Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Foods That Look Like Body Parts & What are They’re Good For
I recently read this article recently about how carrots ARE really good for your eyes and it is not just a myth but that
it is weird that they look like your eye. Which makes me wonder if
there were other fruits and vegetables out there that are good for a
certain part of your body AND look like that body part as well. I was actually VERY surpised as to how many I found. Come and take a Journey into the truth.
1. Carrot : Eye
Slice a carrot in half crosswise and
it’s easy to see that the veggie resembles an eye—look closely and
you’ll even notice a pattern of radiating lines that mimic the pupil and
iris. And the old wives’ tale is true: Munching on carrots will
actually promote healthy eyes. Carrots are filled with vitamins and
antioxidants, like beta-carotene, that decrease the chance of macular
degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in older people.
2. Walnut : Brain
The folds and wrinkles of a walnut
bring to mind another human organ: the brain. The shape of the nut even
approximates the body part, looking like it has left and right
hemispheres. And it’s no surprise walnuts are nicknamed “brain
food”—they have a very high content of omega-3 fatty acids, which help
support brain function.”
Long, lean stalks of celery look just
like bones—and they’re good for them, too. Celery is a great source of
silicon, which is part of the molecular structure that gives bones their
strength. Another funny bone coincidence: Bones are 23 percent sodium,
and so is celery.
4. Avocados : Uterus
The lightbulb shape of an avocado looks
like a uterus, and it supports reproductive health as well. Avocados
are a good source of folic acid. Folate has been found to reduce the
risk for cervical dysplasia, which is a precancerous condition.
5. Clams : Testicles
Studies have offered evidence that
clams, which bear a resemblance to testicles, are actually good for the
male sex organs. Research from the Netherlands has suggested that
supplementing your diet with folic acid and zinc—both of which clams are
high in––can have a significant effect on improving semen quality in
men.
6. Grapefruit : Breast
The similarity between round citrus
fruits––like lemons and grapefruit––and breasts may be more than
coincidental. Grapefruit contains substances called limonoids, which
have been shown to inhibit the development of cancer in lab animals and
in human breast cells.
7. Tomato : Heart
Slice open a tomato and you’ll notice
the red veggie has multiple chambers that resemble the structure of a
heart. Studies have found that because of the lycopene in tomatoes,
there is a reduced risk for heart disease in men and women who eat them.
And, if you mix them with a little fat, like olive oil or avocado, it
will boost your body’s lycopene absorption nearly tenfold.
8. Red Wine : Blood
Red wine, which is rich in antioxidants
and polyphenols, including powerful resveratrol, looks like blood. When
you drink it, you’re really loading up on the healthy stuff that
protects against destructive things in the blood, like LDL cholesterol,
which can cause heart disease. There’s also a blood-thinning compound in
red wine, so it reduces blood clots, which are associated with stroke
and heart disease.
9. Ginger: Stomach
Anyone who’s ever reached for a glass
of ginger ale when they’ve had a stomachache knows about the antinausea
effects of ginger. So it’s fitting that the herb somewhat resembles the
digestive organ. Gingerol, which is the ingredient responsible for
ginger’s pungent scent and taste, is listed in the USDA database of
phytochemicals as having the ability to prevent nausea and vomiting.
10. Sweet Potatoes : Pancreas
The oblong sweet potato bears a strong
resemblance to the pancreas, and also promotes healthy function in the
organ. Sweet potatoes are high in beta-carotene, which is a potent
antioxidant that protects all tissues of the body, including the
pancreas, from damage associated with cancer or aging.
The pineal gland is unique in that it sits alone in the brain whose
other parts are paired. It is the first gland to be formed in the foetus
and is distinguishable at 3 weeks. When our individual life force
enters our foetal body at 7 weeks, the moment in which we become truly
human, it passes through the pineal and
triggers the first primordial flood of DMT ( N-dimethyltryptamine).
