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I woke up feeling like it'd be a good idea to try and give people a quick rundown of what I've read from the likes of James Howard Kunstler explaining why Shale Oil is really a lot less cool and way less of a sustainable long term energy source than most people believe it is.
So, "Conventional" oil drilling is relatively straightforward. There's a relatively large and concentrated amount of liquid crude oil that's somewhere underground and you have to drill very, very deep and then use pumps to suck it out all the way up to the surface.
Even that is pretty difficult to do and requires a great deal of rather complex and cutting edge engineering. Extracting usable oil from shale and tar sands is considerably more complex than that.
For starters, the oil in shale and tar deposits isn't concentrated, instead of being collected in one big mass, it's just all up in the cracks of rock formations underground in a relatively distributed area. Just trying to pump it out won't work, at least not for long enough.
So instead what you have to do is you have to pump something into these porous rock formations in order to displace the oil and squeeze it out so that your drills and pumps can extract it.
And sometimes this is just water and other times it is water combined with all sorts of fancy silica based compounds and solvents and stuff, a lot of which is hilariously toxic and we'll get to that later.
See, the other thing is that these shale oil plays are in the middle of nowhere. So all these liquids and stuff which needs to be pumped into the rocks to squeeze the oil out needs to be brought in. By truck. You know trucks, that run on Diesel.
So the process of extracting this oil from these shale formations is way more energy intensive than conventional oil drilling, because of the sheer quantity of supplies you have to continuously haul out to your extraction location.
And because this is all spread out over a wide area, no specific drill rig is ever productive for a long time. Where conventional drill rigs could extract oil for decades or so, a drill rig in a shale deposit will be productive for a few years then be shut down.
So this means there's no point to building pipelines for transporting the oil that's been extracted, which are way more energy efficient for transporting oil. No, it's got to be hauled out by other trucks. Which run on Diesel.
Then there's the matter of rehabilitating the land afterwards. Again, this is way more complicated than in conventional drilling, where oil's just been pumped out from some natural underground reservoir.
Because in the case of a shale oil deposit that's played out, you've now got an area of land whose water table is badly contaminated, both with oil you squeezed out and were unable to extract and with whatever the hell weird crap you pumped in to squeeze it out.
And also, those very same qualities in the liquid which make it useful for displacing oil so you can easily distract it, make it really good at conducting kinetic energy caused by any pre-existing geological instability.
So you now increase both the frequency and intensity of any earthquakes which were happening in that area. So now you've got an area with an contaminated water table and prone to earthquakes.
We're still yet to come up with any kind of method, especially an economically viable one, which can restore land used for shale oil extraction to some kind of state where it can be economically useful to humans again.
Even the water table contamination would make it dubious for use as a nature reserve, except perhaps in the sense that the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has become an unintentional nature reserve, despite being badly contaminated (in a different way).
Furthermore, the oil extracted from shale deposits isn't the "Light, sweet crude" you get from places like Saudi Arabia. It's more "Heavy, sour crude" which means it's mostly long chain compounds (think asphalt rather than gasoline) which is heavily contaminated with sulphur.
So in addition to requiring a lot more energy to extract than conventional oil, it also produces crude oil which requires much more energy and complexity to refine into usable and (relatively) clean burning forms than conventionally extracted oil.
All these things combined mean that shale oil, while far from being useless, is far from being equivalent to conventional oil as an energy source. It's more expensive and difficult to extract while also giving you output which is less useful.
It's an inferior substitute for declining conventional oil reserves whose only redeeming quality is that there's a lot of it. The thing is that great quantity can be deceptive, because of how much more energy it takes to extract and refine it, relative to conventional oil.
A lot of people like to go on about "Wow America is producing so many barrels of oil now" and yes they are.
They're also consuming way more barrels of oil and rather a lot of those are being consumed in the process of extracting that oil.
They're also consuming way more barrels of oil and rather a lot of those are being consumed in the process of extracting that oil.
The net energy gain from shale oil reserves is really, really bad compared to conventional oil reserves, simply because of how much more energy intensive every aspect of extraction, transport and refining is.
While a lot of barrels of oil are being taken out of the ground, a whole bunch of that refined product is going right back into the fuel tanks of oil company trucks which need to haul in displacing fluid and haul out oil, as well as the very hot fires in the refineries themselves
