Stuff You Should Know - How Oil Shale Works

Episode Date: June 24, 2008

Oil shale is a term for oil trapped in rock, rather than existing in liquid form. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the nature of oil shale. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like, he was a god. Listen to The Turning Room of Mirrors on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by Consumer Guide Automotive. We make our buying easier. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here at HowStuffWorks.com. With me is the lovely and effervescent Charles Bryant fellow staff writer. How are you, Chuck? I'm great. I'm effervescent and it feels good. Good. I'm glad you're feeling good, Chuck. So, Chuckers, have you heard of peak oil? I have, Josh. You know, how can you not work

in here? You're always running around the office screaming about it. Well, you know, I feel pretty passionate about it. You should tell everyone. Okay, well, let me tell you again what peak oil is. It's basically the point in time where we stop finding oil and start running out. And the inevitable decline begins because oil is, after all, a non-renewable resource, contrary to some of the heated opinions of a few of our readers who believe that it actually is renewable. I haven't figured out how, but most people believe that petroleum is finite. So, we're eventually going to run out and what happens then is a mass chaos. Exactly. Exactly. We're all in big, big trouble. Our global economy runs on oil quite literally and we need it to function. Luckily, there's all

sorts of people who are working on alternative energy, whether it be biofuels, wind power, solar power, hydrogen. Who cares? We need to get off of oil. Even Bush, the Texas oil man, thinks America is addicted to oil. Yeah, America. Exactly. So, Chuck, while we're looking for new forms of energy, in the meantime, the conventional oil reserves, which are like, you know, the stuff we pump out of the ground, think Jagd Clampett shooting at the rabbit and missing it. Right, Daniel Day Lewis pulling up oil. Exactly. I will eat your ice cream. Right. It's not ice cream, actually. It's he'll drink your milkshake. I haven't seen it. Is it good? Yeah. I don't know. Well, overrated. Okay. So, but that's conventional oil, right? Yeah. All right. So,

there's also unconventional forms of oil, right, which is, you know, pretty much anything but just conventionally pumped petroleum. One of them is oil shale. Yeah. Oil shale is actually, it's kind of a cool, cool thing. It's really the best way to most the simplest way to describe it is that it's oil and that's trapped in rock and it never had the chance really to become liquid petroleum. It's sort of cut short before that last step and it was stripped of its potential. It was, sadly. And so, it lies underneath the earth, just waiting for someone to go down and find a way to extract it, which is actually possible. There's people that are working on that now. One of the big problems with extracting oil shale, though, is you have to bring up this rock

from the earth and the rock is the byproduct. So, you're left with, you know, I don't know, what was the statistic, how many tons of rock? Seven. Yeah. Seven tons of rock to make one gallon of petroleum. And I'm not 100% sure that's the actual statistic, but there is a significant amount of rock left over. Yeah, I was exaggerating, but it's a lot of rock and they don't know what to do with it and that's one of the issues. No. I mean, the best you can do is use it under overpasses to discourage homeless people from setting up camp there, which is really about as cruel a use of rock as there is. It is. But I think you know about the shell oil company. Yeah, they're onto something. It's called in situ retorting. Retorting is basically the

process of extracting the oil from the shale through heat. Right. They figured out that they can stick these rods down there and heat up these oil shale deposits in the ground. Right, so they don't have the rock byproduct. Right. The rocks never moved. So the carrage in, which is the oil that's found inside, is extracted and pumped out and the rock is left situated. Right. So no mining. They don't have to mine the rock and that's another step to the process. That is. That is. It cuts out like a really, really big expensive step. And so if shell can crack this code, which it looks like they're going to be able to do, they have projects underway, it would make America the new Saudi Arabia as far as oil shale went. That's right,

because of the Green River formation, which no one's probably heard of that. It sounds like some sort of neo-Nazi environmental group. What it actually is, it's 17,000 square miles of oil shale that's under the United States. Yeah, it's out west. It's near the four corner states. Just waiting to be tapped. Yeah, and we've known all about it for a while, but interest really began around 1973 with the oil embargo against the U.S. by OPEC when we realized how dependent we are on foreign oil. So with this interest in oil shale generated, and then it waned because oil prices went back down and now with oil prices up as high as they are, interest is getting up again. There's plenty more to talk about as far as oil shale goes,

and you can find out more by reading what's oil shale on HowStuffWorks.com. by its most influential figure, George Balanjean. He used to say, what are you looking at, dear? You can't see you, only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like he was a god. Listen to the turning room of mirrors on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being

robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.