Later, at birth, the pineal releases more DMT. DMT is also capable of
mediating pivotal experiences of deep meditation, shamanic states of
consciousness, psychoses, spiritual emergence and near death
experiences. The pineal gland's location deep in the brain seems to
intimate hidden importance. In the days before its function as a
physical eye that could see beyond space-time was discovered, it was
considered a mystery linked to superstition and mysticism. This pineal
gland is activated by Light, and it controls the various bio-rhythms of
the body. It works in harmony with the hypothalamus gland which directs
the body's thirst, hunger, sexual desire and the biological clock that
determines our aging process. When it awakens, one feels a pressure at
the base of the brain. While the physiological function of the pineal
gland has been unknown until recent times, mystical traditions and
esoteric schools have long known this area in the middle of the brain to
be the connecting link between the physical and spiritual worlds.
Considered the most powerful and highest source of ethereal energy
available to humans, the pineal gland has always been important in
initiating supernatural powers. Development of psychic talents has been
closely associated with this organ of higher vision. To activate the
'third eye' is to raise one's frequency and moving into higher
consciousness - all is a consciousness experience perceived through the
Eye of Time or Third Eye. Meditation, Visualization Yoga, and all forms
of Out of Body travel, open the Third Eye and allow you to 'see' beyond
the physical. As you practice, you will get it faster and more
frequently. Your psychic abilities will increase as well as your dream
time messages. You may first begin with your eyes closed, but as you
practice, you will be able to open your third eye by focusing your
attention and receiving messages with your physical eyes open. Planetary
vibration/frequency is accelerating exponentially, allowing souls to
peer into other realms far more easily than in the past. Frequency will
continue to rise until consciousness evolves out of the physical.
David Wilcock - An Explanation Of The Pineal Gland http://youtu.be/W9yF5AlYsH0 THE PINEAL GLAND IS A STARGATE http://youtu.be/NcvtNdTDnJ0 Pineal Gland & The Third Eye http://youtu.be/Z0d1IIZ6aC8
By: Jeff Andrews
Monday, November 7, 2011
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| [English Translation] Simple, all you need is 10 minutes of your time daily to keep your knees healthy. After you have reached a certain age, it is common that you start to feel pain, less flexible or some kind of cracking noise on your knees. In fact, problem is about to surface when you begin to realize the "existence" of certain parts of your body. It is no coincidence, unfortunately. You can think back the time when you were young. Did you ever have backache or pain in the neck? Did you feel pain in your shoulders or elbows? Did you ever experience weakness on your limbs? Your answers are probably "no". Why do you have these feelings? Simply put, it is the blood flow (and chi flow along the meridians) in your body is either no longer fluent or encounters some kind of blockage. The effect is similar to the blockage of underground sewage due to lack of maintenance. Therefore, it is important to maintain a healthy system for smooth blood flow and chi flow. To maintain your knees healthy, all you need is 10 minutes of time a day. 1. slap or massage the outer edge of the knees; (2 min.) 2. slap or massage the inner edge of the knees; (2 min.) 3. slap or massage the back (concave part) of the knees; (2 min.) 4. slap or massage the knee caps (2 min.) 5. Kneel down to "walk" on your knees (2 min.) See diagram on the right. Red circles are the relavant acupuncture points. Attention: Must do these everyday; must do these before any exercise. If you cannot "walk" on your knees, you can slap or massage the back of your knees instead. Elders should not run, do speed walking instead. Running can hurt your knees further. If you ever go hiking, down hill steps must put weight evenly on bottom of feet. Never put weight on toes only. Putting weight only on toes can lead to knee injury. |
FIRST, IT WAS EGGS.
TO ALL OF YOU OUT THERE WHO HAVE BEEN HOLDING BACK
NOW, IT'S CHEE YAU JAR.
WHAT'S NEXT? TO ALL OF YOU OUT THERE WHO HAVE BEEN HOLDING BACK
More reasons to eat Chee Yau Char (pig's lard) now because it contains natural fats and not trans fats as in processed food made by Man.
