PominOz1

Pay enough for an 'independent' report and it'll tell you anything you like.

ozzieeagle

Smells like the Poseidon sags to me.


I'll be amazed if we see fracking on a large scale in this country, despite the bonanza it could bring.

Zen10

Fact is, we're all on a crash course with no more oil because our consumption is totally unsustainable. I think it's going to last a lot longer than the preppers do, but I know it's not infinite, and I know we had better have something to replace it or we're in apocalypse territory.

bikeframed

Didn't see any mention of this in the article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale

"The water needed in the oil shale retorting process offers an additional economic consideration: this may pose a problem in areas with water scarcity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_economics

"Depending on technology, above-ground retorting uses between one and five barrels of water per barrel of produced shale-oil."

Where do they propose to get enough water to produce 3.5 billion to 233 billion barrels of oil? Or is Australia going to turn into the western USA where oil companies are buying groundwater rights?

GarryP

There are at least three different types of thing that get classified as 'shale oil' / 'oil shale' / etc. (usually by marketeers) and they are very different things.

The first refers to the 'Alberta' type (oil sands), where the oil (bitumen really) is bound into the rock and it needs to be heated and 'washed' out of the rock, after it's been removed from the ground.

The type referred to in the PR push by Linc is the 'fracking' type, where the oil is in the rock, and can't move (tight), but if you poke a crack in it, it will flow out.

The final is oil shales type, kerogen, where you don't actually have oil at all, but a precursor which after further processing can be made into a synthetic crude. This takes heat (lots of), and water.

The first is obviously done a lot in canada and produces about 2Mbpd for them. The second is done in the US and produces less than 1Mbpd of real oil. The third doesn't produce a barrel and nobody know how to do it realistically.

BTW, those low numbers are why they shouldn't be taken too seriously. It takes quite a bit of effort to achieve those numbers - and meanwhile the big old giants in Saudi are thought to be declining at 0.6-0.8Mbpd each year, every year.

Zen10

That's interesting about Canada because they import around 1 million barrels per day, but use 2 million barrels per day. I once calculated all remaining known stocks of oil and on current consumption there were something like 40 years left.

GarryP

Update

Actually others have been digging into this PR a bit more, and have suggested that what Linc claim to have found is the third type of 'shale oil' - actually kerogen - rather than the second type

If this is the case then they have found the square root of sweet FA, since nobody has a viable way of turning this 'not oil' into real oil.

Words like 'pump and dump' are being thrown around - but their press release is so opaque its difficult to be sure. Certainly some of the terms they are talking, and the numbers, make it look like this is a kerogen play - and therefore essentially worthless.

Zen10

As Robert Palmer once sung, It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough, You know you're gonna have to face it, you're addicted to oil... or something like that anyway..

verystormy

As a geologist, i will through in my tuppence. To extract this, the country will have a choice to make. Cheap electricity or food. The issue is that it is in the area of the Great Australian Basin Aquafer. This is the ground water that is used to keep the agriculture of Australia alive. Extracting by fracking would almost certainly cause severe damage to the aquafer. So, do you want cheap oil and starve?

ozzieeagle

Is that a 100pct given outcome in fracking in that area ? Is there anyway that in fracking, polluting the basin is avoidable

Quite a few quesitons I'd like to ask Geologists in relation to this.... Obviously this material comes from old vegative growth and masses of it. What caused the climate change to end that growth and how long ago did that happen.

.

commonwealth

lets just go nuclear.

cresta57

Much easier to sell the material to third world countries & let them deal with the radioactive waste.

chris955

And much more lucrative.

Beaverstate

Between Australia , the US & Canada, it would seem the middle east days may be shorter than anticipated.

verystormy

No, it is not inevitable. But the risks would be high. Is there a way around it? I am not sure. I am not a fracking expert, but anything that may alter the permiability and porosity of the basin rocks would be a significant concern.

There is a lot of debate about why the carboniferous period ended. Personally, i think it was a combination of things. Pangea had formed and was moving south. We still do not understand all of the reasons for sudden climate change. One of the reasons why a fair few earth scientists are not convinced that global warming is caused by man. At least not in its entirety.

The CO2 level in the atmosphere changed significantly, as did the oxygen levels. The trees had flourished in the high CO2 environemt and succedded very well in converting it to oxygen. The problem being that this meant there was less and less CO2 for them to grow. The mountain buiilding that took place during the formation of Pangea was significant as although initially locking up a lot of water and draining the lands, giving room for forests to expand, as climate changed again and became colder it was then a hinderance. It also was a period of new types of plant forming which may have out competed existing plants.