PROFILE
GETTING OIL SHALE
GOING
Watching
four promoters of
this vast resource
by Frank Dabbs
Drilling and fracturing techniques for
shale gas—similar to operations in the
Barnett Shale, shown here—could be
used to produce oil shale.
Even in the eclectic world of
unconventional oil research, discovery, and production, they are
an unlikely combination: a Colorado-based United States Geological Survey
(USGS) organic geochemist, a North
Dakota state core lab director, a
Montana independent oilman, and a
Washington D.C. lawyer and lobbyist.
Nevertheless,
to understand
how an obscure
North American
deposit of the
poor cousin of
the fossil fuel
family—oil
shale—has yielded the largest
United States
onshore oil discovery in 50
years, one must
look to the combined work of
Leigh Price, Julie LeFever, Dick Findley,
and David Bardin.
In conceptualizing and discovering
the Bakken oil shale play in the
Williston Basin and in championing its
200 billion barrel (or more) significance
to North American energy security,
Price, LeFever, Findley, and Bardin have
become senior partners of the newest
idea for in situ shale oil recovery: the
geological possibility of vast producible
source rocks analogous to the Bakken,
including some of those underlying the
Western Canada Sedimentary Basin.
The proposition is of an unconventional oil source that can be produced
by what are rapidly becoming standard
drilling and fracturing techniques for
unconventional gas. Without the high
capital costs and environmental management challenges of Alberta’s oilsands, oil shale techniques could have
a revolutionary impact on petroleum
economics in western North America,
if proved commercial.
Almost since the beginning of modern petroleum geology, oil shale has
been recognized as likely the most prolific of crude oil and natural gas source
rock. The oil shale deposits are characteristically organically rich. However,
the oil that sweats out of them and
migrates into other sedimentary formations is immature. Before it becomes
conventional light crude, it must be
geologically cooked. (Bitumen and
heavy oil are at the opposite end of
the crude oil life cycle—they exist in
the final state of degradation before
they become unusable as a fossil fuel.)
