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• Board Meeting Date: 7/11/2007
• Description: WSP Section - Intrastate Water Planning - Oil Shale Water Use
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

Summary

Since the early 1980s, oil shale has not been on the U.S. energy policy agenda, and
very litde arrention has been directed at technology or energy market developments
that might change the commercial prospects for oil shale. This report presents an
updated assessment of the viability of developing oil shale resources in the United
States and related policy issues. The report describes the oil shale resources in the
western United States; the suitability, cost, and performance of available technologies
for developing the richest of those resources; and the key energy, environmental,
land-use, and socioeconomic policy issues that need to be addressed by government
decisionmakers in the near future.

The u.s. Oil Shale Resource Base

The term oil shale generally refers to any sedimentary rock that contains solid bitu-
minous materials that are released as petroleum-like liquids when the rock is heated.
To obtain oil from oil shale, the shale must be heated and resultant liquid must be
captured. This process is called retorting, and the vessel in which retorting takes place
is known as a retort.
The largest known oil shale deposits in the world are in the Green River Forma-
tion, which cove:rs portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Estimates of the oil
resource in place within the Green River Formation range from 1.5 to 1.8 trillion
barrels. Not all resources in place are recoverable. For potentially recoverable oil shale
resources, we roughly derive an upper bound of 1.1 trillion barrels of oil and a lower
bound of about 500 billion barrels. For policy planning purposes, it is enough to
know that any amount in this range is very high. For example, the midpoint in our
estimate range, 800 billion barrels, is more than triple the proven oil reserves of Saudi
Arabia. Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per
day. If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, 800 billion barrels
of recoverable resources would last for more than 400 years.

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