Utah Heavy Oil Program - Final Scientific/Technical Report - Project Period: June 21, 2006 to October 20, 2009

The Utah Heavy Oil Program (UHOP) was established in June 2006 to provide multidisciplinary research support to federal and state constituents for addressing the wide‐ranging issues surrounding the creation of an industry for unconventional oil production in the United States. Additionally, UHOP was to serve as an on‐going source of unbiased information to the nation surrounding technical, economic, legal and environmental aspects of developing heavy oil, oil sands, and oil shale resources. UHOP fulfilled its role by completing three tasks. First, in response to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 Section 369(p), UHOP published an update report to the 1987 technical and economic assessment of domestic heavy oil resources that was prepared by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. The UHOP report, entitled "A Technical, Economic, and Legal Assessment of North American Heavy Oil, Oil Sands, and Oil Shale Resources" was published in electronic and hard copy form in October 2007. Second, UHOP developed of a comprehensive, publicly accessible online repository of unconventional oil resources in North America based on the DSpace software platform. An interactive map was also developed as a source of geospatial information and as a means to interact with the repository from a geospatial setting. All documents uploaded to the repository are fully searchable by author, title, and keywords. Third, UHOP sponsored Give research projects related to unconventional fuels development. Two projects looked at issues associated with oil shale production, including oil shale pyrolysis kinetics, resource heterogeneity, and reservoir simulation. One project evaluated in situ production from Utah oil sands. Another project focused on water availability and produced water treatments. The last project considered commercial oil shale leasing from a policy, environmental, and economic perspective.