*This is a very useful 'must read' article. It makes sense to me. Even if you have received this before it is worth reading it again.*
*Low Cholesterol Levels Increases Cancer Risk*- American College of Cardiology
For years, I've been telling my patients that the medical establishment's obsession with lowering cholesterol per se to prevent heart disease is causing more harm than good.
If your doctor continues to get you worried about your high cholesterol levels, here's *a bit of news* for you...
In fact, your high cholesterol may be protecting you from cancer.
Today, I'll explain the truth behind the myth of cholesterol, and show you how to achieve heart health naturally.
A new study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology revealed that driving down cholesterol levels actually increases the risk of cancer.
Researchers at the Tufts University School of Medicine found that among people taking "*statin drugs - like Lipitor and Zocor* - there was a higher* *rate of cancer*. Although the link between the drugs and cancer wasn't clear, there was no doubt that *drastically low cholesterol levels *correlated to cancer risk.
The big drug makers continue to sell the notion that the best way to fight heart disease is to lower LDL levels, the so-called "bad" cholesterol.
Yet 75 percent of people who suffer heart attacks have normal cholesterol levels.*
It makes sense that low cholesterol levels are linked to cancer because cholesterol is one of your body's basic building blocks. You need it to produce testosterone, to build and repair cell membranes, and to preserve your nerve cells through the formation of the protective "sheaths" that cover them.
Starving your body of this critical substance will lead to other health problems. We already know that extremely low cholesterol levels result in muscle weakness, fatigue, depression, decreased sex drive, and "brain fog." This new research shows that there may be even more deadly consequences*.
What really matters is not low "*bad" cholesterol, but high levels of HDL*, the so-called "good" cholesterol*. As long as you have a high HDL count - 75 to 80, for example - it doesn't matter whether your total cholesterol is 150 or 350. A high HDL will always keep your risk of heart disease extremely low.*
So why haven't you heard this already? It may be because there's *no drug that effectively raises good cholesterol levels*. You can only effectively do it naturally.
Consume natural fats. Avoid processed or fast foods containing* "trans" fats * - these man-made substances *were never meant for consumption*, and your body doesn't know what to do with them. They wind up clogging your arteries and putting you on the fast track to heart disease. *
Instead, get your fat from free-range or grass-fed animals, eggs, nuts, and unprocessed vegetable oils*. These are some of the healthiest foods you can eat. (As with all foods, look for organic or minimally processed options whenever possible.)
The health benefit of these natural fats comes from their balance of *Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids*. Your body needs both but, as with cholesterol, they have to be in balance. *Omega-3s are great for your heart. They've been shown to prevent irregular heartbeat, reduce clogging of the arteries, lower blood pressure, and decrease inflammation in body tissues*.
If you stick to eating *natural fats*, you'll automatically get the right ratio of Omega-6 and Omega-3, which is about 2:1. As an added bonus, you'll automatically raise your "good" cholesterol levels and you'll reduce your risk of cancer.
Man’s discovery of God ceases to be a discovery if he begins this search with a foregone conclusion in his mind. Most religions impose a certain image of the type of God they would want their followers to worship. Whereas to mind, in the search for truth, which to me is the
search for God, the choice does not rest with us as to what to reject or accept.
Truth, God, call it what you will, is an awareness of the totality of existence, of our hopes and desires, our ambitions, our greed, our loves and thousands of other emotions which constitute what passes
for the living individual. I believe organized religions stand in the way of this awareness of the totality of existence.
Mind has its own place, a unique place in our lives. Without the use of your mind you won’t be able to find your way back home, and I won’t be able to conduct this conversation without its help. But mind can only move in the sphere of the known, in the sphere of time. Whereas we refer to God as the unknown the timeless, is it not ? Till a certain stage, in the three dimensions world, our mind can serve us to our advantage. But to reach the fourth dimension of existence, the mind instead of moving along the horizontal plane, must learn to shoot up vertically as it were and explode for the timeless, for the unknown to be.
