How much oil is being extracted from tar sands and oil shale today?
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M$2 Answers
per day in 2006. The Oil Sands yield could be even more as some
estimates anticipate that the level of production could reach 3 million
barrels per day by 2020 and some more optimistic estimates say the oil
sands production could be at 5 million barrels per day by 2030," This is from the Canadian Oil Sands, the largest deposit in the world.
http://www.jobmonkey.com/oilindustry/html/canadian_oil.html
Oil Shale: I was unable to find barrel production numbers for oil shale collectively, but China produced some 2.5 Million tons per year, http://www.ceri-mines.org/R02c-JialinQian.pdf.pdf
Estonia produced around 12.5 Million tons in a year http://www.kirj.ee/public/oilshale/ed-page6.html
The yield of various oil shales varies greatly, so I don't have a good means of calculating the raw tonnage of shale production to barrels of oil. The American shales in Wyoming are between 10 and 60 gallons per ton. So based on the above numbers, theoretically 14.5 million tons would be between 145 and 870 gallons per ton. Barrel = 55 gallons, so 2,636,363 to15,818,181 barrels per YEAR. So in barrels per day, 7,222 to 43,337. That's very small, but Estonia and other Eastern European countries often burn oil shale directly, instead of using the extracted petroleum (and instead of coal). So the tonnage might actually be more comparable to coal.
Sources are listed in the text of the article.
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M$
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M$
Thanks, quite helpful info. Given the meager amounts you and others found I seriously doubt that the billions of dollars the Reagan Administration spent to develop and extract the oil have ever or will ever justify the expenditure unless the price of oil goes to $300/bbl. It does, however, demonstrate what happens when government and special interest turn a blind eye to other energy resources that were ignored back then like solar and wind.
BTW, a barrel of oil is 42 gallons because back in the first days of drilling in Pennsylvania oil was typically stored in old wine casks that held one tierce of wine. A tierce is an old english measurement equal to 42 US gallons or 35 Imperial gallons.