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Colorado/Wyoming Oil Shale - Enough to Eliminate Imported Oil by 2020

Source: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Energy ... hl1015.cfm

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How large is this resource? In the Piceance Basin, an area of 1,100 square miles, the oil shale is over 1 million barrels per acre, or roughly 750 billion barrels of recoverable oil. If you extend outward to Wyoming and to Utah, it is 1.3 trillion.
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The resource, again, is in the trillions of barrels of oil, and if you compare, Saudi Arabia's official reserves are about 289 billion barrels.
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If the Saudis upgraded their own recovery technology, which would take billions to do, they would still have one-half of the reserves in oil shale discovered in Colorado. We're talking still about 1.2 trillion, 1.3 trillion barrels of oil; the Rocky Mountain region is the Saudi Arabia of oil shale. The United States has 75 percent of the world resource, which is about 1.8 trillion barrels. Brazil is next.
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How long can oil shale last? There is enough shale to sustain United States consumption of crude oil easily through 2120.
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If shale is commercialized by 2012, we can, under production from Colorado alone, eliminate dependency on Middle East oil by 2020. The President wants to lower it by 20 percent by 2017.

Shale production will eliminate it altogether, and that dependence is roughly 2.3 million barrels a day. The projection is that when it is commercialized, with the ramp-up that will occur, and with everything favorable—that is, world price—we would be at 2 million barrels a day, or the objective of the Department of Energy in the shale process. Currently, we're getting 2.2 million barrels a day from the entire Middle East: 19 percent of our total imports.

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Interesting stuff.

yes, but even though that may reduce our dependence on foreign oil the time has come to look at alternative fuels, air quality is more pressing than where we get our oil.

It is said that the Bush family has a hand in a few Saudi oil companies. Before George's term is up, I expect he'll try to pass some bills to keep foriegn oil flowing. I'm very sceptical of Republicans these days due to their tendency to like money over the needs of us americans. They do a real good job of hiding that.

I say Exxon, Shell, and ever other major US oil distributer should invest all they can in that oil deposit. Until we're using alternate fuel sources, it's ALWAYS good to be self-reliant as a country. Especially with resources. Saudi Arabia has the ability to cut off export to any country they wish. They probobly wont, since it's not good business for them, but they have the ability nontheless. Although I'm against pollution in general, this country without oil would be a second great depression. Personally, I want to still have a job to pay for food and shelter.

And... as long as big oil companies are making money, they have the power to buy out any alternate fuel technologies that may cause them loss in profits. Therefore, the planet is screwed. Thank you greed for that gift to our future.

Ok, rant over.

This oil deposit has been known about for some time but there is just one problem, as it stands, we do not have to technology to extract enough of this field. There are a couple of ways to get oil out, steam or "fracking". Steam involves two pipes, one underneath, that releases steam which heats up the rock and allow for the oil to pass out of the rock and into the extraction tube above.
Fracking deals with applying jets of water onto the rock, fracturing it and the oil that is within the rock then seeps out. With this shale deposit, the oil is so deeply embeded within the rock that only a small fraction would be harvested and likewise, the steam would not be able to force out enough to make it more profitable than the Barnett Shale which is the feild we drill here in Texas. (mostly natural gas but oil is present)

Problem is, how do you get at this shale without horribly scarring the landscape? I live in Colorado Springs, and there is a HUGE scar running up the front range from years of strip mining...Have a look.

That was my concern as well.

And the way capitalism tends to run, how long do you think it'd be before people are leveraged into selling their land or being run off it?

I still think we should go with a varying degrees of ethanol/methanol+petrofuel mix until we can get hydrogen up and running.

MattSullivan wrote:Problem is, how do you get at this shale without horribly scarring the landscape? I live in Colorado Springs, and there is a HUGE scar running up the front range from years of strip mining...Have a look.

I have seen that scar before. Isnt that the one to the west of the city, between Cheyenne and Pikes and over by the Kisssing Camels?

But one thing to note is that there will not be strip mining done there. That mine was for the extraction of gold (if my memory serves me correct), with oil, there would be one or two pipes going down, but once again, it depends on if they find a way to liberate the oil from the shale.

Actually that scar is smack dab in the centerof the city, right next to Pikes peak. And here's a second strip mine jest north of it...

Well this certainly has equal pros and cons from what I have read from everyones posts.

That scar is a strip mine, not an oil well. Oil wells tend to create underground caves collapse, making huge indentions. I hear they pump water into oil wells to keep the pressure from dropping, so perhaps oil drilling isn't harmful to the surrounding environment after all. (Besides oil spills.)

Getting to it was my worry as well. There has got to be a way to do this. Why can't they discover oil buried underneath barren desert rock? Why does it always have to be underneath forests and wilderness? Surely not because of the location; the plants that made that oil grew back when the continents were arranged differently on the planet.

I bet you there's enough oil underneath the Brazillian Rain Forest to power everybody several centuries. Underneath northern Siberia, nada. If it's a desert and it's got oil, it has to have paired with it a government with medieval values.

Bush has been after Alaska for years for the same reason. Great wildlife and unspoiled wilderness, oil underneath.

they actually have ways to get the oil from Alaska ( which is an American STATE btw, there's no international law preventing us from getting it ) it can be drilled with minimal to no effect on the wildlife and environment. It's just the crazy leftie enviro-twits get hysterical every time you mention the possibility of drilling there.