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 http://statements.cabinet.qld.gov.au/MMS/StatementDisplaySingle.aspx?id=59819

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.

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.

Your broker’s shares in SPP are now worth $0.12 each, having fallen steadily from the $2.20 you sold them at!

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.

Queensland Health actually described the plant as “a public health nuisance”!

If they can ever solve the environmental problems, it might get back on it’s feet again one day.

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.

QER reckon they should be able to do it all under the cap of the ETS.

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.

“Beautiful one day, buggered the next”

Very apt!

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!

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.

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.

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.

{Toxicity to humans, including carcinogenicity, reproductive and developmental toxicity, neurotoxicity, and acute toxicity. }
http://www.pesticideinfo.org/Detail_Chemical.jsp?Rec_Id=PC34157

No wonder the people living down wind of the Gladstone plant were getting sick.

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}

http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:Vjgem7p_LTQJ:www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/australia/resources/fact-sheets/climate-change/stuart-oil-shale-project.pdf+Stuart+project&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=au&client=firefox-a

I hope they leave the stuff in the ground and go and look for other non polluting forms of energy.

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.

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….

If you want to worry, worry about the Alberta tar sands or China investing in Coal to Liquids.

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

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.

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.

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.

They are also keen on it in Estonia Wikipedia has an article which says:

Oil shale is used for oil production in Estonia, Brazil, and China; for power generation in Estonia, China, Israel, and Germany; for cement production in Estonia, Germany, and China; and by chemical industries in China, Estonia, and Russia.

and

Although the Estonian and Chinese oil shale industries continued to grow after World War II, most other countries abandoned their projects due to high processing costs and the availability of cheaper petroleum. Following the 1973 oil crisis, world production of oil shale reached a peak of 46 million tonnes in 1980 before falling to about 16 million tonnes in 2000, due to competition from cheap conventional petroleum in the 1980s.

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.