Israel's Energy-Independent Future Looks Like
Judith Levy · Jul. 9 at 4:11am
If it's allowed to get that far. The resources are there, but so is a phalanx of home-grown opposition.
This is a photograph I took on Thursday of a chunk of oil shale that had been dug up moments before from 400 meters below ground (1,300 feet, or a bit deeper than the height of the Empire State Building) at a drilling site in the Shfela Basin, southwest of Jerusalem. The shale's surface is smooth and uniform, like a clay pot, and it has a uniquely earthy smell -- something roughly between mud after a downpour, a distant barnyard, and a glass of Campo Viejo Rioja.
Notice the fossils. In the little caravan next to the drilling site, I had a look through a microscope at plankton that had been brought to the surface during drilling.
This chunk of shale is about 70 million years old. It's part of a deposit with the potential to yield about 250 billion barrels, well beyond Israel's domestic needs and amply sufficient to transform Israel into an oil exporter. Not far from the patch of land from which it was extracted is the cave of Adullam, in which David hid when he was running from King Saul.
There is a great deal to say about these resources, and I plan to give it to you in installments. For the time being I'll call your attention to the resistance to the oil shale exploration, which falls roughly into two categories: anxious locals and angry environmentalists.
The locals are apprehensive -- understandably -- about the introduction of what they fear will be disruptive and destructive technology into a pristine, even idyllic landscape. The environmentalists object on principle to the extraction of fossil fuels, period, regardless of location, and regardless of the implications for Israel of energy independence -- Gaia trumps the state, in other words.
Woven into the objections of both constituencies are elements that will be difficult to combat via pilot projects and feasibility studies: reflexive mistrust of the word of any government agency or representative, a residual socialist repugnance against any industry with the potential to create great wealth for individuals, and a zero-sum assumption that any progress that's made on the oil front must, by definition, be at someone else's expense.
I hope to speak directly with people on the opposition as well as with key figures in the exploration, which is being run by a company called IEI (Israel Energy Initiatives). I spent all of Thursday deep in conversation with IEI environmental engineer Dana Kadmiel, who gave me exhaustive data on the company's technology. Stay tuned.
Notice the fossils. In the little caravan next to the drilling site, I had a look through a microscope at plankton that had been brought to the surface during drilling.
This chunk of shale is about 70 million years old. It's part of a deposit with the potential to yield about 250 billion barrels, well beyond Israel's domestic needs and amply sufficient to transform Israel into an oil exporter. Not far from the patch of land from which it was extracted is the cave of Adullam, in which David hid when he was running from King Saul.
There is a great deal to say about these resources, and I plan to give it to you in installments. For the time being I'll call your attention to the resistance to the oil shale exploration, which falls roughly into two categories: anxious locals and angry environmentalists.
The locals are apprehensive -- understandably -- about the introduction of what they fear will be disruptive and destructive technology into a pristine, even idyllic landscape. The environmentalists object on principle to the extraction of fossil fuels, period, regardless of location, and regardless of the implications for Israel of energy independence -- Gaia trumps the state, in other words.
Woven into the objections of both constituencies are elements that will be difficult to combat via pilot projects and feasibility studies: reflexive mistrust of the word of any government agency or representative, a residual socialist repugnance against any industry with the potential to create great wealth for individuals, and a zero-sum assumption that any progress that's made on the oil front must, by definition, be at someone else's expense.
I hope to speak directly with people on the opposition as well as with key figures in the exploration, which is being run by a company called IEI (Israel Energy Initiatives). I spent all of Thursday deep in conversation with IEI environmental engineer Dana Kadmiel, who gave me exhaustive data on the company's technology. Stay tuned.
Judith, I live in Fort Worth. This is where the shale boom began at the beginning of the last decade. Fort Worth is the county seat of Tarrant Couny which has about 1.8 million people living in an area of about 900 square miles. During the decade over 3,000 wells have been drilled and I would speculate most of these have been in the urban areas of the county. The opponents of drilling here. Yes, even Texas has Environmental Idiots (EI's). These EI's have tried every lie, deception and distortion to stop the drilling. Ultimately, facts have prevailed over lies and emotion the EI crowd has spread. I invite you to research here, where drilling and production is actually happening. Right now there is a well being drilled about 1 mile from my house. I ate at a restaurant right next to the drill site last night.
ReplyDeleteI have looked around and everybody is talking about 250 billion barrels as an estimated reserve for Shfela, but I see no actual data.
ReplyDeleteCJ, the 250 billion barrel figure was presented by Dr. Yuval Bartov -- IEI's chief geologist -- at a Colorado School of Mines symposium at the end of last year. I asked him this morning how he reached this figure. He replied:
The estimate is actually fairly easy to calculate when you have the results of the drilling we had done. The way we calculate it is by sampling the subsurface at high resolution (1 m) in our 6 wells and using the data from 17 other wells in the area (water wells that go through the oil shale). The way the basin wide estimate is done is by correlating and mapping oil shale units in the subsurface to have an accurate volume of the oil shale. The volume calculation is based on the well data in the larger area and that is multiplied by the richness of the shale (the richness is measured in the lab).
continued...
After that the calculation is fairly simple (just multiply the numbers) as appose to conventional oil that one can not make the assumption of continues beds (conventional oil is hosted in pore space and is not part of the rock like oil shale).
Any way my estimates are probably on the low side since I used conservative thicknesses for places we had not solid data.
The work has been presented at the School of Mines symposium and was adopted by the AAPG committee that is estimating the world resources (headed by Dr. Boak).
#12 ·Jul 10 at 12:28am
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Re: Israel's Energy-Independent Future Looks Like
Judith Levy
CJ, Dr. Bartov added that one of IEI's investors hired an international firm, Lambert Energy, to confirm the assessments. They did so, and the investment was made.