Man being free, is wholly responsible to himself, unguided by any plan, by any spiritual authority, by any divine dispensation whatsoever. As he is free, he is, by that very freedom,
limited. If you were not free, you would have a different world from that which exists at present. As the will in everyone is free, it is limited, and because the self is small, without determination
or purpose at the beginning, it chooses, it discriminates, has its likes and has its dislikes. In the removal of that limitation, which is self-imposed on the self, lies the glory of the fulfilment of the
self, the freedom of the self.
This attainment is not brought about by ecstasy, nor does it lie in the abandoning of oneself to works or to prayer, or in the blind following of another, or in immolation of oneself to a cause. Because the “I”, the self, is in process of achieving, it is creating barriers between itself and its fulfilment, by its eagerness, its struggles, through fear, through innumerable complications. To remove these barriers of limitation, you need constant awareness,
constant watchfulness, constant self-reflection, which must be imposed on yourself, never by another. But if you discipline yourself unconsciously, without knowing where you are going, that self-discipline itself becomes a barrier. Understand the purpose of life, and from that very understanding will arise self-discipline. Self-discipline must be born out of the love of Life-vast,
immeasurable, whole, unconditioned, limitless, to which all humanity belongs. Because you love that freedom which is absolute, which is Truth itself, which is harmony; by the very force of that love, your self-discipline will make you incorruptible; so you must nourish that love. The incorruptibility of the self is the perfection of life.
Till man is made incorruptible by himself, he will know no happiness, he will be held in the bondage of friendship and the fear of loneliness. The weariness of strife will still hold him. Men must be created who are great in the serenity of harmony. Such men must be born in you. Such men must give rise to new transformations, must become a flame to burn away the dross danger to all unessential, childish things.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Oil Shale Reserves: Stinky Water, Sweet Oil
by David Y.H. Au on Sunday, November 6, 2011 at 2:27am
And, Carl...this will be great news for Colorado & Wyoming...!!!
Oil Shale Reserves
Oil Shale Reserves: Stinky Water, Sweet Oil
A Daily Reckoning White Paper Report By Dan Denning
"America’s oil shale reserves are enormous, totaling at least 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. That’s five times the
reserves of Saudi Arabia! And yet, no one is producing commercial quantities of oil from these vast deposits. All that oil is still sitting right where God left it, buried under the vast landscapes of Colorado and Wyoming.
"But what if we could safely and economically get our hands on all that oil? Imagine how the world might change. The U.S. would instantly have the world’s largest oil reserves. Imagine…having so much oil we’d never have to worry about Saudi Arabia again, or Hugo Chavez, or the mullahs in Tehran. And instead of ships lined up in L.A.’s port to unload cheap Chinese goods, we might see oil tankers lined up waiting to export America’s tremendous oil bounty to the rest of the world. The entire geopolitical and economic map of the world would change…and the companies in the vanguard of oil shale development might make hundreds of billions of dollars as they convert America’s untapped shale reserves into a brand new energy revolution."....Dan Denning.
You won’t think much of Rio Blanco County if you ever drive through it. In fact, unless you take a right turn off Interstate-70 West at Rifle, head north on Railroad Avenue and then west on Government road to Colorado state highway number thirteen, odds are you’ll never even step foot in Rio Blanco County.
But even if you keep heading west toward Grand Junction, through the town of Parachute and the shuttered oil shale refineries from the 1970s, you’ll see the Book Cliffs geologic formation on your right. For miles and miles. It’s a bleak landscape. Almost lunar. At first glance, it’s the kind of land you’d never want to explore, much less settle down in.
Oil Shale Reserves : America’s Strategic Future
In the small world of geologists, though, the region is well-known. In fact, you might even say it’s the single
most important patch of undeveloped, unloved, and desolate looking land in America. But you’d never guess this particular corner of the Great American Desert may play an integral role in America’s strategic future just by looking at it. You’d never guess that the whole stretch of brown, red, and orange land contains enough recoverable oil and gas to make you forget about the Middle East for the rest of time.
There are places in Rio Blanco County like Stinking Water Creek, named after the smelly mix of oil and water the first white settlers found there, that tell you oil’s always been around the Rocky Mountains. It’s just not always been easy to find. It’s one thing to find oil that bubbles out of the ground in liquid form. It’s quite another to drill a thousand feet down, and encounter oil locked up tight inside a greasy rock.
