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.