Hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, has revolutionized
energy production in the United States and cornered OPEC. That cartel is
currently attempting to restrict oil production and raise prices, but faces the
reality that American frackers can rapidly expand output. It’s a nightmare if
you are a corrupt petrodictator of any stripe, communist to jihadist.
Now, the never-ending quest for new technologies has
yielded a potentially revolutionary replacement or substitute for fracking:
microwaving shale to extract oil and gas. James Watkins reports in Ozy.com:
As strange as it sounds,
producers are experimenting with ways to zap previously unextractable oil
resources with microwaves, which has the potential to kick-start an even bigger
energy revolution than fracking — and appease environmentalists while they’re
at it. This is potentially “a whole shift in the paradigm,” says Peter Kearl,
co-founder and CTO of Qmast, a Colorado-based company pioneering the use of the
microwave tech. Some marquee names are betting on the play: Oil giants BP and
ConocoPhillips are pouring resources into developing similar extraction
techniques, which can be far less water- and energy-intensive than fracking.
If producers can find a way to
microwave oil shales in the Green River Formation,
which sprawls across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, the nation’s recoverable
reserves could soar and energy
independence could become more than an election slogan. Even with existing
methods — strip-mining the shale and then cooking it, or injecting steam to
cook the rock underground (hydraulic fracturing is useless here) — the
formation contains enough oil to last the U.S. 165 years at current rates
of consumption.
Microwave extraction could goose those numbers even higher. After all, there
are more than 4 trillion (with a “t”) barrels of oil in the Green River
Formation.
Let’s take a deep breath. One formation, previously
inaccessible, has a century and half worth of oil for America.
Sure, there is technology yet to be fully implemented, but
the approach sounds promising, indeed:
Producers would microwave oil
shale formations with a beam as powerful as 500 household microwave ovens,
cooking the kerogen and releasing the oil. It also would turn the water found
naturally in the deposits to steam, which would help push the oil to the
wellbore. “Once you remove the oil and water,” Kearl continues, “the rock
basically becomes transparent” to the microwave beam, which can then penetrate
outward farther and farther, up to about 80 feet from the wellbore. It doesn’t
sound like much, but a single microwave-stimulated well, which would be drilled
in formations on average nearly 1,000 feet thick, could pump about 800,000
barrels. Qmast plans to have its first systems deployed in the field in 2017
and start producing by the end of that year.
So in another year, we may see production begin. And even
greenies would have to concede this is promising:
Fracking can slurp up to 10
million gallons of water per operation — not good, especially in the arid West.
“We don’t need water for our process,” Kearl says, “and we don’t have
wastewater to dispose of afterward.” In fact, microwave extraction might produce water
— one barrel of water for every three barrels of oil. In situ recovery using
microwaves also avoids the massive environmental impact of mining and then
processing the kerogen. What’s more, natural gas that often is flared off in
conventional oil-well production could be used to power the generator that
creates the microwaves.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/12/new_technology_better_than_fracking_could_vastly_expand_oil_reserves.html#ixzz4S5FWQR9Q
