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36 comments on Queensland Shale Oil Billions in The Balance ?

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Stormy on December 2, 2007 - 11:47am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Slightly off topic, but germane to the problem of accessing cheaply deposits that were once thought too expensive, has any one here looked at the Thai system developed at the University of Bath for recovering heavy oil? Thai: To-to-Heel-Injection.

THAI™ uses a system where air is injected into the oil deposit down a vertical well and is ignited. The heat generated in the reservoir reduces the viscosity of the heavy oil, allowing it to drain into a second, horizontal well from where it rises to the surface.

THAI™ is very efficient, recovering about 70 to 80 per cent of the oil, compared to only 10 to 40 per cent using other technologies.

http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/2007/11/28/oil-process.html

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memmel on December 2, 2007 - 1:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I'm suspecting that a problem with this process is its only draining the local region. Traditional oil wells drain a fairly large region around the well. This means drilling wells till it looks like swiss cheese. If these wells are producing less that a million barrels of oil before a new one has to be drilled the the process is not competitive with extracting small pools of oil. Which is not going to help us much. Producing small pools or extracting from a small region of a large non-traditional deposit gives the same end result a little bit of very expensive oil.

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