In this post I mentioned that the CSIRO had just released a report which says petrol could be $8 per litre by 2018. There was also a lot of discussion on this thread about the possible impact of an ETS on transport.
News of the CSIRO report Fuel for thought (pdf) has rocketed around the world. When I googled there were over 60 links smack on the topic.
The World Today did an item on the story followed by one on shale oil where Queensland Energy Resources are considering their options and are more than eager to help.
Oil shale resources in Australia have the potential to have a sustained production level of a million barrels a day. We estimate that in two decades, we can be producing in the order of 500,000 a day.
To put that in perspective, Australia currently imports in the order of 350,000 barrels a day.
Back in 2003 the dream of black gold in Gladstone finally ended in tears. The pieces were picked up for a song by Austin Texas-based Sandefer Capital Partners backed by New York’s billionaire Ziff brothers.
Queensland Energy Resources site under construction has been created to pursue the dream (and make heaps of money.) QER reckon they should be able to do it all under the cap of the ETS.
Am I worrying excessively about this? And if we decided we wanted to leave the oil in the ground how much would we have to pay to make them go away?
Ah, I can hear old Archbishop Duhig (?sp) and all those “more that half a century ahead of their time” investors in Roma (S Qld) shale oil muttering I told you so! from their graves!
But hang on a mo, Brian! CSIRO, an OZ org. wouldn’t (Shock! Horror!) be trying to led the way/ world on this, would it?
I thought Howard’s gov made it clear that this was A Bad Thing for Oz! Brendan will not be pleased!
Dee Cee, I’m a fairly unsubtle bloke and I’m not sure I follow all that. It seems though I didn’t make sufficiently clear where QER is planning its operation. While they own the tenements at Gladstone the focus is now on Proserpine, gateway to the Whitsundays as this item from the Mackay Daily Mercury in April shows.
As far as I know there is no shale oil around Rome. The Moonie oil field is inland from Dalby; there has been natural gas from near Roma. I believe there is masses of coal seam gas, mostly near Chinchilla, which is about 100k west of Dalby.
There’s more shale oil in central and northern Queensland and other players, but QER is the big one.
Probably. Shale is the nuclear fusion of the oil industry. Its always just around the corner, but never quite happens. Ask Adam Brandt about shale. I reckon he knows more than just about anyone. Lots of interesting papers to plough through.
If you want to worry, worry about Marn’s plans for coal-to-liquids.
carbonsink - didn’t 60 minutes do a story on a working shale oil mine a few weeks ago, or was that something different?
Brian, I was referring to the concept of shale oil as the alternative not specifically to one small geographic area; although I’m fairly sure there was SO (or at least traces of it) in the Roma area. Somewhere downstairs among the forest of books are a couple on Oz shale oil efforts & at least one on the pre-war/ wartime German.
Shale oil is an alternative, albeit an expensive one; but, I hope, only as a “holding pattern” one, as it was in war-time Germany. SO use is an old technology - like all our current power and machine technologies. Carbon-fuel recycling is a better solution. But the big ask is a very different technology. All of the current ones, even atomic power, are Industrial Revolution (or much earlier) technologies, as are the type of machines they drive.
So where are our James Watts, Rudolf Diesels, Werner von Brauns? Or the Matthew Boultons & Josiah Wedgwoods to turn ideas into an industrial revolution, and the money and status to “sell” the technology to the nation? To inspire the Arkwrights, Fultons & Treverthicks to apply the power source to other industries (in C18 to cloth production, coin stamping & the forerunner of the assembly line, transport)? Where are the new geniuses & champions who think beyond existing technologies?
Every solution I’ve seen to our current problems with CC & oil comes from the past, not the future, even though at least one the future (carbon-residue morphing) already exists (the corpse-to-diamond technology - see Saturday Salon comments).
I think most of us are still trapped in the Limits to Growth (Club of Rome) Frankfurt School, PostModernists etc paradigm/s … all of which have IMO played the same role in C20 & early C21 as the Counter-Reformation did in C16-17. When every “innovative” “revolutionary” solution is Back to the Future, we’ve got problems BigTime!
