The Black Gold Rush

June 16, 2008 — -- With the world eagerly consuming 86 million barrels of oil a day and the nation's gas prices averaging more than $4 a gallon, inventors and the oil industry are searching for ways to quench the insatiable appetite for black gold.

Dreams of alternative fuel solutions may be appealing, but the reality is that it will still be years before many of those technologies will have major impact on oil and gas consumption.

Oil Shale The Next Big Thing?

At least one self-taught inventor suspects the thirst for precious fuel could be satisfied by rocks in the form of oil shale.

Entrepreneur Byron Merrell said oil shale, which contains hydrocarbons that through distillation yield petroleum, could answer the nation's increasing gas prices at some point in the future.

"All we are doing is finishing what Mother Nature didn't do," Merrell said.

Oil shale actually is a precursor to oil and the pre-historic organic sediment sits under much of Utah and Colorado. A Rand Corporation study estimated the sedimentary rock in the area where Utah borders Colorado and Wyoming holds about 800 billion barrels -- three times the size of Saudi Arabia's oil reserves.

And it may be enough to fuel the United States for the next century — if and only if — new technology can turn it into oil.

The rants over rising gas prices have brought a resurgence of discussion of the oil shale idea, which was tested a generation ago, but abandoned when the price of crude oil plunged. Now the prospect looks more intriguing, but the problem remains that it takes more than a ton of rocks to make a single barrel of oil using the current process.

Even digging and removing the oil shale would require a gargantuan, expensive mining operation. For an oil hungry economy, the process just may not be quick enough.

"It's not a quick fix, unfortunately," said Randy Udall, co-founder of the USA Association for the Study of Peak Oil, a network of scientists that studies the rise and fall of oil production. "We might be producing 100,000 barrels 10 years from now."

But for a country that already uses 100,000 barrels every seven minutes, the wait could be too long, according to Udall.

While Merrell admits the limitations of oil shale, he still maintains it could be the solution for consumers.

"It's not the answer to all the world's problems, but it may be the answer to one. We think it is," Merrell said.

Other Energy Alternatives

Shell Oil has a different idea about how to get oil from the shale. The company is experimenting with what it calls the In situ Conversion Process, in which a giant section of shale is heated in the ground for several years, while moisture is blocked out with an ammonia frost wall.

The heat liquifies the oil, and then it can be sucks it out of the ground, Shell officials say. Yet even this process takes an enormous amount of energy. It highlights the problem with alternative energies — the scale required to make a difference is overwhelming.

For example, a recent Environment America study said the nation could power itself with solar panels but it would require 10,000 square miles of them to do so — enough to stretch across Kansas one and a half times.

More conventional solutions to the energy problem include mining for undiscovered oil in Eastern Montana and North Dakota, where there may be several billions worth of the good stuff.

Also, Canada has an area called the Tar Sands, which has sand rich with oil and already yields 1.25 million barrels of oil per day.

But experts contend the biggest and quickest way to squelch the energy dependency is by increasing the efficiency of cars and other machines that burn gas.

"We could save 10 times more energy simply by improving our automobiles two miles per gallon," Udall said. "Energy efficiency is a better bang for the buck."