Our commitment goes beyond the requisite compliance with all necessary permits and environmental standards. In fact, one of the major objectives of our RD&D program is to assess environmental impacts and develop mitigation measures for a follow-on commercial project. Our proprietary process incorporates many layers of protection for the environment – the water, the air, the land surface.
Our Process Involves Minimal Surface Disturbance
Our operation is a true in-situ process -with oil and gas produced in place- and uses methods common to the oil and gas industry.
It is also designed to result in a small surface footprint through the use of centrally located drilling to provide for introduction of multiple deviated wells for energy delivery and for product collection
- Our commercial scale design incorporates the use of retort panels designed to achieve high resource recovery
- By using horizontal wells, we disturb only 10% of the surface area above the retort
Protection of Drinking Water
Our commitment to protecting the environment is what led us to pursue the illite-rich oil shale layer, which comprises only one-third of our resources but allows us to ensure protection of the leached zone aquifers, protecting the drinking water and vegetation. (The defined Illite Mining Interval lies below the aquifers and is isolated from the aquifers by a protective cap of nahcolitic oil shale.
Additionally, unlike in-situ processes tested in the 1970’s and 1980’s, the AMSO Process does not entail the direct injection of fluids into the subsurface, thus reducing the risk of impact to the subsurface water.
Minimal Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The low temperature, long term heating of the carbonates in the oil shale results in low carbon dioxide emissions compared to surface retorting processes that rapidly heat the oil shale to 900 deg. F. Carbon dioxide that is produced through combustion and retorting may be sequestered for re-injection and/or transported through a pipeline to nearby oil fields for use in secondary/tertiary recovery.
This step is not anticipated for the field testing phase, but is an option for commercial operations if regulations at that time require reduction in the emission of green house gases.
Even at this preliminary stage in our process, we are investing in exploring CO2 sequestration methods, and have joined forces with leading scientific research institutes to develop methods of reducing the CO2 emissions resulting from our operations
Minimal Use of Water Resources
One of the major advantages of our true in-situ method is the ability to avoid the site disturbance and water consumption that attend mining and spent shale disposal operations.
There is little or no requirement for external sources of water since none is needed to moisten spent shale or mine waste.
- We have no mining, crushing and spent-shale disposal needing water for dust control
- Our retort interval is isolated from clean water, so we don’t need clean water to restore it
- Our goal is one barrel or less of water per barrel of shale oil