TIGHT OIL                                       Site Contents       Restoring Our Oil Independence
Chapter 2, Page 1: Mitigating "Peak Oil" With Shale Oil        <  Chapter  >
Categories: Shale Oil,

About Energy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy

The amount of heat energy in a wood match is about one "British Thermal Unit" (BTU).  A BTU will raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit.
The System International unit for energy is the "Joule."    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule    One BTU equals 1055 joules.

Energy: The Master Resource

The cost of 1 million BTU of heat in their common market units.
(In the United States, February 2012.)

The High Cost Of Oil Is Keeping The Cost Of Oil High

To make a long story as short as possible, the United States has about 2 trillion barrels of non-conventional oil locked up in shale.  That's about 100,000 days worth (or 274 years worth) at today's 20 million barrels per day (or 230 barrels per second).  This web site is suggesting using the heat from a very cheap-to-run high temperature reactor, the thorium fueled molten salt reactor, to both free up and upgrade this oil to vehicle fuels. 

Each individual chapter on this web site looks at a different aspect of how the USA could regain its oil independence, achieving it with abundant, low cost domestic non-conventional shale oil and synthetic oil feedstocks such as coal, natural gas, garbage, sewage, and algae.  Getting out from under the chronic distractions of the "Oil Cloud" should do a lot to get us back on the track of thinking clearly again.

Energy: The Master Resource

Energy Economics 101: Without energy, you can't make anything happen.  That includes obtaining more energy.  Below is a chart showing how much energy it takes to obtain different kinds of energies.  This is "Energy Economics" and is called the "Ratio of Energy Returned on Energy Invested" or EROI.

For example, the chart at right says coal gives you get 80 units of energy for each unit of energy invested in obtaining coal.  An excellent payback.

Since this is being written by an engineer who was educated more than 50 years ago in the United States, the unit of energy being used at that time was the "British Thermal Unit" or BTU. 

A BTU is about as much energy as the heat you get by burning a wood match down until it burns your fingers.  Today, the SI unit, "Joule," is used by the kids in college.  You can Google Joule to find out how it converts to BTUs.

Coal produces about 10,000 BTUs per pound.  So a pound of coal invested in coal mining will pay you back about 800,000 BTUs.  An excellent payback indeed.

Check out the EROI on recent oil discoveries.  Perhaps 8.

Check out the cost of energy in the table below.  Oil is 9 times more expensive per BTU than coal.  Not good.

Oil is usually used to obtain oil, so that drives up the cost of oil. There are also much lower costs in preparing coal for market compared with oil refining. So you get a lot less energy for your energy dollar at the pump.

The way to get the most energy for your money is to obtain the most expensive energy with the cheapest energy and prepare it for market with the cheapest energy.

This would mean obtaining and refining oil using thorium energy.

This is exactly what this web site is about.