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Current Events » in reply to Supposably the mine tailings are an issue

The article mentioned mine tailings
Larry J — (archived)

I'm far from an expert on this subject as well so I look to credible sources like the Colorado School of Mines (a very good engineering school). The linked article did briefly mention that the mine tailings expand when heating, making disposal a problem. If other shale oil deposits are like the ones we have in Colorado, then ensuring an adequate supply of water might be a more serious problem. There are places here in Colorado that are extremely dry. There simply isn't enough water in the area, so it'd have to be brough in, probably in an expensive pipeline.

So, unless we try some form of in-situ processing, we have to mine the shale, heat it and mix it with water, process the oil (it's different from petroleum, so current processing techniques might not work), dispose of the tailings in an environmentally sound manner, and transport the oil to market. We have to be able to do all of this at a cost competitive with conventional petroleum, accounting for all of the energy used in the process. Not an easy task, unless the cost of petroleum goes quite a bit higher than it is today.

I don't know what the current costs would be to process shale oil, but if memory serves, when there was a lot of federal research underway on this back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, processed shale oil ended up costing about 2.5 times the cost of petroleum at the time. It just doesn't look like an economically viable technology, at least at current prices.

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