EncapSol’s unique ability to separate oil from virtually any material means that all the hydrocarbon-contaminated ground-soil properties in America, and around the world, can now be cleaned of all oil, leaving clean sand, clean gravel and clean rocks free of oil residues.

Currently, the environmental clean up business does not have a solvent that has proven as effective as EncapSol.  EncapSol can effectively clean up oil spills by encapsulating the oil so that it can be safely recovered.

When oil is spilled the first response by local, state or federal environmental protection agencies is to contain the spill, and then pay for the bulldozing of all oil-contaminated materials to be disposed of in a toxic landfill licensed to the handle huge volumes of oil-contaminated water.  Then the landfill uses steam-washing and detergent-washing clean-up methods that can produce more oil-contaminated materials and toxic waste water than the original oil spill itself.

Using the same type of EncapSol Oil Recovery machine that demonstrated the successful extraction of oil from Utah tar sands, toxic oil spill and sludge pit oil field waste materials will no longer need to be dumped, at great expense to the government or the environment, in licensed toxic landfills.  EncapSol can turn this toxic liability into a profitable asset by extracting the oil from the oil spill or sludge pit for re-sale, while only leaving behind clean soil and agricultural grade water.

With EncapSol, the cost of environment clean-up can be partially if not fully paid for by the value of the oil recovered by the EncapSol process.  Thus, cash-strapped government agencies can still meet their EPA requirements to clean up oil spills and sludge pits at no net cost to their budgets.

Freestone intends to develop relationships with Canada’s leading oil sands operators for the purpose of utilizing our mobile EncapSol Oil Recovery machines to clean their toxic waste effluence.

Freestone will also work with existing environmental clean-up companies to transform their obsolete toxic sludge clean-up businesses into more profitable oil-recovery businesses that make money from the sale of the recovered oil and by-products of value, while enabling for a more efficient waste clean-up process.

If America truly wants to become energy independent, it needs to start producing oil from all of its oil-containing natural resources – not just drilling for oil, but also recovering oil from the oil-rich shale rocks and oil sands of America.

Oil Sands and Oil Shale

Encapsol is the only environmentally-friendly technology that is capable of cleanly unlocking America’s vast, but currently untapped and stranded, oil shale and oil sand resources – which can displace expensive imported oil with lower-cost, domestically-produced oil that benefits the American economy and creates new clean oil jobs around the country.

Oil shale is carbonate rock, very rich in organic sedimentary material called “kerogen” that contains mainly hydrogen and carbon molecules, but also oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur.  The kerogen content of “oil shale” ore can range from 10 to 60 or more gallons of oil per ton.  Kerogen can be converted to superior quality jet fuel, #2 diesel, and other high value by-products.

According the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), America’s total oil shale resources could exceed 6 trillion barrels of oil equivalent. About 1.8 trillion barrels of shale oil are thought to reside in deposits greater than 15 gallons per ton in the Green River Basin spanning Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.  Additionally, U.S. oil sands resources are estimated at 60 to 80 billion barrels of original oil in place in the form of bitumen (a heavy, black, asphalt-like hydrocarbon).

Why Oil Sand and Oil Shale?

Since America now imports over 60% of its petroleum needs, harnessing America’s oil shale and oil sand resources are a high-priority national security issue for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).  The development of safe supplies of domestically-produced fuels instead of relying on foreign gasoline and jet fuel imports is a priority for the DOD, in order to ensure that U.S. oil supplies are not interrupted by geopolitical events or acts of terrorism.

What has prevented the oil shale-rich parties from harnessing these valuable oil shale resources has been the high-cost and environmental concerns of using primitive retort heat or in-situ heat to get the highly-viscous molasses-like oil flowing out of the oil shale rocks and oil sands.

