Re-Posting A Bit Of Geology -- February 22, 2017

This was previously posted, but re-reading it today, I found it so interesting, I want to re-post it:

Annals of the Former World

John McPhee

c. 1998

DDS: 557.3 MCP 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

This is not an easy book to read. The paragraphs are way too long. Most pages have one, one-and-a-half, or two paragraphs. The writing is meandering. It is not tight. But, wow! Talk about an interesting look at geology in the 1980s and 1990s and how far we've come.

Plate tectonics was new; it was all the rage; and there were still detractors. The theory was not necessarily widely accepted. 

The table of contents and the index suggest there is only one full page devoted to shale oil, but what an incredible page. The author writes from Wyoming:

At all moments in the history of Lake Gosiute, it was replete with organic life, from the foul clouds of brine flies that obscured its salty flats to the twelve-foot crocodiles and forty-pound gars in the waters at their widest reach. For this was Wyoming in the Eocene, and the lake at varying times were ictalurid catfish, bowfins, dogfish, bony tongues, donkey faces, singrays, herring.

The American Museum of Natural History has a whole Gosiute trout perch in the act of swallowing a herring, recording in its violence two or three seconds from forty-six million years ago. In the museums' worldwide vertebrate collection, roughly one fossil in five comes from Wyoming, and a high percentage of those are from Gosiute and neighboring lakes. Around the shores were red roses and climbing ferns, hibiscus and soapberries, balloon vines, goldenrain. The trees would generally have been recognizable as well: pines, palms, redwoods, poplars, sycamores, cypresses, maples, willows, oaks. There were water striders, plant hoppers, snout beetles, crickets. The air was full of frigate birds. Dense beds of algae matted the shallows.

In all phases through the eight million years, quantities of organic material mixed with the accumulating sediments and (sic) are preserved with them today in the form of shale oil.

On the far side of the Uinta Mountains was another great lake, reaching from western Colorado well into Utah. Lake Uinta, as it has come to be called, and Lake Gosiute and several smaller lakes left in their shales a potential oil reserve estimated at about one and a half trillion barrels. This is the world's largest deposit of hydrocarbons. It is actually nine times the amount of crude oil under Saudi Arabia, and about ten times as much oil as has so far been pumped from American rock. 
 
Distinct in the long suite of cuts at Green River were the so-called mahogany ledges, where oil shale is particularly rich. They looked less like wood than like bluish-white slabs of thinly bedded slate.

Oil shale always weathers bluish white but is dark inside, and grainy like wood. The thinner the laminae, the higher the ratio of organic material. [This explains the Bakken.] The richest of the oleaginous flakes -- each representing the sedimentation of one year -- were fifteen-thousandths of a millimetre (sic) thick. [David] Love [of the USGS] dropped some hydrochloric acid on the rock, and the acid beaded up like an arching cat.

"It's actually kerogen," he said. "It converts to high-paraffin oil. It's not like Pennsylvania crude."

To mining engineers, oil shale had presented and as yet unsolved and completely unambiguous problem: how to remove the shale oil without destroying the face of the earth. So far, three principal methods had been considered.

None of the three mentioned sounded like hydraulic fracturing; and none of the three have been commercially successful.

The one-and-a-half-trillion-barrel estimate was somewhat extravagant, because it included every last drop -- referring, as it did, to all shale with any content of kerogen. In the richer rock -- in the shales that contained twenty-five to sixty-five gallons of oil per ton -- were nor more than six hundred billion barrels.

That would do. That was more petroleum in place than all the petroleum produced in the world to date. Love remarked that oil shale had been "trumpeted to the skies" but, with the energy crisis in perigee, both government and industry were losing interest and pulling out. Temporarily pulling out. Sooner or later, people were going to want that shale. 

The essays were written in 1981, 1983, 1986, and 1993.