How Oil Shale Works

I'm glad you're feeling good, Chuck? So Chucker's Uh? Have you heard of peak oil? I have? Josh? You know, how can you not working here? Are you just? You're always run around the office screaming about it? Well, you know, I feel pretty passionate. You should tell everyone. Okay, well, let me tell you again what peak oil is. It's basically the point in time where we stop finding oil and start running out and the inevitable decline begins because

oil is, after all, a non renewable resource. Contrary to some of the heated opinions of a few of our readers who believe that it actually is renewable. I haven't figured out how But most people believe that petroleum is finite, so we're eventually going to run out. And what happens then is a mass chaos exactly exactly. We're all in big, big trouble our Our global economy runs on oil, quite literally,

and we need it to function. Luckily, there's all sorts of people who are working on alternative energy, where it be biofuels, wind power, solar power, hydrogen. Who cares? We need to get off oil, even Bush, the Texas oil man, thinks America is addicted to oil. America exactly, so chuck.

While we're looking for new forms of energy in the meantime, the conventional oil reserves, which are like, um, you know, the stuff we pump out of the ground, think Jeg clamp It shooting at the rabbit and missing in doubt. I will eat your ice cream, right, it's not ice cream. Actually, it's he'll drink your milkshake. I haven't seen it again. Yeah, okay, So but that's conventional oil, right, yeah, all right. So there's also unconventional forms of oil, which is you know,

pretty much anything but just conventionally pumped petroleum. Um. One of them is oil shale. Yeah, um oil shell is actually it's kind of a cool cool thing. It's really um. The best way to most the simplest way to describe it is that it's oil in uh that's trapped in rock and it never had the chance really to become liquid petroleum. It's sort of cut short before that last

step and uh, it was stripped of its potential. It was, sadly, and so it lies underneath the earth, um, just waiting for someone to go down and find a way to extract it, which is actually possible. Um, there's uh, there's people that are working on that now. One of the big problems with extracting oil shale, though, is is you have to bring up this rock uh from the earth, and the rock is the byproducts. So you're left with you know, I don't know what was statistic how many

tons of rock? Seven yeah, seven tons of rock to make one gallon of patrol petroleum And I'm not sure that's the actual statistic, but there is a significant amount of rock left. I was exaggerating, but it's a lot of rock and they don't know what to do with it, and that's one of the issues. I Mean, the best you can do is use it under overpasses to discourage homeless people from setting up camp there, which is really about as cruel use of rock as there is. It is.

But I think you know about um, the the Shell Oil Company's got a different methods. Were onto something it's called institution retorting. Retorting is basically the process of extracting the oil from the shale through heat. They figured out that they can stick these rods down there and heat up these oil shell deposits in the ground, right, so

they don't have the rock byproduct, right, the rocks never moved. Um, so the carriage in which is the oil that's found inside uh is extracted and pumped out and the rock is left situated. It's just so no mining. They don't have to mind the rock. And that's another step to the process. And that is it is it cuts out like a really really big expensive step. And and so if Shell can crack this code, which it looks like they're going to be able to do this, they have

projects under way. Um, it would make America the new Saudi Arabia as far as oil shal went. That's right. Because of the Green River formation, which no one's probably heard it heard it that it sounds like some sort of you know, neo Nazi environmental group, But what it actually is is it's seventeen thousand, thousands square miles of oil shale that's under the United States. Yeah, it's out west, it's uh, it's near the four Corner States, just waiting

to be tapped. Yeah. And and we've known all about it for a while. Um, but interest really began around nineteen seventy three with the oil embargo against the US by OPEC, when we realize how dependent we are in fur and oil. So um, with this interest in oil shell generated and then it waned because oil prices went back down. And now with oil prices up as high

as they are, interests is getting getting up again. So yeah, there's plenty more to talk about as far as oil shale goes, and you can find out more by reading what's oil shale on how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com? Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, Are you