Oil shale

“ The upper is known as the oil-shale group, and is over 3,000 feet in thickness, and contains, in its highest part, beds of coal, usually of inferior quality, and, farther down, about six main seams of oil-shale, inter-stratified with beds of sandstone, shale, fire-clay, marl, and estuarine limestones. ”

“ To develop the oil shale industry to a point where it could supply anything like the amount of oil now derived from oil pools would mean the building of great plants, including towns, railroads, and other equipment, equivalent to the plants of the coal mining industry. ”

“ The value of this oil shale will depend upon the cheapness of its reduction, and this must be greatly lessened by the value of by-products before it can compete with coal or the oil from wells. There is every reason to believe, however, that some day the production of oil from shale will be a great and a permanent industry. And the country could make no better immediate investment than to give a large appropriation for the development of an economical shale-reducing plant. ”

“ The use of petroleum as railroad, marine, and industrial fuel is destined to increase enormously in the next decade.
Although an important contributor to the oil-supply of Great Britain, the shale-oil industry has received little attention in recent years outside of Scotland. Investigations by the United States Geological Survey have demonstrated that the United States contains vast deposits of oil shale in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Nevada, much of which will average higher in oil content than the Scottish shale. ”

“ Second, we should expand American oil production by tapping into the extraordinary potential of oil shale. Oil shale is a type of rock that can produce oil when exposed to heat and other processes. One major deposit in the Rocky Mountain West alone would equal current annual oil imports for more than a hundred years. ”

“ R. W. Ells, LL.D., F.R.S.C., in the Geological Survey report on “The Bitumen or Oil Shales of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, also on the Oil Shale Industry of Scotland,” says:—“The celebrated tar-sands of Athabaska river in Northern Alberta may at some time furnish material for distillation, since all attempts to find oil by boring have hitherto been unsuccessful. These tar-sands have been well described by Doctor Bell, and other officers of the Geological Survey who have visited the area. ”

“ As regards the circumstances favoring the accumulation of petroleum, it appears that there should be a shale or other fine-grained rock forming to protect the organic matter during its deposition, a porous stratum above to be penetrated by the hydrocarbons resulting from the decomposition of the organic matter, and finally another shale or slate above, to prevent the further escape of the volatile products. If the sand-rock which usually forms the porous stratum is filled with fissures, large quantities of oil may collect in these. ”

“ The wells of Oil Creek penetrate strata immediately overlying the Huron shale, and the oil is obtained from fissured and porous sheets of sand stone of the Portage and Chemung groups, which lie just over the Huron and offer convenient reservoirs for the oil it furnishes. It is a well-known fact that wells sunk into the black shale yield no considerable quantity of oil, unless from strata resting upon it. ”

“ Occasionally in passing through the shale, small fissures in the rock are passed through, with circumstances indicating the presence of a stratum or vein of water, as at such times the sand accumulated in boring all disappears, leaving the bits clean and bright. At other times small veins or cavities of petroleum are pierced, the product of which rises to the surface of the well, and indicates its presence by appearing in the sand pump. In the earlier stages of the business this 'show of oil,' as it was termed, was considered most favorable to ultimate success ”

“ Efforts already begun to develop methods for the recovery of shale oil on a commercial [5] scale in the United States will undoubtedly result in the establishment of a shale-oil industry in this country within the next two or three years. The future growth of this industry will depend largely on the rapidity of the decline in the domestic production of petroleum. ”

“ From the western end of the hill thousands of tons of a peculiar shale have been manufactured into paving-brick, the hardest and toughest in America. A million dollars would not pay for the oil taken from the hill that found no takers at fifteen-hundred! ”

“ This may furnish a reason for the fact, noticed by the oil men, that fresh water has a much more injurious effect than salt in clogging a well. No oil-bearing sand rock is free from laminæ of shale, and when fresh water gets down into the sand, the water must, as the experiments show, rapidly break up the shale, setting free fine particles, which soon are driven along into the minute interstices of the sand rock, plastering it up and injuring the well.—Engineering and Mining Journal. ”

“ If the sandstones were open to the air, or if fissures extended from them to the surface, the oil has escaped to the surface and evaporated into the air. But in those cases where the sandstone (or other permeable rocks) was covered by an impervious layer, like a dense shale or clay, the oil was confined below the covering layer of rock. Crude oil is lighter than water; so that when natural gas, petroleum and water were all present in the rocks, the gas lies on top, the petroleum next, and the water underneath. ”

“ The "oil-sand group" of the southwestern district is composed of three sandstone members, separated by intervals containing coal-seams, slate, and shale; but the second of these three members—the Mahoning sandstone—is the principal repository of petroleum in the southwestern district. The "oil-sands" of the western district are also three in number. The first sand of this group yields a heavy lubricating oil, 30° to 35° gravity; the second, an oil about 40° gravity; the third, a light oil, 45° to 50° gravity. This third sand is the most productive, and supplies most of the oil of commerce. ”

“ It could, nevertheless, be made to yield gasoline, fuel oil, and other products if suitably processed.
The shale strata generally the richest in oil are found above coal seams, are black, and are sometimes called slate by coal miners. They are rarely more than 3 feet thick, but they extend over large areas. ”

“ Australia can boast of very large areas of shales: some deposits have been operated for several years, but others are still awaiting development. From a variety of causes, however, the shale-oil industry of Australia has never been set upon a profitable footing. The Commonwealth Oil Corporation some years ago set out to accomplish much, but the only thing which it seemed to do with energy was to sail to destruction. 121 Its failure cannot be said to have been due to any absence of the material it set out to treat for petroleum, for at every turn enormous quantities were opened up. ”

