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Sustainable Energy
Published in Stanley E. Manahan, Environmental Chemistry, 2022
Shale oil is a mixture consisting primarily of hydrocarbons, but containing hetero elements including nitrogen compounds as well, which is produced by heating fine-grained sedimentary oil shales to approximately 500°C. The carbonaceous material in oil shale is a substance called kerogen. Shale oil is more costly and environmentally damaging than liquid petroleum because the rock is mined and processed in retorts, releasing enormous quantities of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and leaving a residue with a tendency to leach salts into water. Optimistic predictions of large-scale shale oil production in the United States from around the early 1970s have fallen flat because of unfavorable economic and environmental impact. There has been some limited production in Brazil, China, Estonia, Germany, and Israel. Although estimates of shale oil potentially available in the world are enormous—around five trillion barrels—it never will be developed for environmental reasons.
What instead of oil?
Published in Rauli Partanen, Harri Paloheimo, Heikki Waris, The World After Cheap Oil, 2014
Rauli Partanen, Harri Paloheimo, Heikki Waris
Shale oil is light and easier to refine than heavy oils or bitumen. This would indicate that its greenhouse gas emissions would be comparable to conventional oil. Since a significant part of the production is natural gas, there will be methane leaks. There is an ongoing debate on how much of the gas leaks, with the higher estimates being between 4 and 8 percent. Even if the total leaks from production, transportation, storage and end use amounted to just 1 or 2 percent, it would mean that its emissions would be comparable to coal use. This is because methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If there is no nearby market for the associated gas, as in Bakken, it is flared. While natural gas only has around half the CO2 intensity compared with coal per energy unit, flaring does not offer any benefit to society. Leaks from production and transport can be minimized, but this requires tough regulation and enforcement, and the use of best practices.
Other Feedstocks—Coal, Oil Shale, and Biomass
Published in James G. Speight, Handbook of Petrochemical Processes, 2019
Shale oil is a synthetic crude oil produced by retorting oil shale and is the pyrolysis product of the organic matter (kerogen) contained in oil shale. The raw shale oil produced from retorting oil shale can vary in properties and composition (Scouten, 1990; Lee, 1991; Lee et al., 2007; Speight, 2008). Compared with petroleum, shale oil is high in nitrogen and oxygen compounds and a higher specific gravity—on the order of 0.9–1.0 owing to the presence of high-boiling nitrogen-, sulfur-, and oxygen-containing compounds. Shale oil also has a relatively high pour point and small quantities of arsenic and iron are present.
Effect of N2 and CO2 on shale oil from pyrolysis of Estonian oil shale
Published in International Journal of Coal Preparation and Utilization, 2022
Sepehr Mozaffari, Oliver Järvik, Zachariah Steven Baird
Fossil fuels, such as crude oil, natural gas and coal, provide most of the energy in the world (Demirbas, Alidrisi, and Balubaid 2015). Oil shale is another widely available fossil fuel, although less used. It is a sedimentary rock that contains significant amount of organic matter called kerogen (Wang et al. 2014). Oil shale has attracted lots of interest due to the large amount of available oil shale deposits (Dijkmans et al. 2015) as well as the possibility of utilizing them as a source of energy and chemicals (Strizhakova and Usova 2008). The processing of oil shale to produce shale oil is often considered to be costly with a large environmental impact. For this reason, oil shale has not been widely utilized. However, some countries such as Estonia use oil shale extensively to supply their domestic energy (Baird et al. 2018; Mozaffari et al. 2020; Mozaffari, Järvik, and Baird 2020).
Oil production forecasting using deep learning for shale oil wells under variable gas-oil and water-oil ratios
Published in Petroleum Science and Technology, 2022
Pedram Mahzari, Mehryar Emambakhsh, Cenk Temizel, Adrian P. Jones
At time this work was carried out, the world consumes just over 90 million barrels of oil per day (IEA 2020). Hydrocarbon production from shale formations has brought about a shift in the industry and research outlooks. Shale oil and gas formations can be exploited by drilling and hydraulically fracturing wells. As the shale formations are intrinsically tight and chemically complex, the fluid flow and fracturing mechanisms may not be readily expressed by conventional modeling approaches (Striolo and Cole 2017; Gong 2020). Local heterogeneity (Iacoviello et al. 2019), stochastic nature of fracture propagation (Mousavi Nezhad et al. 2018), in-situ micro-fractures (Padin, Tutuncu, and Sonnenberg 2014), complex fluid-rock interactions (Mahzari, Jones, and Oelkers 2020), cumbersome laboratory methodology (Mahzari et al. 2021), uncertainty in upscaling methodologies (Yan, Wang, and Killough 2016), and field-scale wellbore inter-communications (Yu et al. 2017) can be raised amongst the current issues encountered in modeling of shale formations.
Effects of hydration on physical properties and rock microstructure of shale oil reservoir in the Triassic Chang 7 Member of Southern Ordos Basin
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2020
Pengfei Zhao, Xiangyu Fan, Qiangui Zhang, Mingming Zhang, Bowei Yao
As relevant discoveries lead to a greater understanding of the conditions of oil and gas generation, migration, and reservoirs, the petroleum industry is moving toward unconventional oil and gas. Shale oil is a kind of unconventional oil resource that is widely distributed in the world and may become an important substitute for conventional oil in the future (Zou et al. 2013). Benefiting from the development of shale oil, the U.S. repealed the ban on crude oil exports in 2015 and has gradually changed from an oil-importing country to an oil-exporting country (Zhou et al. 2019). Canada has also successfully exploited shale oil, which accounts for a certain proportion of the total annual oil production (Chen et al. 2019b). At present, some other countries have also researched shale oil reserve budgets and exploration; however, there are no reports on successful large-scale industrial exploitation.