Extracting shale oil from oil shale is more potentially costly than the production of conventional crude oil both financially and in terms of its environmental impact. The estimated in-ground resources are over 300 billion barrels of oil—some of the largest oil-shale resources in the world. 6.2 Shale Oil Properties. Most of the organic matter in oil shales is derived from various types of marine and lacustrine algae. Oil shales were deposited in a variety of depositional environments, including fresh-water to highly saline lakes, epicontinental marine basins and subtidal shelves, and in limnic and coastal swamps, commonly in association with deposits of coal. In the past 20 years, despite the extraction of almost 50 billion barrels and 475 trillion cubic feet, proven oil reserves have increased 66% to over 50 … We produce marketing and networking events for oil and gas businesses and organizations. Depths to selected Cretaceous and lower Tertiary stratigraphic units in the Piceance Basin, northwestern Colorado are presented here for 1,563 wells. Oil world needs a new word like ready reserves, defined as the amount of oil that can be lifted profitably at current prices. Oil shales range widely in organic content and oil yield. Deposits of shale oil / gas are found around the world. Johnson, R.C., Birdwell, J.E., Brownfield, M.E., and Mercier, T.J., 2015, Mass-movement deposits in the lacustrine Eocene Green River Formation, Piceance Basin, western Colorado: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2015–1044, 13 p., http://dx.doi.org/10.3133/ofr20151044. Extracting shale oil from oil shale is more potentially costly than the production of conventional crude oil both financially and in terms of its environmental impact. S&P Global Platts forecasts a decline to 10m b/d by mid-2021. Variations in the areal extent of saline mineral deposition through time were studied using descriptions of core and outcrop. Today, we are producing ~87 Bcf/d, which is a whopping 30% higher than the 67 … The total in-place resource for the Uinta Basin is estimated at 1.32 trillion barrels. The refined products can be used for the same purposes as those derived from crude oil. Oil shale is commonly defined as a fine-grained sedimentary rock containing organic matter that yields substantial amounts of oil and combustible gas upon destructive distillation. Some of these names are still used for certain types of oil shale. The Eocene Green River Formation of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming contains the largest oil shale deposits in the world. Energy map of southwestern Wyoming, Part B: oil and gas, oil shale, uranium, and solar; 2014; DS; 843; Biewick, Laura R. H.; Wilson, Anna B. For much of the 20th century, the Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves served as a contingency source of fuel for the Nation's military. This is perhaps the most common type of analysis that is currently used to evaluate an oil-shale resource. The Green River Formation was... Introduction By comparison, the heating value of lignitic coal ranges from 3,500 to 4,600 kcal/kg on a dry, mineral-free basis (American Society for Testing Materials, 1966). The situation today has not greatly improved, although much information has been published in the past decade or so, notably for deposits in Australia, Canada, Estonia, Israel, and the United States. On the other hand, oil-shale deposits that have economic potential for their shale-oil and gas yields are geothermally immature and have not been subjected to excessive heating. This file is updated from the Piceance Basin Oil Shale Database with data for additional new drill holes. The commercial development of an oil-shale deposit depends upon many factors. For much of the 20th century, the Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves served as a contingency source of fuel for the Nation's military. Hydrocarbons are substances made entirely of hydrogen and carbon. Oil shale usually meets the definition of "shale" in that it is "a laminated rock consisting of at least 67% clay minerals," however, it sometimes contains enough organic material and carbonate minerals that clay minerals account for less than 67% of the rock. Canada: Oil-shale deposits in Canada (locations after Macauley, 1981). These color differences can be noted by a petrographer and measured using photometric techniques. S ign U p F or our. The thermal maturity of an oil shale refers to the degree to which the organic matter has been altered by geothermal heating. Since the oil-price bust of 2014, unpredictability has been the theme music of U.S. shale. U.S. gains increased at least 100,000 barrels per day for 10 of the last 16 months. Both give more complete information about the grade of oil shale, but are not widely used. More information on Estonia and Sweden oil shale. More information on United States oil shale. This is usually much less efficient than drilling rocks that will yield oil or gas directly into a well. