Report on Geothermal Oil Generation: Is this for real?

[GW Johnson]

I see a lot of stuff floating around out there about this that or the other hydrocarbon resource being bigger than Saudi Arabia. May be true, but you have to temper that with the observation that most internet forwards are nothing but political crap and/or out-and-out lies.

I am familiar with both the Williston Basin tar sands (Alberta) and oil shales (Bakken and some other names). They aren't what you think they are. But they are rather large theoretically-recoverable hydrocarbon reserves. Theoretically.

The tar sands in Alberta are already in production, and have been for a while now. Those are thick tar spread thinly in sand, and located near the surface. You do not drill this stuff, you cannot. You strip mine it, and you use steam to separate tar from sand. Then, you thermally crack the tar before you put it through a distillation column. Still, the product is competitve (as-priced today) with our secondary drillable-oil recovery methods. This is, in fact, a significant chunk of the oil the US imports.

There is a downside (when is there not?) No one yet knows how to clean up the wastewater from the steam separation process. That's not to say it is impossible, but no one knows how to do it right now, and that's for a commercial production process! That wastewater is being accumulated in holding ponds under armed guard, because it is a dangerous material. So far, the accumulated volume exceeds that of Lake Erie. One of these days, that cleanup bill will come due. Until then, the oil products derived from those tar sands are seriously underpriced, precisely because this currently-unknown cost is not included in the price.

The oil shales in Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Montana are even worse. It's not really oil, it's tar. There is a bunch of it (more than Saudi Arabia) because the formation is so immense. Yet, this is shale: porosity is a tiny fraction of 1% of rock volume, and the pores are almost unconnected, so permeability is virtually zero. If this were gas, you could do downhole fracturing and still recover 1 or 2% of what is down there, that tiny amount being in the pores right along the cracks. But, it ain't gas. It's not even oil, for which fracking plus steam injection might work. It's tar. So, none of this works. They've been trying since 1953 to recover anything significant from "oil" shales, completely without success. That is a matter of historical record.

There is a way to recover it, but I can guarantee nobody will like it. You strip mine it, just like the shallow tar sands. Except, this stuff is very deep. Strip mining this makes mountaintop-removal coal mining look like potting house plants. You would be digging a hole bigger and deeper than Lake Superior, and trucking every single cubic yard out of that hole. You have to crush and cook every single cubic yard of that rock, to remove the tiny fraction of 1% of its volume that is hydrocarbon. If you used steam in that process, the volume of wastewater would fill the hole several times over, and like the tar sands, no one knows of a cleanup method. Besides, we don't have that much fresh water. Think $4/gallon gasoline was bad? This stuff will be $400+ /gallon, higher if cleanup costs get included.

Even fracking shale for natural gas can have unforseen effects on groundwater supplies, especially since there is the "Halliburton exemption" that means gas frackers do not have to comply with the Clean Water act. You can thank ex-VP Dick Cheney for that one.

Don't get me wrong. I think we need to tap shale gas supplies in a big way. Better that than coal, for sure, especially since all the "easy" coal is already gone. I'd just like to see it done right, meaning we don't make people sick or kill them, while doing it. It is very startling to see the water tap in your kitchen catch fire and/or explode. It's already happened in the Appalachian shale gas areas.

Whether petroleum is biological or abiogenic in origin (or both) makes no difference at all to my discussions here. The biggest problem we have in the US is that much of the costs for cleanup and health/sickness effects come out of tax dollars (superfund, etc) instead of being in the price of the products. It's in the product prices in Europe. Done the same way, our fuel prices would look about the same as those in Europe, which just goes to prove that figures lie and liars figure. (That's true in corporate business as well as politics.)

As for "peak oil", that effect depends upon what methods are considered. For secondary methods (tertiary ain't ready yet), Saudi production rates peaked in 2004. They have reduced below those rates at times, as part of OPEC monopoly cartel pricing, but they have never managed to produce more than they did in 2004, even during periods of favorable prices. That means they can't, technologically, and that's by definition "peak oil" for their 3 big fields, the largest ever discovered. Typically, for a large oil field, production rates for a given recovery technology hold steady for around 30 years, then fall no matter what you try.

The Saudis entered peak production 6 years ago, guys. The Chinese and the Indians are demand-spiking as they industrialize rapidly. Spiking demand, limited supply: I see unstable and rapidly-rising oil prices in the world's very near future. Kinda makes those alternatives look more-and-more "economical", doesn't it? Especially since cellulosic ethanol seems to be coming onto the market near $2/gallon, with all cleanup costs included in the price.

Just some food for thought as you argue about this stuff....

[djolds1]

I found this report where the author claims to have experimentally produced hydro-carbons at high temperatures using only FeO, Ca(CO3) and H2O at pressures of 50kbar and 1500 Celsius.

http://www.gasresources.net/Hi-p-VI(H-C-Genesis).pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hot_biosphere
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold

There is a long article on Wikipedia about abiogenic petroleum origin.
Is it quack science or should it deserve some credit?

Titan has huge lakes of the stuff. Carbonaceous asteroids are jam-packed with the raw materials to make hydrocarbons out of. So which pathway of generation is more probable & widespread - chemical/abiotic or biotic?

The end of oil era won't be related to the end of oil, but with our inability to extract enough oil so that we are able to satisfy oil demand for all countries.

Extraction rates and energy returns of investments are the things that matter here, not how much oil is left underground.

...

It will probably happen on the next 5 years.

Every Apocalyptic prediction from the Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich and their ideological compadres over the last 40 years has failed to materialize. Be very careful about setting dates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager

[GW Johnson]

I'm not so sure about carbonaceous asteroids. We'll have to go investigate those. Most other off-world things we thought we knew turned out wrong when we actually landed there.

Titan on the other hand looks like a hydrocarbon gold mine with a weak gravity well. We just need the capability of flying to Saturn. The main resource appears to be methane, ready to pump up from surface lakes. Useful stuff.

There's a lot of water ice out there on comets/asteroids with little or no gravity well. Just need the capability to fly past Mars. Between the water and the methane, there's a lot of useful stuff out there.

It all hinges on being able to fly fast and far in a relatively simple ship the way Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon did it.

[jmc]

Useful stuff if we're desperate for hydrocarbons to manufacture plastics and petrochemicals, for fuelling cars something tells me the overall fuel cycle involved in mining and transporting the hydrocarbons from Titan to Earth would have a slightly negative EROEI.

From the point of view of petrochemicals, genetically modified bacteria and living plants would probably also be able to do the same for cheaper.