rigorousintuition.ca

<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/6/30/02641/9310#more">www.theoildrum.com/story/.../9310#more</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Maybe this is one to watch out for in the future,<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>The need for a relatively rapidly available resource to allow us to continue being able to supply the worlds needs for oil, even as it increases into the future, will require some fairly rapid and agile production of resources, and as I noted in the first post of this series, with some 2 trillion extractable barrels of oil locked up in the oil shales of the above four states, there lies a potential answer to the problem. But conventional means for extraction, particularly the levels of capital required, and other issues that I will discuss later, make it unlikely that these normal means will produce any significant impact on the gap in economic supply that will develop in the near future. The use of nuclear explosives has the potential to solve that problem. And to explain, rather simply how this might be done (as with the other techie talks), I will explain how, conceptually, this might be achieved.............</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <p></p><i></i>

Luckily it'll never work, as some of the scores of underground nuke tests in the US showed. But if we keep driving, it might pay someone to try anyway. <p></p><i></i>

Excellent idea..Hey, while we're at it, why not pop that huge lava-zit over in Yosemite? <p>____________________<br>Oderint, dum metuant</p><i></i>

I know a bit about this.<br><br>I worked on a project in the Athabasca Oilsands way back.<br><br>Atlantic Richfield (I think it was) actually had a proposal to set off nuclear bomb in the oilsands in the mid '50s. I read the original application. I'd heard this was proposed and was fascinated to see wtf they were thinking, as it seemed to me hard to fatham how setting off the nuke would help much for oil recovery.<br><br>Most of the proposal dealt with security of the nukes. Next to nothing on the efficiency of recovery. Not even the most basic calculations of how big of area would be positively effected by the detonation, recovery factor therein, etc.<br><br>I can pretty much guarentee that the nuke will be very efficient at making part of the reservoir glass; but won't help much for recovering oil from an unconventional deposit.<br><br>Dumb ideas never seem to go away. <p></p><i></i>