Talk:Oil shale economics

message: This section is incredibly biased towards the Oil Tech process and appears to be written by a promoter.  No credible comparative economic study I've seen has come to this conclusion--one can only reach a defendable conclusion by using and disclosing a consistent set of economic assumptions.  For example, there is no mention of the 1990 NRC report "Fuels to Drive our Future", which tried to compare different oil shale processes with other sources of synthetic fuels using consistent economic assumptions.  That is not to say that the Oil Tech process should be dismissed out of hand, but there is no objective basis for making these claims in an encyclopedia.  
The Oil Tech process is merely one of hundreds that have been tried, and there is no technical basis for its prominence in a general article on oil shale.  It would be far better to present a systematic classification table based on heat source, heat transfer method, above or below ground, and then give multiple examples of the various types.
The same problem is true for the statement that the Oil Tech process would be environmentally safe. Even if it were true, there is no independent study I've seen, and certainly none referenced here, to substantiate that claim.  It is certainly true that open-pit mining is cheaper than room and pillar mining and is necessary if aboveground shale oil production is to be a significant player in our energy needs, but is it universally accepted that digging up large fractions of the Uinta and Piceance Basin and returning it as a different material is environmentally safe?  This conclusion is somewhere between unsubstantiated and subjective. 
Akburnham 00:17, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Biased economics

message: Efficency? Nowhere in the article, energy efficiency is mentioned. How much energy do I have to invest to harvest 1 calory in shale oil? Or one could also ask the question in a diffenerent way: How much is the total CO2 output if I want to get 1 MJ of energy from shale oil compared to conventional oil? If some of the processes need months of electrical (!!) heating before extraction, this sounds ridiculous. The processes might be economically viable because liquid fuels yield extremely high prices these days compared to, let's say, coal or even natural gas but might result in a net reduction of fossile fuel resources. Does anybody have data to answer these crucial questions?
:Shell reported the EROEI of their In-situ Conversion Process to be 3:1 or even 3.5:1.Beagel 19:09, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Information about the EROEI of oil shale is added.Beagel 08:09, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: By my understanding this is not exactly "backing out". Despite of this, I agree that we should be cautious about all EROEI figures. They vary very largely depending technology and the oil shale deposit properties as also counting methodology. Probably it is the best described by Adam Brandt. Beagel (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Efficiency

message: Anom user added an information that Canada re-started production in 2003-4. I reverted this as no available sources confirm this. However, if there is current commercial production of oil shale in Canada, please provide information where and by whom it was re-started.Beagel 18:27, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Canada

message: Added a section on water usage.  Would like to keep this section focused on economics. Cost 2.5m bbls/day capacity range between $1.8 bn-$4.2 bn is $1.97-$4.60 bbl-year, or at a 15% roi implies $0.30-$0.60/bbl.  Even if the water costs is tripled, it's not really significant.  Of course prices would rise is shale were produced, which may mean some cotton farms in arizona get priced out of business :)--Work permit (talk) 03:51, 30 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The amount of water used probably depends on the method used to extract the oil from the shale.Kgrr (talk) 15:56, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Water Usage 

message: Anom user added Nighthawk Plc & Running Foxes to the list of current projects. However, there is no reliable sources confirming this claim.  It seems that this is one of the cases when company uses "oil shale" not for the kerogen-containing sedimentary rock, but for shale which contains liquid petroleum. Although it may be classified as unconventional oil, it is still in form a liquid oil and not in form of kerogen in the solid rock as in case of oil shale.  We have quite similar confusion also with shale gas which may refer to gas in shales (todays common understanding of the term) and oil shale gas (most of the scientific-technical literature refers to it also as "shale gas"). As this article is about the economics of oil shale in its traditional meaning, I reverted this edit to avoid confusion. Also, this list includes confirmed projects at least at the test stage. There is no such information about Nighthawk Plc & Running Foxes. Beagel (talk) 17:58, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nighthawk Plc & Running Foxes 

message: Anon user added outdated tag to the 'Break-even price of crude oil' section with reasoning "Parts of this article (those related to The technologies to reduce costs of shale mining have progressed significantly since 2005, the date of this section's future breakeven cost-projections.) are outdated." While I agree that the article may be outdated, I disagree with this reasoning as it seems to confuse oil shale and producing oil from the oil-bearing shales which are very different things. While there is indeed a significant progress on technologies producing tight oil (also referred as shale oil) from the oil-bearing shales, there is no such progress related to producing oil from oil shale. Therefore, I will remove the tag now. Beagel (talk) 14:20, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Outdated tag 

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message: The production of oil from shale will not happen no matter the price of a barrel of crude if the current political climate is geared towards moving away from the use of fossil fuels and more towards electric vehicles, solar, wind and hydroelectric sources of energy. 2607:FB91:8E83:7AD:E1F5:4C8F:6BA0:4164 (talk) 19:04, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mitigating Factor