Move over fracking, there's a new technology in town.
What do
Hot Pockets and oil shale have in common? As it turns out, more than you might
imagine. True, you can’t bake oil shale the way you can Hot Pockets. And you
can’t steam Hot Pockets (unless you like ’em soggy) the way you can oil shale
when you want to siphon off its black gold. But there is one preparation method
that works for both these two improbable sources of abundant energy, and it’s
probably in your kitchen at this very moment: microwaves.
As
strange as it sounds, producers are experimenting with ways to zap previously
unextractable oil resources with microwaves, which has the potential to
kick-start an even bigger energy revolution than fracking — and appease
environmentalists while they’re at it. This is potentially “a whole shift in
the paradigm,” says Peter Kearl, co-founder and CTO of Qmast, a Colorado-based
company pioneering the use of the microwave tech. Some marquee names are
betting on the play: Oil giants BP and ConocoPhillips are pouring resources
into developing similar extraction techniques, which can be far less water- and
energy-intensive than fracking.
If
producers can find a way to microwave oil shales in the Green River Formation,
which sprawls across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, the nation’s recoverable
reserves could soar and energy
independence could become more than an election slogan. Even with
existing methods — strip-mining the shale and then cooking it, or injecting
steam to cook the rock underground (hydraulic fracturing is useless here) — the
formation contains enough oil to last the U.S. 165 years at current rates of consumption.
Microwave extraction could goose those numbers even higher. After all, there
are more than 4 trillion (with a “t”) barrels of oil in the Green River
Formation. And yet this microwave extraction technology comes at a time when the world is
awash in oil, and prices are so low that domestic producers are
having a hard time pumping at a profit.
We don’t need water for our process, and
we don’t have wastewater to dispose of afterward.
PETER KEARL, CO-FOUNDER OF MICROWAVE
TECHNOLOGY COMPANY QMAST
Time for
a quick geology lesson. Don’t worry, if “painless” and “geology lesson” ever
belonged in the same sentence, it’s this one. The most important takeaway:
Don’t confuse shale oil with the not-at-all-confusingly-named oil shale. Shale
oil is essentially liquid oil locked up in rock that’s found in deep formations
and requires hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for it to flow freely to the
wellbore for extraction. Oil shale, on the other hand, isn’t really oil yet.
Instead, it is found in more shallow formations that contain solid organic
materials called kerogen. “You can get oil out of it,” says Dr. Seth Shonkoff,
executive director of the energy science and policy institute PSE Healthy
Energy, but it “usually involves subjecting the oil shale to high heat.” High
heat from, say, microwaves. OK, class dismissed.
In
Kearl’s playbook, you’d leave the kerogen in the ground and bring its oil to
the surface. Producers would microwave oil shale formations with a beam as
powerful as 500 household microwave ovens, cooking the kerogen and releasing
the oil. It also would turn the water found naturally in the deposits to steam,
which would help push the oil to the wellbore. “Once you remove the oil and
water,” Kearl continues, “the rock basically becomes transparent” to the microwave
beam, which can then penetrate outward farther and farther, up to about 80 feet
from the wellbore. It doesn’t sound like much, but a single
microwave-stimulated well, which would be drilled in formations on average
nearly 1,000 feet thick, could pump about 800,000 barrels. Qmast plans to have
its first systems deployed in the field in 2017 and start producing by the end
of that year.
Potential
extraction for three types of U.S. oil reserves (from top to bottom): zapping,
tapping and fracking. These figures from the USGS show “technically recoverable”
deposits. Scale: 1:4.2 trillion.
SOURCE GETTY/SHUTTERSTOCK
Kearl
claims there are multiple environmental advantages to this technique. Fracking
can slurp up to 10 million gallons of water per operation — not good,
especially in the arid West. “We don’t need water for our process,” Kearl says,
“and we don’t have wastewater to dispose of afterward.” In fact, microwave
extraction might produce water — one barrel of water for every three barrels of
oil. In situ recovery using microwaves also avoids the massive environmental
impact of mining and then processing the kerogen. What’s more, natural gas that
often is flared off in conventional oil-well production could be used to power
the generator that creates the microwaves.
Kearl and
company may overcome technical challenges and stand ready to bring microwaved
wells on line, but there’s nothing they can do about their highest hurdle: the price of oil.
Kearl estimates his pumping costs will be about $9 per barrel, which is only
about $2 more than conventional wells. However, a recent report
claims the price of oil needs to be $65 per barrel in order for new oil-patch
investments to break even. The current price is about $47. So, unless the price
of oil soars, all that microwavable oil shale may remain untapped.
Strip
mining in Canada’s oil sands, an environmentally devastating process, is
similar to the practice currently used to exploit oil shales in the Green River
Formation.
SOURCE MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/GETTY
Waiting
for crude to cost a Benjamin a barrel may buy the time some experts think the
technology needs to mature. “[It] isn’t there yet,” says James W. Rector,
professor of geoengineering at the UC Berkeley Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering. “Maybe in another 15 to 20 years it’ll be there.” He
emphasizes that the massive capital expenditures required and the culture of
the oil and gas industry translate into a long gestation period for any new
technology.
In the
meantime, Kearl and others think that the best use of the technique might be to
clean conventional oil wells, which can clog with paraffin and other gunk, and
to steam-clean fracked formations where water is blocking the flow of oil to
the wellbore. “In the end,” says Shonkoff, “these microwave technologies may
just enhance the ability of oil operators to squeeze a little bit more oil out
of the ground.
SOURCEROBERT INGELHART/GETT
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