Talk:Environmental impact of the oil shale industry

Environmental Considerations

This section is equally flawed and appears to be written by someone who has no direct experience with oil shale. First, by what basis does the author claim that waste rock is a known carcinogen? Even if it were true for waste rock from some specific process, the differences in spent shale from different processes are vast, so it cannot be generally true. The statement that rock expands by about 30% after processing due to a popcorn effect is obsurd urban legend. The increase in mined oil shale volume occurs efore processing merely because there are interparticle voids introduced to any solid when it is broken up, and the fractional increase depends on the width of the particle size distribution. Beds of oil shale do not expand during retorting, as I have observed hundreds of times. A rare exception can occur for extremely rich oil shale veins (~60 gal/ton), which may froth during pyrolysis like a coking coal, but such cases are vanishingly small in importance, do not occur under load, and can be easily compacted away if they do occur.

Akburnham 00:17, 29 October 2006 (UTC)A. K. Burnham

Anyone can edit. Find sources and add details, delete what is wrong and unsourced. (SEWilco 04:11, 29 October 2006 (UTC))

Hydraulic fracturing

There was a good faith addition concerning hydraulic fracturing: "Hydraulic fracturing, used for oil and gas shale extraction, can cause groundwater contamination." I removed this as it confused oil shale industry and oil and gas industry extracting from shales. These are different things. Although some proposed in-situ extraction technologies propose hydraulic fracturing as a part of the process, as of today hydraulic fracturing is not used in the oil shale industry. Beagel (talk) 12:40, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Methane

There is a good faith addition about methane release. Unfortunately this is incorrect as the reference concerns release of methane from hydraulically fractured shale in the process of oil and gas production, and it does not talk about oil shale (the term oil shale is even not used in this reference). Oil-bearing shales like Bakken Formation and oil shale are different things (oil shale event not always a shale but it could be, e.g. cannel coal etc). The confusion is based on the fact that the term "shale oil" is interchangeable, as it is used as well for crude oil produced from shales of other very low permeability formations. However, for avoiding the risk of confusion of shale oil produced from oil shale with crude oil in oil-bearing shales, the International Energy Agency recommends to use the term "light tight oil" and World Energy Resources 2013 report by the World Energy Council uses the term "tight oil" for the latter instead of shale oil. Correspondingly, oil and gas-bearing shales are not oil shales. Beagel (talk) 15:17, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for helping figuring this out. I thought by definition most/all oil and gas wells release some amount of methane. What makes shale oil different because intuitively breaking rocks apart in hydrocarbon deposits/nature's methane underground storage areas MUST release methane. I don't understand why there would be ZERO methane released. Whatever the answer be, should be inserted into the article. --Oil1236 (talk) 19:12, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

Again, please see the main Oil shale article and, in addition, you may want to see the Shale oil extraction article. From the main oil shale article: "Oil shale, also known as kerogen shale, is an organic-rich fine-grained sedimentary rock containing kerogen (a solid mixture of organic chemical compounds) from which liquid hydrocarbons called shale oil (not to be confused with tight oil—crude oil occurring naturally in shales) can be produced." To convert solid kerogen into liquid oil and gaseous gas it should be additionally heated (by humans). Some oil shale deposits may be associated in some cases with underground methane but in most cases they are not. So, your assumption that there MUST be methane release is incorrect. Your source is talking about shale gas and tight oil production, and the methane release belongs into the relevant articles as also into the Environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing article. That one already includes information about methane leakage during the fracturing process. Beagel (talk) 19:40, 13 July 2015 (UTC)

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Need elaboration or clarification of following wording

"In some cases it requires the lowering of groundwater levels below the level of the oil shale strata, which may have harmful effects on the surrounding arable land and forest". I failed to find a clue to explain the phenominon. Thank you very much. ThomasYehYeh (talk) 02:18, 17 December 2022 (UTC)