Oil shale has been recognized as a potentially valuable U.S. energy resource since as early as 1859, the same year Colonel Drake completed his first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Early products derived from shale oil included kerosene and lamp oil, paraffin, fuel oil, lubricating oil and grease, naphtha, illuminating gas, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer.
In the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. Navy converted its ships from coal to fuel oil, and the nation’s economy was transformed by gasoline fueled automobiles and diesel fueled trucks and trains, raising concerns about assuring adequate long-term supplies of liquid fuels at affordable prices to meet the needs of the nation.
America’s abundant resources of oil shale were initially eyed as a major source for these fuels. Commercial entities sought to develop oil shale resources. The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 made petroleum and oil shale resources on Federal lands available for development. Soon, however, discoveries of more economically producible and refinable liquid crude oil in commercial quantities caused interest in oil shale to plateau.
Global Resource Corp. has a patent pending process that allows for removal of oil and alternative petroleum products at very low cost from various resources, including shale deposits, tar sands, waste oil streams and bituminous coal with significantly greater yields and lower costs than are available utilizing existing known technologies. The process uses specific frequencies of microwave radiation to extract oils and alternative petroleum products from secondary raw materials, and is expected to dramatically reduce the cost for oil and gas recovery from a variety of unconventional hydrocarbon resources. GBRC’s technology will not only be developed to extract oil from shale, but from depleted oil fields in the US and elsewhere, many of which still contain more than half of the hydrocarbons originally in these fields, because the residual hydrocarbons are too viscous to extract with conventional technology.
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