Non-Conventional Oil

As mentioned preciously, with conventional oil running out fast and prices for crude oil increasing, the society is quickly trying to find new methods of obtaining energy. One of such methods is extraction of the same crude oil raw product from non-conventional oil. The difference between conventional and non-conventional oil is that crude oil is much harder to recover from non-conventional oil requiring much higher costs both financially and environmentally so the question remains as to whether it is worth it. The other method of obtaining energy is renewable and nuclear energy, which I shall discuss further on in my blog with all implications and advantages. I have already written a blog post about one of the non-conventional oil recovery methods from shale oil in detail and this is a more a more general post about other non-convectional oil that is out there and is being actively researched. Non-conventional oil includes oil from oil shale, oil sands, GTLs (gas to liquids), tight oil and biofuels. I shall also look at biofuels in more detail in my next post but I decided to do a more general post about all other types of non-conventional oils first because biofuel is in between being classed as non-conventional oil and renewable energy. My blog after non-conventional oil is going to explore renewable energy so I thought putting a post about biofuel in between non-convectional oil discussion and other biofuels was a good idea.

Oil sands are extra heavy crude oil or crude bitumen that is trapped in unconsolidated sandstone. These are still hydrocarbons thus forms of crude oil yet they are extremely dense and viscous making exrraction difficult, expensive and generally not possible using conventional oil extraction techniques. Some deposits, which are shallow enough, such as those found in Anthabasca oil sands can be extracted using conventional oil extraction techniques however most must be recovered using strip mining or the oil made to flow into wells using complex in-situ technologies. The more complex methods require more energy and water for the recovery of oil sands thus increasing costs yet again both monetary and environmentally. Furthermore the deposits may be contaminated by heavy metals such as nickel and vanadium as well as sulfur which mean separation after extraction is required increasing the costs of recovery. The deposits are found worldwide although the two most important, biggest and easiest to recover deposits are Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada and the Orinoco heavy oil belt in Venezuela. Regardless of all its disadvantages, oil sands production is projected to increase very singnificnatly in the next 20 years although Canadians warn that the production rates are very slow and insignificant on the global crude oil production scales (Miller, 2013).

Tight oil is crude oil that is contained in petroleum formations of low permeability- often shale or tight sandstone. Tight oil is not the same as oil shale which is produced synthetically from oil shale. Tight oil requires hydraulic fracturing and often uses the same horizontal well technology as that which is used in shale gas production. One of the problems with tight oil is that its formations are heterogeneous and hence they vary widely over small distances thus it is very hard to predict the amount of oil that can be recovered from one well let alone a reservoir which potentially makes investments into these projects unattractive. Furthermore the production of tight oil requires at least 15-20% natural gas in the reservoir pore space to be able to drive the oil towards the borehole out the reservoir. It is located all over the world in such countries as Russia, USA, China, Australia, Argentina, Libya, Venezuela, Mexico, Pakistan, Canada and Indonesia thus could present a solution for each country’s own recovery of this product when conventional oil is exhausted. Some studies and news forums suggest that a $150 billion investment is going to be made into the tight oil industry in North America in 2015 (Mills, 2008).

GTLs and as well as CTLs (coal-to-liquid) are already being produced in small volumes as very expensive substitutes to conventional crude oil. They are expected to increase the contribution to the global energy font in the future. The four main conversion technologies used for the production of unconventional oil this way are Fischer-Tropsch process, Mobil Process, Belgius process and Karrick process. However natural gas requires high transportation costs thus many known yet remote fields are not yet being developed but the on-site conversion to liquid fuels are making energy recovered this way available under current economic conditions and large plants for coal to liquid conversions are currently being built in China. There are also some plants where gas-to-liquid conversion occurs found in such countries as Malaysia, South Africa and Qatar. Although the processes are highly inefficient in both scenarios and very large quantities of coal and gas are required to provide significant contributions to tatal liquid supply. Also environmental concerns remain a worry as the conversions generate high amounts of CO2, which is then released into the atmosphere. CO2 is a GHG and hence its emissions have significant impacts on global warming.

Thus overall it seems clear that so far no technology is available to make recovery of oil and energy from non-conventional oil nor economically profitable nor environmentally friendly. No significant research has been performed yet as it would require a lot of investment so it is unlikely that these methods will take of on global scales any time in the foreseeable future until humanity gets desperate to obtain more oil and thus non-conventional oil can not currently be considered as a viable alternative to the conventional oil and energy we obtain from it.