BTW, it was the bit abut the CSIRO’s global reception - after Brendan & TheOz spent so much of the week damning Rudd’s Gov. for seeking to “lead the way/ world” - that set this Old futurist Biddy’s lips a-twitching.
No that was more promises. The only working shale project in Australia was the Stuart Oil Shale Project which ceased operations in 2004. That might be what they’re trying to revive now, I’m not sure. Certainly there’s no oil being produced from shale in Australia (or anywhere else in the world) ATM on a commercial basis.
I recollect from my time in the archives reseasrching home defence in WW2 that there was an effective shale oil mine in I think, Serena, during WW2. I didn’t take any notes on it, because it wasn’t in my topic area. But it was there.
And anything JWH says is a bad thing for Australia is probably a good thing for the country.
I just remembered there was a kerfuffle about a month ago where Bush wanted to mine shale oil in Colorado amongst other desperation measures. It got them going in the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post for example.
They are also keen on it in Estonia Wikipedia has an article which says:
and
This graph tells the story. But on the face of it shale oil production and use should ramp up again in response to high oil prices.
So, carbonsink, I haven’t had time to follow up your link, but perhaps you could tell us briefly why we shouldn’t worry in the light of shale oil’s history.
carbonsink, one of the problems in the Stuart shale oil project was that they were stinking some of the local residents out who had to live with the constant smell of diesel. They hadn’t solved the problems of local environmental impacts. I think there was also a problem in scaling the technology up.
I think QER have that one on the backburner, not wanting to piss the Gladstone locals off again, although the claim now is that with superior technology there shouldn’t be a problem.
In a more innocent time I actually had shares in SPP which I bought for about $4. The broker reckoned they should go to $80 with the price of oil as it was then. I simply wasn’t aware of the environmental problems. It all became very cringeworthy. I baled out after listening to a Greenpeace report of an interview with the Canadian partners, who indicated that they would get a better return for effort with tar sands.
My broker reckoned that was all greenie BS, so I sold mine for about $2.20 from memory against his advice and he kept his.
I live in Gladstone, which is about 15-20kms from the shale oil plant.
I remember there was a huge kerfuffle with residents in the little communities in the vicinity of the plant. I got out of my car once, about half a k from the plant when it was in operation - the stench drove us straight back inside. There were also supposedly incidents of wildlife dying.
If they can ever solve the environmental problems, it might get back on it’s feet again one day.
Long story, too long to repeat here, but I’ve emailed you some stuff.
Currently no shale is mined in the world to produce oil apart from Petrobas in Brazil and the quantities are tiny. The bulk of the world’s shale is mined in Estonia, pulverised and burned for electricity generation, like a poor man’s coal.
The point is, shale is an extremely poor quality hydrocarbon. Pretty much anything is better, including tar sands and brown coal. The EROEI ranges from less than one (meaning you have to put in more energy than you get out) to around 4 for Shell’s in situ process, which is yet to be proven commercially. Compare this to an EROEI of 100+ for the early days of “Texas Tea” which literally gushed out of the ground in a convenient liquid form.
Its because you need to invest so much energy with all of these so called “unconventional” sources of oil (shale, tar sands, CTL etc) that they are unlikely to ever supply more than a few million barrels per day (out of 85mbpd currently consumed). Regardless of the greenhouse implications, these technologies will be extremely difficult to scale.
I suggest you read Robert Rapiers’s shale articles, Dyni’s “Geology and Resources of Some World Oil-Shale Deposits” at the USGS (which is the source of your graph, and Everything at Adam Brandt’s website.
I worry about tar sands and CTL, they will be exploited well before shale.
Here’s a story in today’s Guardian about the Alberta tar sands. This is a huge operation, many years in advance of anything happening with shale, and its pumping out stupendous amounts of GHGs. Despite this, they still produce just 687,000 barrels per day of synthetic crude (the 1.3mbpd quoted in the article is actually how much bitumen they produce).