The first seeping pools of oil were discovered in Western Colorado as far back as 1876, the year the state entered the Union. But exploration didn’t get serious until drillers settled in the town of Rangely in Rio Blanco County.
By 1903, thirteen different drillers had come and gone in Rangely. According to the local museum, the only six wells that actually struck oil were producing just two to ten barrels of oil a day. Hardly a Spindeltop, the gusher that launched the Texas oil-boom on January 10th, 1901, and immediately began producing 100,000 barrels per day.
The energy reserves of the Piceance Basin, upon which Rio Blanco County sits, contain massive petroleum reserves of a very unusual nature: Oil shale.
Oil Shale Reserves : A Congressional Legacy
Most of the nation’s oil shale reserves rest under the control of the U.S. government – a legacy of a 95-year old Congressional Act. In 1910, Congress passed the Pickett Act, which authorized President Taft to set aside oil- bearing land in California and Wyoming as potential sources of fuel for the U.S. Navy. Taft did so right away. The Navy was in the process of switching from coal burning ships to oil burning ships. And the U.S. military, conscious of the expanding role of America in the world, needed a dependable supply of fuel in case of a national emergency.
From 1910 to 1925 the Navy developed the Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves Program. The program became official in 1927 and President Roosevelt even expanded the scope of the program in 1942 as the U.S. geared up for war with Japan and Germany.
Several of the oil fields set aside for the nation’s first strategic reserve, particularly Elk Hills in California,
would go on to produce oil for the U.S. government. Elk Hills was eventually sold off to Occidental Petroleum for $3.65 billion in 1998 in the largest privatization in U.S. history. The shale reserves, however, still remain, locked 1,000 feet underground in the Colorado desert.
Unlocking The Future
The destruction of Hurricane Katrina shows the importance of a strategic petroleum reserve, or, more accurately, a strategic energy reserve. But the SPR in Louisiana only holds about 800 million barrels of emergency, enough to get the country through about 90 days of regular oil usage. That’s barely a band-aid for a country that faces a potential energy heart attack.
In other words, the future of oil shale may have finally arrived. Extracting oil from shale is no simple task, which is why the reserves remain almost completely undeveloped. But an emerging new technology promises to unlock the awesome potential of the oil shale.
“The technical groundwork may be in place for a fundamental shift in oil shale economics,” the Rand Corporation recently declared. “Advances in thermally conductive in-situ conversion may enable shale-derived oil to be competitive with crude oil at prices below $40 per barrel. If this becomes the case, oil shale development may soon occupy a very prominent position in the national energy agenda.”
Estimated U.S. oil shale reserves total an astonishing 1.5 trillion barrels of oil – or more than five times the
stated reserves of Saudi Arabia. This energy bounty is simply too large to ignore any longer, assuming that the reserves are economically viable. And yet, oil shale lies far from the radar screen of most investors.
But we here at The Daily Reckoning are on the case. Just yesterday, I caught a first-hand glimpse of a cutting-edge oil shale project spearheaded by Shell. I trekked out to a barren moonscape in Colorado to tour the facility with Shell geologists. To summarize my findings, oil shale holds tremendous promise, but the technologies that promise to unlock this promise remain somewhat experimental. But sooner or later, the oil trapped in the shale of Colorado will flow to the surface. And when it does, it will enrich investors who arrive early to the scene.
Can Oil Shale Change The World?
America’s oil shale reserves are enormous, totaling at least 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. That’s five times the
reserves of Saudi Arabia! And yet, no one is producing commercial quantities of oil from these vast deposits. All that oil is still sitting right where God left it, buried under the vast landscapes of Colorado and Wyoming.
Obviously, there are some very real obstacles to oil production from shale. After all, if it was such a good
thing, we’d be doing it already, right? “Oil shale is the fuel of the future, and always will be,” goes a popular
saying in Western Colorado.
