Oil Shale and Energy

This morning I read an article about the deposits of shale in the western states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, centering around the triple-point at which the three states meet. The article said that there is a tremendous deposit of oil here. It said that there are a billion barrels of oil per square mile. I looked at the map and I could easily see two or three areas at least 30 miles wide. So this is a total of well over 2-3 trillion barrels of oil.

Then I read further to find out what this mining would be like. The idea is to take a rod and plunge it deep into the earth, and heat it to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. This melts the rock and after a while of doing this, the melted stuff, consisting in large measure of an oil-like substance, comes to the surface and it can then be refined into distillate products such as gasoline.

The problem with this is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to heat the rock to 700 degrees. The article said this would have to be done for four years before any oil comes from it. Further, the column would have to be surrounded by a cold layer, I suppose, at least 100 degrees below zero. That would require more energy. And further, the operation requires a lot of water, which is not in great supply in Wyoming, Colorado, or Utah.

The question is whether it takes more than a barrel of oil's worth of energy to get a barrel of shale oil out of the ground. If it does, this will not be an energy source for us - in fact, it takes up energy instead and would make the problem worse. Already, a few hundred thousand barrels of oil were extracted from these fields in the 1980s, according to the article, and it did not earn any profit.

Oil shale is a possibility, but mainly if a new technology not requiring so much energy could be used to get the oil out.