How Oil Shale Works

Oil shale is a term for oil trapped in rock, rather than existing in liquid form. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the nature of oil shale.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from how Stuff Works dot Com? Brought to you by
consumer Guy at Automotive we make carbine easier. Hi, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, the staff writer
here at how Stuff Works dot Com. With me is
the lovely and effervescent Charles Bryant, fellow staff writer. Are

(00:24):
you Chuck? I'm great, I'm effervescent and it feels good. Good.
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

(00:47):
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

(01:08):
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,

(01:31):
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,

(01:54):
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.

(02:15):
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

(02:39):
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

(02:59):
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

(03:22):
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,

(03:43):
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

(04:05):
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

(04:29):
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

(04:52):
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

(05:14):
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