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed in 2011 a comprehensive assessment of in-place oil in oil shales in the Eocene Green River in the Greater Green River Basin, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. The estimated in-ground resources are over 300 billion barrels of oil—some of the largest oil-shale resources in the world. Oil shale has received many different names over the years, such as cannel coal, boghead coal, alum shale, stellarite, albertite, kerosene shale, bituminite, gas coal, algal coal, wollongite, schistes bitumineux, torbanite, and kukersite. For decades many politicians and scientists have touted Utah’s oil shale as the energy of the future. Oil shale is a type of sedimentary rock that is rich in kerogen. Hutton (1991) visualized oil shale as one of three broad groups of organic-rich sedimentary rocks: (1) humic coal and carbonaceous shale, (2) bitumen-impregnated rock, and (3) oil shale. However, looking at success in US lots of other countries have started to explore their shale reserves. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), Mapping, Remote Sensing, and Geospatial Data, spatial and tabular datasets, fischer assays and well logs, http://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-069/dds-069-y/, http://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-069/dds-069-bb/, http://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-069/dds-069-ddb/. The amounts of individual gases-chiefly hydrocarbons, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide-are not normally determined but are reported collectively as "gas plus loss," which is the difference of 100 weight percent minus the sum of the weights of oil, water, and spent shale. Marinites are deposited typically in epeiric seas such as on broad shallow marine shelves or inland seas where wave action is restricted and currents are minimal. Byproducts may add considerable value to some oil-shale deposits. The fracking of hard-to-reach oil reserves has helped the US regain its crown as the world's top crude oil producer. Click on a pin on the map to see more information. Such materials may be of bacterial origin or the product of bacterial degradation of algae or other organic matter. We can get your products and services seen. The purpose of this report is to (1) discuss the geology and summarize the resources of selected deposits of oil shale in varied geologic settings from different parts of the world and (2) present new information on selected deposits developed since 1990 (Russell, 1990). 227-264. Also, oil-shale deposits in Jordan (locations after Jaber and others, 1997; and, Hamarneh, 1998). Year Published: 2020 Assessment of continuous oil and gas resources in Lower Silurian Shales of the Arabian Peninsula, 2019. The average breakeven price of oil has fallen 4 percent (or $2 per barrel) over the past year, to $50 per barrel, according to the latest Dallas Fed Energy Survey. Shale Energy Resources is a Texas-based marketing firm that. Under such circumstances, oil shales can be source rocks for petroleum and natural gas. To get to the oil and gas, companies will most likely need to use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that fractures rock using a pressurized liquid containing chemicals. More information on Australia oil shale. It may also include varied admixtures of biologically higher forms of plant debris that depend on the depositional environment and geographic position. Culture of Inflating Oil Reserves Helped Stoke U.S. Shale Boom As the industry reels from the pandemic, some question whether oil reserves were as rich as some companies estimated. The heating value is useful for determining the quality of an oil shale that is burned directly in a power plant to produce electricity. Vitrinite reflectance is commonly used by petroleum explorationists to determine the degree of geothermal alteration of petroleum source rocks in a sedimentary basin. By Christopher J. Petherick. The organic matter of oil shale, which is the source of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons, typically has a higher hydrogen and lower oxygen content than that of lignite and bituminous coal. The hydrocarbons in oil shale can be used as an alternative to petroleum or natural gas. Kukersite, which takes its name from Kukruse Manor near the town of Kohtla-Järve, Estonia, is a light brown marine oil shale. His classification has proved to be useful for correlating different kinds of organic matter in oil shale with the chemistry of the hydrocarbons derived from oil shale. By The quantities reported are the weight percentages of shale oil (and its specific gravity), water, shale residue, and "gas plus loss" by difference. In general, the precursors of the organic matter in oil shale and coal also differ. The Fischer assay method does not determine the total available energy in an oil shale. Mining oil shale can be either surface mining or in situ retorting. ... We have access to over 60,000 contacts in the oil & gas industry. The Devonian-Mississippian oil shales of eastern United States are typical marinites. Shale oil is a substitute for conventional crude oil. Although shale-oil plays with oil stored in open-fractured shale have been pursued for more than 100 yr, organic-rich and low-permeability shales and hybrid shale-oil systems are now being pursued based on knowledge and technologies gained from production of shale-gas resource systems and likely hold the largest untapped oil resource potential. 