Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC said efforts to tap Rocky Mountain oil deposits large enough to meet U.S. demand for a century have been stalled by subterranean rivers and greenhouse gases.
Shell won’t know until 2009 whether an underground wall of ice intended to shield oil- rich rocks from flowing water will work, project director Wolfgang Deeg said Tuesday at an industry conference at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden.
Exxon Mobil hasn’t figured out how to contain greenhouse-gas emissions from its planned development to extract oil from shale formations in the region.
The world’s two largest oil companies and Chevron Corp., second-biggest in the U.S., are spending $100 million a year to find a way to turn organic matter in limestone in the Rockies into oil. Prior efforts to exploit oil-shale deposits as large as the reserves of all OPEC member countries collapsed in the 1980s, when slumping prices made the work unprofitable.
“I hope it works this time,” Arthur Hartstein, former director of the U.S. Energy Department’s future oil and gas program, said at the conference, a shale-oil symposium that’s being held this week for its 27th year. “Before I croak, I’d like to see some oil shale commercially produced.”
The obstacles holding up oil-shale production underscore the challenges the biggest energy companies are facing as the search for new reserves extends to fields previously considered too difficult or costly to exploit. The U.S. government says commercial oil-shale production is at least eight years away.
