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Chapter 7, Page 1:  Extracting Shale Oil         <  Chapter  >         Page 2  >
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Extracting Shale Oil Using Thorium Heat
Current estimates of the Green River oil shale basin are between 400 and 1,500 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

Very long heating rods and oil wells are intermingled. (Image from RAND Report MG414)  The heating rods are left on two or three years until the shale oil is at 700°F.  Then the shale oil can be pumped and processed much like pumpable oil.  This same heating process frees up a very large amount of natural gas at the same time.  An "Ice Wall" is frozen around the heated area to protect the environment and to keep the oil in.  As you might expect, heating a several hundred foot thick layer of oil shale a thousand feet under a 12 acre by 12 acre field takes a very large amount of heat.

The Shell test site.

The "ice wall" in the ground to keep the environment uncontaminated and to hold in the oil and gas as it is being freed up by heating.  Ice walls are common, being used for construction sites.  It is unknown how well this will work on a large scale, decades-long recovery.

"Must Read" Reference Sources below:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/2008/RAND_TR580.pdf     (About 100 pages, 700 k download)
http://fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/publications/Pubs-NPR/40010-373.pdf  (Excellent brief, good Images)
http://oilshalegas.com/greenriveroilshale.html   An excellent what's there, who's there, web site to get you up to speed.
http://www.gastechno.com/   Natural gas-to-methane for "M85" vehicle fuel equipment manufacturer site.

This web site is about the leveraging of thorium's almost free very hot heat. We would have a 1,300F molten salt reactor - 2.5 gigaWatt (thermal or smaller) - running on thorium somewhere in the remote Green River shale oil basin. Some of the reactor's heat would be used to drive a sulfur-iodine water splitter to make large volumes of hydrogen for upgrading kerogen to gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.  The reactor would also be driving a Stirling hot air electricity generating turbine to power the entire remote shale oil facility. Using heat from the reactor, both shale's kerogen and some methane (natural gas) would be extracted. The methane could be converted to liquid vehicle M85 fuel by using Gastechno type equipment or both liquids could be further upgraded and refined into vehicle ready fuels.

The refinery would be completely "Greenhouse Gas" clean, i.e., nothing would be burned to make electricity.  CO2, H2S, and other waste streams would remain captured and disposed of properly.

How cheap is heat from thorium?

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

How much heat from thorium is available?

The chart above shows where all the world's energy comes from, the areas of the energies (center) represent their relative amounts in heat.  The flows show how the energies are being used.  "P" is conventional pumpable oil. 
Your author added the thorium energy and non-conventional oils, "B" for bitumen oil, "S" for shale oil, and "EH" for extra heavy oil (sludge). 
Oil and M85 methanol can also be made economically by synthesis from coal, natural gas, and biomass such as garbage, sewage, algae.
Click on the image for a downloadable pdf of a higher resolution printable copy.

Just look at all the energy we could get from thorium. 

Fracking:

(Above) "Fracking" technology: Horizontal directional drilling guided by 3D seismic imaging and opening.  The job is completed by hydraulic fracturing. 
Now that fracking technology has become well developed and is producing predictable results in gas shale, it is likely that fracking will be used in conjunction with in-situ shale oil extraction to maximize yields.

Not only can oil companies see where the best spots are, now they can get there with their directional drills, use hydraulics to get some elbow room, and use as much thorium heat as necessary to retort in-situ.   It's gonna happen!

General Background Information About Extracting Shale Oil Follows

Pumpable oil recovery is "In Situ."  Very desirable since it leaves a very small environmental "footprint."

Thorium heat can provide in situ recovery without resorting to low-yield fracking or destructive, messy mining.

"Fracking" is a very sophisticated recovery technology that took 30 years to develop and demands very advanced oil field technology.

High yield in situ without fracking (below).

You can see this calls for large amounts of heat and electricity.

Shell in situ ice wall test project, above ground.  Notice the oil pumps? 
The ice wall was to protect an aquifer that was above the oil shale.

(Below) Similar American Shale Oil Company in situ concept.  Red are steam lines, oil extraction lines are green.
Test wells and echo imaging assure the shale oil holding strata are well-known.

(Below) Radio frequency heating.  Think microwave oven.