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01/06/2009
San Leon Energy has signed an agreement with Morocco’s state-owned ONHYM to employ proprietary in-situ vapour extraction (IVE) technology over the 6,000 sq km Tarfaya oil shale project. San Leon estimates reserves of billions of barrels of recoverable oil from the area. IVE is an in-situ oil shale extraction technology that forces heated gas through a central injector well and into a high oil yielding and fractured oil shale. The oil is then produced from several extraction wells, equidistant from the central injection well. IVE was tested successfully in the Naval Petroleum Reserve #3 at the Tea Pot Dome field in Wyoming, with assistance from the US government, in order to increase production from the existing heavy oil reserves The in-situ process of oil extraction is cleaner environmentally than the alternative technology, open pit mining, which is invasive. San Leon’s IVE process ‘cooks’ the oil shale in the ground (or in-situ) and the gases utilised in the process are recycled within a closed system.
News Item details
Region: Africa
Keywords:
Exploration and production
- Oil
Subjects:
Mining Engineering,
Resource use and management,
Project Management,
Policy and Governance,
Mining and quarrying,
Oil and gas extraction,
Crude oil,
Heavy gas oil,
Oil,
Shale oil,
Solid fossil fuels and derived products,
Primary energy production,
Reserves,
Oil reserves