“ Such shales are now mined only in Scotland and in France to a relatively small extent, but there are immense reserves of these shales in various parts of the world which are likely to be drawn upon when commercial conditions require it. In the United States alone it is estimated that the oil shales are a potential source of oil in amounts far greater than all the natural petroleum of this hemisphere. ”

“ As we have stated, products analogous to those derived from cannel coal are obtained by the destructive distillation of bituminous shales and schists, and lignites or brown coals. On the Continent the production of shale oils has of late years declined considerably, owing to their unsuccessful competition, in point of price, with the American petroleum oils. The oil obtained from bituminous shale or from coal is generally of higher specific gravity than that procured from petroleum; it is deeper in colour, and not so pleasant in smell. ”

“ The decay continued until the number of active concerns in the Scottish shale-oil industry could be counted on one’s fingers.
The industry exists to-day simply as a result of the great improvements which have been made in the retorting of the shale, by which larger quantities of products are produced—including ammonia. It is thus able to withstand foreign competition. 136
To-day, it is estimated that nearly 4,000,000 tons of the Scottish shales are treated every twelve months by the several operating oil companies. ”

“ We may fairly claim these as coal products, although the shales used contain much mineral matter, the carbon averaging about 20 per cent., the hydrogen three per cent., the nitrogen 0·7, and the ash about 67 per cent. The shales worked are approximately of the same age as true coal, i.e. Carboniferous. The Scotch companies are distilling about two million tons of shale per annum, this quantity producing about sixty million gallons of crude oil, and giving employment to over 10,000 hands. ”

“ The French shale-oil industry is much older than that of Scotland, but has made far less progress, the amount of shale distilled in 1897 being 200,000 tons, as compared with 2,259,000 tons in Scotland. ”

“ The richer kinds yield about 30 gallons of oil per ton of shale, and in some cases as much as 40 gallons, but the higher yield is usually obtained at the expense of the solid paraffin and of the quality of the heavy oils. The inferior shales yield about 18 gallons of oil, but a much larger amount of sulphate of ammonia. ”

“ In appearance the crude shale oil resembles butter, and so viscid is it, that a match, cinder, or even a red-hot poker fails to ignite it. Even in those localities where the cheapness of coal would equalise the cost of the two substances, it is yet claimed for the shale oil, that economy results from the comparatively little labour required in connection with its employment; an immense gain is moreover made in space for storing purposes ”

“ The rise and progress of the mineral-oil industry are too well known to need any special comment. In this and other countries, the supply of hydro-carbon oils, both from shale-beds and springs, has of late years received remarkable development. ”

“ The people of Fair Haven have a superintendent of streets to whom they can point with pride.”
Dr. J. W. James, of Brady’s Bend, who drilled some of the first wells around Oil City and was largely interested in the Armstrong and Bradford fields, in 1858 had a plant near Freeport for extracting coal-oil from shale. At a cost of twelve cents a gallon it produced crude-petroleum, which the company refined partially and sold at a dollar to one-twenty-five. The oil obtained from the rocks by drilling and that distilled from the shale were the same chemically. Dr. ”

“ Soft rock, with a provoking tendency to cave-in, and artesian water, impregnated with sulphur and found just above the oil-sand, rendered drilling a difficult task. The best well in the bunch produces from a rock five-hundred feet down, while the deepest is sixteen-hundred feet and the sand is fifty feet thick. Oil-basins on Caspar Creek, Powder River, Salt Creek and Poison Spider indicate the existence of petroleum over a wide section of the state. Wells on Salt Creek resemble those in Russia. ”

“ It abounds in South America, in the West Indies, the United States and Canada. The most extensive and phenomenal natural fountain of petroleum ever known is on the Island of Trinidad. Hot bitumen has filled a basin four miles in circumference, three-quarters of a mile from the sea, estimated to contain the equivalent of ten-millions of barrels of crude-oil. The liquid boils up continually, observing no holidays or Sundays, seething and foaming at the center of the lake, cooling and thickening as it recedes, and finally becoming solid asphaltum. ”

“ In the Oil Creek region, some of the smaller wells having been exhausted, resort was had to deeper boring. One hopeful theorist imagined that if the desirable fluid came from a very great depth, it might be good policy to seek it in a stratum still nearer its rocky home. So down he penetrated, regardless of the 'fine show' of oil that presented itself by the way, until at the depth of five hundred feet in the rock, a vein of mingled gas and oil was reached that literally forced the boring implements from the well. ”

“ The ascent of petroleum in the artesian oil-wells in Pennsylvania, and, in many cases, of salt-water in similar tubes, can hardly be ascribed to hydrostatic pressure, and there is much difficulty in accounting for the rise of water in artesian wells in many parts of the African desert on that principle. Perhaps the elasticity of gases, which probably aids in forcing up petroleum and saline waters, may be, not unfrequently, an agency in causing the flow of water in common artesian borings. ”

“ While cannel-coal in the western end of Pennsylvania and other sections of the country, bitumen and shales from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Huron, chapapote or mineral pitch in Cuba and San Domingo, oozings in Peru and Ecuador, asphaltum in Canada and oil-springs in Columbia and a half-dozen states of the Union from California to New York denoted the presence of petroleum over the greater part of this hemisphere, wells bored for salt were leading factors in bringing about its full development. ”

“ Generally speaking, about one-third of the oil actually present in the rocks can be pumped before the well becomes uneconomical to operate. This is called primary production. Oil operators have learned that by pumping water or gas down some wells into the oil-bearing formation, another third of the oil may be forced out through neighboring wells. This is called secondary production. Experiments that use steam or that burn some of the oil underground in an oil-bearing formation are attempts to recover the remaining third. ”