Oil Shale News

From: Town Hall Finance

By: Lincoln Brown

According to E&E Times, last week, the House killed funding for oil shale research in the 2013 energy and water spending bill. Had the funding been left in place 25 million dollars would have been allocated for oil shale R&D. It was a close vote, 208 to 207, but the funding was eliminated.

People in Parachute, Colorado remember all too well the Black Sunday on May 2^nd 1982 when Exxon suddenly closed its oil shale development there. Over 2,000 people found themselves out of work.

From: Forbes

Everyone has heard about the Bakken shale, the huge expanse of oil-bearing rock underneath North Dakota and Montana that billionaire Harold Hamm thinks could yield 24 billion barrels of oil in the decades to come. The Bakken is a huge boon, both to the economic health of the northern Plains states, but also to the petroleum balance of the United States. From just 60,000 barrels per day five years ago, the Bakken is now giving up 500,000 bpd, with 210,000 bpd of that coming on in just the past year. Given the availability of enough rigs to drill it and crews to frack it, there’s no reason why the Bakken couldn’t be producing more than 1 million bpd by the end of the decade, a level that could be maintained for halfway through the century.

From: CNBC

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Exxon Mobil Corp <XOM.N>, the world’s largest publicly listed energy company, warned on Tuesday that too much government regulation could undermine a rapid global expansion of gas output from a range of unconventional sources.

Helped by a boom in shale gas, Exxon Mobil has become North America’s largest natural gas producer, but energy firms face pressure for tighter regulation of the industry over concerns about the impact of drilling on the environment and also public concern that U.S. gas prices could rise if the gas is exported.

From: Trend

Jordan has finalized a deal to construct an oil shale power plant, becoming the first Arab state to try to tap into the alternative energy resource, the country announced Saturday.

The power station comes as part of an agreement reached on Thursday between Amman and Enefit, an Estonian-Malaysian firm currently carrying out exploration in the country’s central region. Experts believe it has the potential to yield up to 38,000 barrels per day, dpa reported.

Under the multimillion-dollar deal, the Estonian firm is to construct a 450-megawatt power plant by 2016, the first of several planned projects to tap into Jordan’s estimated 40-billion-tonne oil shale reserves.