High-Temperature Nuclear Reactors for In-Situ Recovery of Oil from Oil Shale
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory, P.O. Box 2008, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6165 (United States)
The world is exhausting its supply of crude oil for the production of liquid fuels (gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel). However, the United States has sufficient oil shale deposits to meet our current oil demands for {approx}100 years. Shell Oil Corporation is developing a new potentially cost-effective in-situ process for oil recovery that involves drilling wells into oil shale, using electric heaters to raise the bulk temperature of the oil shale deposit to {approx}370 deg C to initiate chemical reactions that produce light crude oil, and then pumping the oil to the surface. The primary production cost is the cost of high-temperature electrical heating. Because of the low thermal conductivity of oil shale, high-temperature heat is required at the heater wells to obtain the required medium temperatures in the bulk oil shale within an economically practical two to three years. It is proposed to use high-temperature nuclear reactors to provide high-temperature heat to replace the electricity and avoid the factor-of-2 loss in converting high-temperature heat to electricity that is then used to heat oil shale. Nuclear heat is potentially viable because many oil shale deposits are thick (200 to 700 m) and can yield up to 2.5 million barrels of oil per acre, or about 125 million dollars/acre of oil at $50/barrel. The concentrated characteristics of oil-shale deposits make it practical to transfer high-temperature heat over limited distances from a reactor to the oil shale deposits. (author)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21016428
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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