21 Facts About Oil shale

Oil shale is an organic-rich fine-grained sedimentary rock containing kerogen from which liquid hydrocarbons can be produced.

Accordingly, shale oil produced from oil shale should not be confused with tight oil, which is frequently called shale oil.

Deposits of oil shale occur around the world, including major deposits in the United States.

Oil shale has gained attention as a potential abundant source of oil.

Oil shale can be burned directly in furnaces as a low-grade fuel for power generation and district heating or used as a raw material in chemical and construction-materials processing.

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Shale oil is a substitute for conventional crude oil; however, extracting shale oil is costlier than the production of conventional crude oil both financially and in terms of its environmental impact.

Accordingly, shale oil produced from oil shale should not be confused with tight oil, which is called frequently shale oil.

Oil shale contains a lower percentage of organic matter than coal.

The organic components of oil shale derive from a variety of organisms, such as the remains of algae, spores, pollen, plant cuticles and corky fragments of herbaceous and woody plants, and cellular debris from other aquatic and land plants.

The mineral matter in oil shale includes various fine-grained silicates and carbonates.

The first patent for extracting oil from oil shale was British Crown Patent 330 granted in 1694 to Martin Eele, Thomas Hancock and William Portlock, who had "found a way to extract and make great quantities of pitch, tarr, and oyle out of a sort of stone".

Oil shale serves for oil production in Estonia, Brazil, and China; for power generation in Estonia, China, and Germany; for cement production in Estonia, Germany, and China; and for use in chemical industries in China, Estonia, and Russia.

Israel, Romania and Russia have in the past run power plants fired by oil shale but have shut them down or switched to other fuel sources such as natural gas.

Oil shale serves as the main fuel for power generation only in Estonia, where 90.

Extraction of the useful components of oil shale usually takes place above ground, although several newer technologies perform this underground .

Two in-situ processes could be used: true in-situ processing does not involve mining the oil shale, while modified in-situ processing involves removing part of the oil shale and bringing it to the surface for modified in-situ retorting in order to create permeability for gas flow in a rubble chimney.

Oil shale is utilized as a fuel for thermal power-plants, burning it to drive steam turbines; some of these plants employ the resulting heat for district heating of homes and businesses.

Between 1946 and 1952, a marine type of Dictyonema Oil shale served for uranium production in Sillamae, Estonia, and between 1950 and 1989 Sweden used alum Oil shale for the same purposes.

Oil shale gas has served as a substitute for natural gas, but as of 2009, producing oil shale gas as a natural-gas substitute remained economically infeasible.

Various attempts to develop oil shale deposits have succeeded only when the cost of shale-oil production in a given region comes in below the price of crude oil or its other substitutes .

Mining oil shale involves numerous environmental impacts, more pronounced in surface mining than in underground mining.