Heat-based oil extraction technologies suffer from major unintended problems that are too environmentally wasteful and destructive to ignore.  These problems include:

• WASTED WATER – FOR WASHING ORE & MAKING STEAM
• WASTED NATURAL GAS – FOR MAKING STEAM & ELECTRICITY
• WASTED ELECTRICITY TO HEAT IN-SITU GROUND COILS
• ELECTRIC POWER REQUIRES MORE WATER FOR COOLING
• THE PRODUCTION OF TOXIC TAILING POND WASTE THAT POLLUTES GROUNDWATER
• EMITS HARMFUL GHG / SOX / CO2 & P.M. EMISSIONS
• BAD TRADE-OFF OF NATURAL GAS, ELECTRICITY AND WATER – FOR OIL

Unlike the proposed heat-based oil shale oil extraction methods that have incurred the scrutiny of environmentalists worldwide, EncapSol does not burn valuable natural gas fuel to make heat, does not consume precious river water supplies to make steam or wash slurry, and does not produce toxic air pollution nor tailing pond waste-effluence and groundwater contaminants that have heretofore prevented commercial-scale oil sands and oil shale production in America.

EncapSol’s low-impact chemical-based technology avoids all of the above heat-based problems.  EncapSol cleanly and cost-effectively can extract oil from rocks in a closed-loop system with zero-discharge and emissions.

Proprietary oil extraction equipment using the EncapSol formula has been built and successfully demonstrated to achieve the extraction of oil from Utah oil sands with high solvent recovery efficiency.  This same equipment can be used to process oil shale, but using a different formulation of EncapSol that is customized for the exact type of oil shale to be processed.  A fourth generation oil extraction machine, with even more solvent recovery efficiency, is in final stages of development and will be used by Freestone Resources for further demonstrations.

In the normal course of business, refineries, oil tanker and oil storage tank owners pay high fees to periodically have their storage tanks cleaned of sediment sludge, and dispose of that sludge with tipping fees paid to licensed landfills for storing the hydrocarbon-contaminated toxic sludge.

EncapSol has the proven ability to chemically-dissolve oil sludge and recover greater than 80% of the tank bottom sludge as oil, which can turn a major oil company’s expense/liability into a revenue-generating asset.

At the end of the EncapSol cleaning process, the sludge is processed by the EncapSol Oil Recovery machine and delivers cleaned oil and a small percentage of waste-material that may be subject to disposal.

With EncapSol, large Oil Companies and Refineries can stop using toxic landfills to dispose of their oil-contaminated sludge and ground soils. EncapSol can effectively pay for the decontamination of the sludge by removing the oil for re-sale while leaving the remaining water, sand, clay, gravel and other mineral by-products cleaned and oil-free for disposal or re-sale as raw materials.

Freestone will work with existing tank cleaning companies to assist in transforming their obsolete sludge-cleanup and disposal businesses into oil-recovery businesses that will make money from the sale of the recovered oil and by-products of value – turning waste into profits.

America (and all oil producing countries) need to produce more oil from their current oil wells, because new discoveries of oil reserves are declining, while demand for oil will continue to grow.

After employing all available primary and secondary oil recovery processes, fifty percent of the oil in any given oil reservoir are still left stranded, stuck and immobilized in the formations that primary oil recovery pressures and secondary water-flooding displacement cannot recover.

The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that of the known 582 billion barrels of oil in-place in previously discovered oil fields in America, 208 billion barrels of that oil has already been extracted or proven, which leaves 374 billion barrels of stranded, immobile oil still available for extraction in existing operating oil fields using enhanced oil recovery technologies.

With tertiary enhanced oil recovery  technologies, such as steam-injection, chemical flooding and CO2 gas injection methodologies to change oil viscosities, interfacial tensions, and oil-to-water saturations, the DOE estimates that 100 billion barrels of this “stranded” oil resource may become technically recoverable.

Unfortunately, tertiary recovery methods being used today have been constrained by economics and environmental concerns.  In the case of CO2,  the price of carbon dioxide, the cost of pipeline infrastructure to deliver CO2 to candidate reservoirs far away from the source of CO2, and leakage of CO2 are issues of concern.  In the case of steam-injection, the cost and use of water in times of drought and the burning of fossil-fuels to make heat to boil the water cause environmental issues to arise.

Initial lab tests indicate that EncapSol will work downhole in gaseous form for the purpose of stranded oil extraction.  Freestone intends to conduct multiple field tests with EncapSol as a downhole injectant (in both liquid form and gaseous form) to determine the extent to which it may be capable of increasing recovery yields in different geologic formations, including oil-wet and mixed-wet reservoirs.  Freestone intends to form partnerships with local operators and company’s currently providing steam-injection and CO2-injection services to the industry.