1, known as Elk Hills, was privatized, the first of a series of major organizational changes that leave only one of the original six Federal properties in the program. Results of this assessment are available in the following publications (see 'Data and Tools' for data supporting this assessment): Johnson, R.C., Brownfield, M.E., and Mercier, T.J., (U.S. Geological Survey Oil Shale Assessment Team), 2010a, Oil Shale and Nahcolite Resources of the Piceance Basin, Colorado: U.S. Geological Survey Digital Data Series DDS-69-Y [CD-ROM]. Part B consists of oil and gas, oil shale, uranium, and solar energy resource information in support of the WLCI. Shale oil is an unconventional oil produced from oil shale rock fragments by pyrolysis, hydrogenation, or thermal dissolution. Cannel coal is brown to black oil shale composed of resins, spores, waxes, and cutinaceous and corky materials derived from terrestrial vascular plants together with varied amounts of vitrinite and inertinite. Up to 1/3 of the rock can be solid organic material. Pennsylvania (103.4 Tcf) Texas (100.8 Tcf) West Virginia (31.7 Tcf) Louisiana (25.6 Tcf) Ohio (24.0 Tcf) Oklahoma (21.4 Tcf) New Mexico (13.1 Tcf) North Dakota (11.7 Tcf) figure data Much of the organic matter in oil shale is of algal origin, but may also include remains of vascular land plants that more commonly compose much of the organic matter in coal. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2018.01.107, Johnson, R.C., Birdwell, J.E., Lillis, P.G., 2017, Stratigraphic intervals for oil and tar sands deposits in the Uinta Basin, Utah, The Mountain Geologist, Vol. These hydrocarbons have somewhat varied chemical and physical characteristics, and several have been mined commercially. The Bakken Field in North Dakota and Montana is the largest producing shale oil reserve. Coaly materials including vitrinite and inertinite are rare to abundant components of oil shale; both are derived from humic matter of land plants and have moderate and high reflectance, respectively, under the microscope. The Fischer assay method also does not necessarily indicate the maximum amount of oil that can be produced by a given oil shale. Public domain.). The Estonian oil-shale deposit in northern Estonia along the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland and its eastern extension into Russia, the Leningrad deposit, are kukersites. The Bakken Field in North Dakota and Montana is the largest producing shale oil reserve. Most of these uses are still small or in experimental stages, but the economic potential is large. The drilling of AHT1 H2 well, completed within four months, used 7,000 cm of water as part of the hydraulic fracturing technique used during drilling. However, this method can pose a problem with respect to oil shale, because the reflectance of vitrinite may be depressed by the presence of lipid-rich organic matter. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has compiled Part B of the Energy Map of Southwestern Wyoming for the Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative (WLCI). While the current report considers more … To bring some uniformity into this assessment, oil-shale resources in this report are given in both metric tons of shale oil and in equivalent U.S. barrels of shale oil, and the grade of oil shale, where known, is expressed in liters of shale oil per metric ton (l/t) of rock. He then divided oil shale into three groups based upon their environments of deposition - terrestrial, lacustrine, and marine. The resulting oil can be used immediately as a fuel or upgraded to meet refinery feedstock specifications by adding hydrogen and removing impurities such as sulfur and nitrogen. A report based on documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and published by the nonprofits Partnership for Policy Integrity and Earthworks i… Oil shale, despite the name, does not actually contain oil, but rather a type of organic matter called kerogen, a precursor of oil that is converted to a type of crude oil when heated to about 450 – 500° C. The oil shale deposits are in three structural and sedimentary basins that have been recently assessed: Estimated total in-place resources are about 1.5 trillion barrels of oil for the Piceance Basin, about 1.3 trillion barrels of oil for the Uinta Basin and 1.4 trillion barrels of oil in the Greater Green River Basin. Shale oil is the product of the thermal reaction and decomposition of kerogen present in oil shales. Assuming that the organic matter is subjected to geothermal heating as a function of depth, the colors of certain types of organic matter change from lighter to darker colors. The field is roughly the size of West Virginia and, as of December 2012, produced 770,000 barrels of oil a day. Utah’s oil-shale deposits are located in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah. Organic matter in oil shale includes the remains of algae, spores, pollen, plant cuticle and corky fragments of herbaceous and woody plants, and other cellular remains of lacustrine, marine, and land plants. SHALE OIL AND SHALE GAS POTENTIAL IN COLOMBIA. It also contains small amounts of vitrinite and inertinite. US Shale Oil Reserves . Artem Abramov, head of shale research at Rystad, said production would remain between 11.5m b/d and 12m b/d at $40 a barrel. Others have suggested a limit as low as 25 l/t. It also reviews the economics, the environment and the major shale oil countries. More information on Israel and Jordan oil shale. The drilling of AHT1 H2 well, completed within four months, used 7,000 cm of water as part of the hydraulic fracturing technique used during drilling. For this reason, it may be necessary to measure vitrinite reflectance from laterally equivalent vitrinite-bearing rocks that lack the algal material. The well confirmed the existence of substantial reserves of shale gas in the Ahnet Basin, located in In Salah, 650 km northwest of Tamanrasset. Texas alone holds more than 60 billion barrels of shale oil according to this new