If you want to worry, worry about the Alberta tar sands or China investing in Coal to Liquids.
Brian wrote: “As far as I know there is no shale oil around Rome.”
But there might be, Brian. And I know just the bloke to go searching for it. He always wanted to be an exploration geologist, but he became diverted into a different career direction. His name is George Pell. Get the shale oil boys to give him a call in about a fortnight from now. I think he’s been sniffing round Rome for a few years….
Bugger me, I did write Rome instead of Roma.
carbonsink, you’ve been impressively diligent. I’ll still worry about shale, but you’re right, there’s plenty of other stuff to worry about.
Today via Newsradio I heard a program done by the BBC in the One planet series on the Qld coal industry. It provides $3 billion a year to the Qld treasury they said. But they also said it only has about 10 years to run. The problem then will be not a fall in demand but competition from every other country in the world that has coal to dig up and flog off.
Very depressing. Depressing also to hear Rudd say the other day in Mackay how enthusiastic he is for the coal industry.
Just a bit of clarification for readers & posters re the Stuart Shale Oil experiment.
A major by-product of the processing of the Stuart Shale Oil was a chemical amalgamation called “Polymethylene Polyphenyl Isocyanate” which can, under various temperature & other conditions turn into a number of hazardous substances such as “dioxins’.
Shale Oil exploitation also increases “greenhouse gases”.
{“Exploiting oil shales also yields significantly higher emissions of greenhouse gases than the production of conventional oil resources.}
{The production and use of both oil shale and tar sands have significant adverse environmental
impacts in terms of greenhouse gases, air pollution and waste material.”
West Australian Government Transport Energy Strategy Committee, June 2003}
{ If expanded, the Stuart Project would be a significant source of highly toxic dioxins,
which have been linked to cancer, reproductive problems and immune system defects}
[link]
I hope they leave the stuff in the ground and go and look for other non polluting forms of energy.
Here’s a bit more on Polymethylene polyphenyl isocyanate.
{Toxicity to humans, including carcinogenicity, reproductive and developmental toxicity, neurotoxicity, and acute toxicity. }
[link]
No wonder the people living down wind of the Gladstone plant were getting sick.
Strange how no one has questioned the hysterics of the $8 petrol prediction.
Imagine what the average salary will be in 10 years time and the predicted price of petrol suddenly looks altogether reasonable, quite cheap in fact - lower than today’s price, most likely.
The proportion of household income going into petrol today is lower than it was ten years ago.
The hysterics about the price of petrol is akin to the false and ignorant belief that interest rates under Howard were “low” compared to the big nasty of the Hawke/Keating era - yet, as a percentage of their expenses people in Oz were paying less on their mortgage while being hit with an 18% interest rate than they do today, paying only a fraction of that interest rate combined with much higher (inflation adjusted) incomes.
Fairy [17]:
Slightly off topic but …. I did a few sums before moving to this part of the bush and the cut-off point for living here in very frugal comfort - assuming the pension and a few specific basic costs stayed pretty much the same - was $7/litre. This was when petrol was well below $1/Litre. $7/Litre?? It will never get that high - or so I was told. Motor fuel is stll way below my pessimistic guess so I feel no compulsion just yet to pack up and head back to an urban area and join all the homeless people there.
No, no hysterics at all about $8/Litre - at today’s wages and costs-of-living - but I wonder how many others have done rough and thoroughly rational calculations about how to adjust their life-style for maximum enjoyment in an $8/Litre [or higher] environment?
If $8/Litre never happens, I’ll be delighted to be shown as wrong.
Graham, I drive a ‘93 gas guzzling Falcon ute. The body type suits me very well. I work about 3 days a week on properties out at Upper Brookfield with a round trip of about 40k. At $8 it would cost me over $50 per trip. I’d be looking at other options at about $2 per litre. It’s currently over $2 in NZ I understand and approaching $2.50 in Europe. We are about mid-range with the Americans whingeing at $1.12 last I heard.
