Why "drill, baby, drill" was right

In the 1970s Jimmy Carter touted shale as a possible energy source to get out from OPEC. Plus many other things like tides, wind, geothermal, ‘nucular’, coal gasification. Sigh.

Shale was the only approach that scaled economically, 40 years later.

My contention is that the collapse in the economy in 2008 would not have happened as violently, if at all, if energy prices remained stable or went down. The 2008 shock of $4.00 gas with no end in sight of future increases caused a hunker down effect that collapsed the financial system. And allowed Obama’s election.

The shale Jimmy Carter was talking about is the Green River Shale. It was mined and had to be baked to get the oil out of it. Expensive, in a word, and the major project ended when the price of oil went down. In today's environmentalist beleaguered world, that development would likely not have happened (especially in Western Colorado) at all. Unocal To Suspend Production At Parachute Creek Shale Oil Project and Colony oil shale project

SAnother attempt at extraction, Project Rulison was also deemed to be a failure.

But that was oil shale, not 'shale oil'.

Most of the current projects involve oil generated in shale source rock, but the Bakken, for example, has the oil trapped in the low porosity dolomite, sandstone, limestone, and siltstone in between the source shales, and the Three Forks gets its oil from the lower Bakken Shale.

If you buried the Green River Shales under a few thousand feet of rock and squeezed the oil into tight reservoir formations next to it, it would be similar to what is going on, geologically, with the Bakken.

The Green River Formation, however is at or near the surface, and does not lend itself to the same production methods.

Instead, attempts have been made to bake the oil out of the shale near the surface and drive it into other wells, but the results have been mixed and generally not economically feasible.

As a former Colorado resident, Parachute Creek was controversial to say the least.

I did not know the difference between oil shale and shale oil. I doubt many others do.

From what I read, the Bakken shale is so tight, that it could pass for construction purpose rock. I would expect it to ooze, but apparently it is dry to the touch. Is that how you understand it?

Oddly enough (or maybe not, because I am a geologist) I have handled both the Green River Shale near Parachute Creek and the Bakken in core samples. The Bakken isn't quite dry to the touch, but nearly so. In core it looks like roofer's asphalt when you peel the paper off, at least in the places I have seen it cored.

The Green River Shale I have seen ranges from blue gray to a light grayish brown, and up near Rio Blanco, has scads of insect fossils in it. (mostly gnats, bot fly larvae, and the occasional mosquito). There are supposed to be better bugs up near Douglas Pass, but the ones I found up there were weathered somewhat and not as nice as the small ones near Rio Blanco.

The deposit is considered to be lake bed sediments, and feathers and small plant fronds and leaves can be found in the Rio Blanco area as well.

For more information, this article is a start.

By contrast, the Bakken Shales (upper and lower) were laid down in a marine basin, and do not outcrop anywhere. They are completely contained in the subsurface. Considering the area of the Williston Basin, it is a huge area where oxygenation stopped and the organics were preserved to generate oil. Pressure and temperature, both a function of depth of burial, provided the mechanisms of oil and gas generation, with true vertical depths between roughly 8000 ft. and 10500 ft. being ideal in North Dakota. In the Elm Coulee Field in Montana the depths are a bit shallower, but the oil is there (there is only one Bakken Shale in most of the Elm Coulee field, the other having pinched out before you get that far west. The shale looks much the same as that in the deeper part of the Basin in North Dakota, black, vitreous to waxy, and breaks readily into small chunks, which can cause problems in a horizontal well because the hole will slough if you stray from the middle Bakken into either shale (upper or lower) and the drill string can get stuck--an expensive problem, necessitating drilling a sidetrack, and possibly causing the loss of a million or more dollars worth of downhole tools.

For more info on the Bakken, check out this website and wikipedia, which have pretty good basics.

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