data. Today, few, if any deposits can be economically mined and processed for shale oil in competition with petroleum. Torbanite, named after Torbane Hill in Scotland, is a black oil shale whose organic matter is composed mainly of telalginite derived largely from lipid-rich Botryococcus and related algal forms found in fresh- to brackish-water lakes. For other oil shales, the reverse is true-silicates including quartz, feldspar, and clay minerals are dominant and carbonates are a minor component. A scale of vitrinite reflectances has been developed that indicates when the organic matter in a sedimentary rock has reached temperatures high enough to generate oil and gas. This NRG Expert Global Oil Reserves and Shale Oil market research report provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of the global shale oil market. Birdwell, J.E., Vanden Berg, M.D., Johnson, R.C., Mercier, T.J., Boehlke, A., Brownfield, M.E., 2016, Geological, geochemical, and reservoir characterization of the Uteland Butte member of the Green River Formation, Uinta Basin, Utah in Dolan, M.P., Higley, D.K., Lillis, P.G., ed., Hydrocarbon Source Rocks in Unconventional Plays, Rocky Mountain Region: Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists, Chapter 12, p. 352-378. Values obtained by this method are reported in English or metric units, such as British thermal units (Btu) per pound of oil shale, calories per gram (cal/gm) of rock, kilocalories per kilogram (kcal/kg) of rock, megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg) of rock, and other units. All that changed in 1998 when Naval Petroleum Reserve No. For US, more than 50% of remaining oil reserves is unconventional shale oil. The method commonly used in the United States is called the "modified Fischer assay," first developed in Germany, then adapted by the U.S. Bureau of Mines for analyzing oil shale of the Green River Formation in the western United States (Stanfield and Frost, 1949). In fact, special methods of retorting, such as the Hytort process, can increase oil yields of some oil shales by as much as three to four times the yield obtained by the Fischer assay method (Schora and others, 1983; Dyni and others, 1990). A deposit of oil shale having economic potential is generally one that is at or near enough to the surface to be developed by open-pit or conventional underground mining or by in-situ methods. Utah’s oil-shale deposits are located in the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah. The reserves data distinguish between reserves in existing fields and new projects, and potential reserves in recent discoveries and still undiscovered fields. Results of this study are provided in two publications, below (see 'Data and Tools' for data supporting this assessment): Johnson, R.C., (and U.S. Geological Survey Oil Shale Assessment Team), 2010, Oil Shale Resources of the Eocene Green River Formation, Greater Green River Basin, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah: U.S. Geological Survey Digital Data Series DDS-69-DD, [CD-ROM]. Oil shales range widely in organic content and oil yield. Estimated in-place oil is about 1.5 trillion barrels, based on Fischer assay results from boreholes drilled to evaluate oil shale, making it the largest oil shale deposit in the world. The estimated in-place nahcolite resource is about 43.3 billion short tons. Shale Energy Resources is a Texas-based marketing firm that. Recent studies indicate that the Piceance Basin in northwestern Colorado contains over 1.5 trillion barrels of oil in place, making the basin the largest known oil-shale deposit in the world. As supplies of petroleum diminish in future years and costs for petroleum increase, greater use of oil shale for the production of electric power, transportation fuels, petrochemicals, and other industrial products seems likely. However, the U.S. was the world's largest oil … Enlarge map. The grade of oil shale has been determined by many different methods with the results expressed in a variety of units. It looks at global oil and gas reserves, oil supply and demand, unconventional and frontier oil and gas reserves. Small amounts of plant resins and waxes also contribute to the organic matter. One technique is to observe the changes in color of the organic matter in samples collected from varied depths in a borehole. The heat energy obtained by the combustion of the organic matter in oil shale can be used in the cement-making process. Marine oil shales are composed of lipid-rich organic matter derived from marine algae, acritarchs (unicellular organisms of questionable origin), and marine dinoflagellates. This page accesses data for Oil Shale Assessments of PIceance, Uinta and Green River Basins. They perforate short segments of … An in-place assessment of the oil shale and nahcolite resources of the Green River Formation in the Piceance Basin of western Colorado was competed in 2010. Johnson, R.C., Dietrich, J.D., and Mercier, T.J., 2015: Updated tops file for Cretaceous and lower Tertiary units, Piceance Basin, northwest Colorado: U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2015–1036, 16 p., http://dx.doi.org/10.3133/ofr20151036. Includes thin-walled colonial or unicellular algae, typified by genera such as Botryococcus lower limit of 40... ( locations after Jaber and others, 1975, p. 236-237 ) assay, or close thereof! Uses are still small or in situ retorting map to see more information on China, Russia,,... 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