| Description |
The University of Utah (the Recipient), via their Institute for Clean and Secure Energy (the Institute), shall pursue research to improve industry's ability to utilize the vast energy stored in domestic oil shale and oil sands resources in a manner that shall minimize environmental impact and effectively capture the combustion CO2 from production, upgrading and refining of the produced liquid fuel. Because unconventional fuel utilization involves not only technical but also economic, legal, and environmental challenges, Institute research shall be multidisciplinary in scope. Legal, policy, and economic research shall provide analysis of the frameworks under which development might occur. Technical research shall be organized around the principles of validation and uncertainty quantification, which require the tight coupling of simulation and experiments. Simulation tools developed through this program shall guide the design and optimization of greenhouse gas mitigation strategies and reduce the time needed for new ideas in resource development to move from inception to commercialization. The two overarching project objectives are: 1. Clean oil shale & oil sands utilization with efficient CO2 capture The objective of this project area is to produce the research and simulation tools needed to provide efficient CO2 capture for process equipment for production, upgrading, and refining of oil shale and oil sands and specifically to produce predictive capability with quantified uncertainty bounds for a pilot-scale, oxy-gas process heater using flameless technologies. 2. Secure liquid fuel production by in-situ thermal processing of oil shale & oil sands The objective of this project area is to apply science, engineering, technology and economics research tools developed within the Institute to a wide variety of in-situ processes and to explore the environmental, legal and policy framework for implementation of such technologies on public and private lands. These objectives are divided among four research tasks: environmental, legal, economic & policy framework; oil shale/sands utilization with CO2 capture, in-situ thermal processing, and market assessment of unconventional fuels development. |
