Clean and secure energy from domestic oil shale and oil sands resources: Quarterly progress report - October 2014-December 2014

The Clean and Secure Energy from Domestic Oil Shale and Oil Sands Resources program, part of the research agenda of the Institute for Clean and Secure Energy (ICSE) at the University of Utah, is focused on engineering, scientific, and legal research surrounding the development of these resources in Utah. Outreach efforts in Task 2 included the presentation of two papers at the 34th Oil Shale Symposium in Golden, CO, in October 2014. Additional presentations will be made at various venues in Utah and in Alabama during January of 2015. Task 3 focuses on utilization of oil shale and oil sands resources with CO2 management. The Subtask 3.2 performed a simulation of the IFRF furnace that is stable after almost 8 seconds of simulation time. The Subtask 3.3 and 3.4 teams improved the decline curve analysis in their basin-scale conventional and unconventional fuel development model by automating a process that takes production curves with complicated production histories and divides the history into different production intervals. Task 4 projects are related to liquid fuel production by in-situ thermal processing of oil shale. The Subtask 4.3 project, reservoir simulation of reactive transport processes, is submitting a topical report in early 2014. Subtask 4.1 and 4.7 researchers focused their efforts on related projects under Subtask 7 during this quarter. Task 5 and 6 projects relate to environmental, legal, economic, and policy analysis. All Task 5 and 6 projects are now complete. Task 7 projects have focused on in situ production processes at a commercially-relevant scale. The Subtask 7.1 team is using state-of-the-art testing to measure the permeability of pyrolyzed oil shale samples after first testing the validity of the procedure. They are also developing a comprehensive model of in situ oil shale pyrolysis to gain insight into the evolution of poroelasticity in oil shale and the practical consequences of this evolution. Subtask 7.3 researchers ran their simulations of oil shale retorting for time intervals of four and a half years. For the three well spacing/arrangement geometries tested, the net energy return was well below one. This result is attributed to the large heat losses which occur when heat supplied by the heaters goes into heating a large volume of oil shale to temperatures that never reach the temperature required for retorting.