I haven’t read the CSIRO report but I heard one of the authors stressing it was a worst case. Nevertheless it seems clear that our behaviour will be altered fairly drastically irrespective of whatever the ETS does to the price.
Hi,
I’m currently making a documentary about QER’s McFarlane oil shale project. I’m putting together all the research and as you all know it is overwhelming. I still can’t believe the Govt would allow this to go ahead anywhere in the country let alone the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef.
I’m looking for contacts, people who lived near the Gladstone project, experts, pro shale spokespeople, anything and everything. I have already looked through the links in this blog so thanks for that. If anyone has any ideas or anything new I’d love to hear about it.
You can also contact me directly at hchogan@gmail.com.
Thanks!
Hi Hayley
I can give you contacts for this. Go to [link] to find out about this issue and contact Toni Randall on randall.earthmoving@bigpond.com as she is the powerhouse dynamo behind this campaign.
I am the president of RAA in Bowen just 70kms North of Proserpine and we are facing one of the worlds largest aluminium refinerys(Chinese Govt owned) to be set up here on our nationally significant wetlands on the Great Barrier Reef at the top of the Whitsundays. Go to [link] to find out about this.
This is a horrendous situation and the Labour Govt is turning Qld into a Quarry State and destroying communities over to foreign mining companies. It makes you want to cry! Looking forward to further communique
Maria
maria, the last link is broken!
I think it was the Mackay Conservation Group you meant.
“Beautiful one day, buggered the next”
Very apt!
Your broker’s shares in SPP are now worth $0.12 each, having fallen steadily from the $2.20 you sold them at!
Queensland Health actually described the plant as “a public health nuisance”!
This is a major problem for shale oil because you are going to get a number of fairly significant environmental impacts if you exploit it no matter what technology you use because of the very nature of the fuel, although different technologies might be slightly less worse than others. For example, it has a high carbon content which becomes CO2 when the oil is extracted.
They also have publicly said that developing shale oil “certainly won’t be adding to Australia’s carbon footprint”, which is laughable. All the figures that I’ve seen show that shale oil emits more greenhouse pollution than conventional oil.
In the case of the technology SPP were using at the Stuart Project the production of shale oil produced almost four times as much. SPP were aiming to reduce it to 5% below conventional oil, but even if they had been successful (which appeared unlikely) the size of the shale oil resource is so large (25+ billion barrels in Qld alone, with other deposits in NT, SA & Tas currently being explored) that developing it all, as SPP then & QER now want to do, would still greatly increase Australia’s greenhouse emissions. This at a time when scientists such as the CSIRO say we need to reduce them 60-80% by 2050.
Shale oil is a step in completely & utterly the wrong direction.
Seems no one has yet found a way to make it truly viable anyway, and perhaps never will.
Oil shale is something of a misnomer - it is neither oil nor shale but solid rock, impregnated with a waxy substance called kerogen. It obviously cannot be pumped, it must be mined, transported, milled, mixed with other substances, heated and condensed. The Energy Return On Energy Invested is extremely marginal. And then there are the environmental concerns.
There may be a further irony (I only speculate here, I am uncertain) in that the industry may not benefit from spiralling oil prices as liquid crude does, because the mining and transporting are themselves possibly so petroleum-intensive that input costs balloon as oil prices do, making the whole excercise something of a no-brainer.
On Sunday the Queensland Government announced a 20 year moratorium on shale oil mining at Proserpine, where Australia’s largest shale oil deposit is located, & that no new shale oil mines will be permitted in the state. It will research “whether oil shale deposits can be used in an environmentally acceptable way”, which is likely to find it can’t given the problems that exist with it.
Small scale demonstration plants will only be permitted on the Stuart shale oil deposit near Gladstone, where the failed Stuart Project was located, if their technology passes “strict environmental standards”.
See [link]
Thanks, Gareth, we’ve noted this development on a new thread.