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How Oil Shale Works · Stuff You Should Know

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  Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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  Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
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  Speaker 1: from how Stuff Works dot Com? Brought to you by
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  Speaker 1: consumer Guy at Automotive we make carbine easier. Hi, and
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  Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, the staff writer
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  Speaker 1: here at how Stuff Works dot Com. With me is
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  Speaker 1: the lovely and effervescent Charles Bryant, fellow staff writer. Are
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  Speaker 1: you Chuck? I'm great, I'm effervescent and it feels good. Good.
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  Speaker 1: I'm glad you're feeling good, Chuck? So Chucker's Uh? Have
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  Speaker 1: you heard of peak oil? I have? Josh? You know,
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  Speaker 1: how can you not working here? Are you just? You're
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  Speaker 1: always run around the office screaming about it? Well, you know,
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  Speaker 1: I feel pretty passionate. You should tell everyone. Okay, well,
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  Speaker 1: let me tell you again what peak oil is. It's
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  Speaker 1: basically the point in time where we stop finding oil
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  Speaker 1: and start running out and the inevitable decline begins because
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  Speaker 1: oil is, after all, a non renewable resource. Contrary to
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  Speaker 1: some of the heated opinions of a few of our
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  Speaker 1: readers who believe that it actually is renewable. I haven't
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  Speaker 1: figured out how But most people believe that petroleum is finite,
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  Speaker 1: so we're eventually going to run out. And what happens
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  Speaker 1: then is a mass chaos exactly exactly. We're all in big,
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  Speaker 1: big trouble our Our global economy runs on oil, quite literally,
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  Speaker 1: and we need it to function. Luckily, there's all sorts
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  Speaker 1: of people who are working on alternative energy, where it
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  Speaker 1: be biofuels, wind power, solar power, hydrogen. Who cares? We
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  Speaker 1: need to get off oil, even Bush, the Texas oil man,
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  Speaker 1: thinks America is addicted to oil. America exactly, so chuck.
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  Speaker 1: While we're looking for new forms of energy in the meantime,
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  Speaker 1: the conventional oil reserves, which are like, um, you know,
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  Speaker 1: the stuff we pump out of the ground, think Jeg
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  Speaker 1: clamp It shooting at the rabbit and missing in doubt.
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  Speaker 1: I will eat your ice cream, right, it's not ice cream. Actually,
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  Speaker 1: it's he'll drink your milkshake. I haven't seen it again. Yeah, okay,
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  Speaker 1: So but that's conventional oil, right, yeah, all right. So
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  Speaker 1: there's also unconventional forms of oil, which is you know,
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  Speaker 1: pretty much anything but just conventionally pumped petroleum. Um. One
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  Speaker 1: of them is oil shale. Yeah, um oil shell is
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  Speaker 1: actually it's kind of a cool cool thing. It's really um.
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  Speaker 1: The best way to most the simplest way to describe
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  Speaker 1: it is that it's oil in uh that's trapped in
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  Speaker 1: rock and it never had the chance really to become
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  Speaker 1: liquid petroleum. It's sort of cut short before that last
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  Speaker 1: step and uh, it was stripped of its potential. It was, sadly,
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  Speaker 1: and so it lies underneath the earth, um, just waiting
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  Speaker 1: for someone to go down and find a way to
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  Speaker 1: extract it, which is actually possible. Um, there's uh, there's
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  Speaker 1: people that are working on that now. One of the
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  Speaker 1: big problems with extracting oil shale, though, is is you
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  Speaker 1: have to bring up this rock uh from the earth,
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  Speaker 1: and the rock is the byproducts. So you're left with
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  Speaker 1: you know, I don't know what was statistic how many
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  Speaker 1: tons of rock? Seven yeah, seven tons of rock to
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  Speaker 1: make one gallon of patrol petroleum And I'm not sure
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  Speaker 1: that's the actual statistic, but there is a significant amount
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  Speaker 1: of rock left. I was exaggerating, but it's a lot
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  Speaker 1: of rock and they don't know what to do with it,
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  Speaker 1: and that's one of the issues. I Mean, the best
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  Speaker 1: you can do is use it under overpasses to discourage
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  Speaker 1: homeless people from setting up camp there, which is really
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  Speaker 1: about as cruel use of rock as there is. It is.
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  Speaker 1: But I think you know about um, the the Shell
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  Speaker 1: Oil Company's got a different methods. Were onto something it's
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  Speaker 1: called institution retorting. Retorting is basically the process of extracting
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  Speaker 1: the oil from the shale through heat. They figured out
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  Speaker 1: that they can stick these rods down there and heat
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  Speaker 1: up these oil shell deposits in the ground, right, so
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  Speaker 1: they don't have the rock byproduct, right, the rocks never moved. Um,
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  Speaker 1: so the carriage in which is the oil that's found
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  Speaker 1: inside uh is extracted and pumped out and the rock
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  Speaker 1: is left situated. It's just so no mining. They don't
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  Speaker 1: have to mind the rock. And that's another step to
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  Speaker 1: the process. And that is it is it cuts out
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  Speaker 1: like a really really big expensive step. And and so
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  Speaker 1: if Shell can crack this code, which it looks like
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  Speaker 1: they're going to be able to do this, they have
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  Speaker 1: projects under way. Um, it would make America the new
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  Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia as far as oil shal went. That's right.
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  Speaker 1: Because of the Green River formation, which no one's probably
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  Speaker 1: heard it heard it that it sounds like some sort
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  Speaker 1: of you know, neo Nazi environmental group, But what it
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  Speaker 1: actually is is it's seventeen thousand, thousands square miles of
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  Speaker 1: oil shale that's under the United States. Yeah, it's out west,
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  Speaker 1: it's uh, it's near the four Corner States, just waiting
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  Speaker 1: to be tapped. Yeah. And and we've known all about
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  Speaker 1: it for a while. Um, but interest really began around
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  Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three with the oil embargo against the US
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  Speaker 1: by OPEC, when we realize how dependent we are in
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  Speaker 1: fur and oil. So um, with this interest in oil
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  Speaker 1: shell generated and then it waned because oil prices went
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  Speaker 1: back down. And now with oil prices up as high
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  Speaker 1: as they are, interests is getting getting up again. So yeah,
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  Speaker 1: there's plenty more to talk about as far as oil
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  Speaker 1: shale goes, and you can find out more by reading
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  Speaker 1: what's oil shale on how stuff works dot com for
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  Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
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