Was reading this article last year concerning shell's in-situ oil shale practice. I know most people here are against using oil at all, but I for one don't want to go back to the middle ages. This technology could hold us over until renewables could catch up.
http://deseretnews.com/...
some would say "it's a energy sink"....wrong, the shell pilot project proved otherwise:
"The energy balance is favorable; under a conservative life-cycle analysis, it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production."
Some say, there's just not enough....wrong, there's plenty...
" On one small test plot about 20-by-35 feet, on land Shell owns, they started heating the rock in early 2004. "Product" -- about one-third natural gas, two-thirds light crude -- began to appear in September 2004. They turned the heaters off about a month ago, after harvesting about 1,500 barrels of oil.
While we were trying to do the math, O'Connor told us the answers. Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil-shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles -- the largest fossil-fuel deposits in the world."
Thoughts???