RE: Shale Oil Extraction and RefiningEstimated U.S. oil shale reserves total an astonishing 1.5 trillion barrels of oil - or more than five times the stated reserves of Saudi Arabia.
Throught the late 70's and early 80's Exxon dumped more then $5 Billion dollars on the Colony Oil Shale project. The project ended up in failure and was abandoned in 1982 due to economic factors.
Royal Dutch Shell has been working on In-situ Conversion Process. Work on this process began somtime in 1985 3 years after Exxons failure at the Colony Oil Shale project.
In 1996, Shell successfully carried out its first small field test on its privately owned Mahogany property in Rio Blanco County, in Colorado. Part of the process consists of drilling holes into the resource, inserting electric resistance heaters into those heater holes and heating the subsurface to around 650-700F, over a 3 to 4 year period.
The area they were working the shale is 1000 ft below surface, when one considers ground water pollution and insulating heat in the shale to the lv of 650-700f one must ask themselves how viable will a process like that be for us in this play with our resource so close to surface? environmental factors set aside.