left. Secretary Chu assures me we will have electric cars by then.”

      Are people around here as tech challenged as President Obama and that Nobel Laureate Energy Secretary of his? We will probably need to develop all of these resources at some point, but shale oil is a new thing that will probably have important beneficial consequences in the next few years whereas this oil shale business is something known for a long time and will continue to be known for a long time.

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