Oil shale and tar sands

To continue its growth or even its existence, the United States must find new energy supplies to replace the petroleum we are rapidly depleting. No fossil energy form can offer a long-range solution, but coal offers a mid-range solution. Unfortunately we're not geared to use it, and learning to apply coal to fill our variety of energy uses takes time. While we learn, we have to supply our current needs. This means petroleum. The primary product from both oil shale and tar sands is oil which can feed directly into our established consumption patterns. These two resources can contribute significantly to the petroleum supply needed while we learn to use coal. They are largely untapped, and commercial technology for their development is just getting past the research phase. The oil shale and tar sand resources and their development technology are the subject of this AIChE Symposium volume. Oil shale has been a development target in the United States for more than fifty years, but commercial production has never been achieved. The Eocene Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming with resources exceeding 2 trillion barrels of oil is an intriguing resource. It continually attracts development efforts. Two general schemes for production of oil exist. The first, more conventional and better tested, involves mining the shale, then heating it in large retorts. Economies of scale dictate that large quantities of shale oil be produced. In consequence, huge quantities of oil shale, a relatively low-grade ore, must be processed, and huge quantities of spent shale must be disposed of presenting a tremendous materials-handling problem. The second general shale-oil production scheme avoids the materials-handling problem by producing oil from the oil shale in place. This faces a problem of its own, however, because oil shale is impermeable. A number of approaches to providing permeability to the oil shale in place have been proposed and some have been tested. The oil shale part of this Symposium includes papers describing processes to treat the shale in place, a summary report on a surface retorting process, and papers describing properties of oil shale important to process technologies.