But what if we could safely and economically get our hands on all that oil? Imagine how the world might change. The U.S. would instantly have the world’s largest oil reserves. Imagine…having so much oil we’d never have to worry about Saudi Arabia again, or Hugo Chavez, or the mullahs in Tehran. And instead of ships lined up in L.A.’s port to unload cheap Chinese goods, we might see oil tankers lined up waiting to export America’s tremendous oil bounty to the rest of the world. The entire geopolitical and economic map of the world would change…and the companies in the vanguard of oil shale development might make hundreds of billions of dollars as they convert America’s untapped shale reserves into a brand new energy revolution.
Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter may have been entertaining similar ambitions in the late 1970s when they encouraged and funded the development of the West’s shale deposits. A shale-boom ensued, although not much oil flowed. The government spent billions and so did Exxon Mobil. New boomtowns sprung up in Rifle, Parachute, Rangely, and Meeker here in Colorado.
And then came Black Monday. May 2, 1982. The day Exxon shut down its $5 billion Colony Oil Shale project. The refineries closed. The jobs left (the American oil industry has lost nearly as many jobs in the last ten years as the automobile and steel industries.) And the energy locked in Colorado’s vast shale deposits sat untouched and unrefined.
Oil Shale Technology – Old & New
Extracting oil from the shale is no simple task. The earliest attempts to extract the oil utilized an environmentally unfriendly process known as “retorting.” Stated simply, retorting required mining the shale, hauling it to a processing facility that crushed the rock into small chunks, then extracted a petroleum substance called kerogen, then upgraded the kerogen through a process of hydrogenation (which requires lots of water) and refined it into gasoline or jet fuel.
But the difficulties of retorting do not end there, as my colleague, Byron King explains:
“After you retort the rock to derive the kerogen (not oil), the heating process has desiccated the shale (OK, that means that it is dried out). Sad to say, the volume of desiccated shale that you have to dispose of is now greater than that of the hole from which you dug and mined it in the first place. Any takers for trainloads of dried, dusty, gunky shale residue, rife with low levels of heavy metal residue and other toxic, but now chemically-activated crap? (Well, it makes for enough crap that when it rains, the toxic stuff will leach out and contaminate all of the water supplies to which gravity can reach, which is essentially all of ‘em. Yeah, right. I sure want that stuff blowin’ in my wind.) Add up all of the capital investment to build the retorting mechanisms, cost of energy required, cost of water, costs of transport, costs of environmental compliance, costs of refining, and you have some relatively costly end-product.”
But a new technology has emerged that may begin to tap the oil shale’s potential. Royal Dutch Shell, in fact, has recently completed a demonstration project (The Mahogany Ridge project) in which it produced 1,400 barrels of oil from shale in the ground, without mining the shale at all.
Instead, Shell utilized a process called “in situ” mining, which heats the shale while it’s still in the ground, to
the point where the oil leaches from the rock. Shell’s Terry O’Connor described the breakthrough in testimony before Congress earlier this summer (And Congress may have an acute interest in the topic, since the U.S. government controls 72% of all U.S. oil shale acreage):
“Some 23 years ago, Shell commenced laboratory and field research on a promising in ground conversion and recovery process. This technology is called the In-situ Conversion Process, or ICP. In 1996, Shell successfully carried out its first small field test on its privately owned Mahogany property in Rio Blanco County, Colorado some 200 miles west of Denver. Since then, Shell has carried out four additional related field tests at nearby sites. The most recent test was carried out over the past several months and produced in excess of 1,400 barrels of light oil plus associated gas from a very small test plot using the ICP technology…
“Most of the petroleum products we consume today are derived from conventional oil fields that produce oil and gas that have been naturally matured in the subsurface by being subjected to heat and pressure over very long periods of time. In general terms, the In-situ Conversion Process (ICP) accelerates this natural process of oil and gas maturation by literally tens of millions of years. This is accomplished by slow sub-surface heating of petroleum source rock containing kerogen, the precursor to oil and gas. This acceleration of natural processes is achieved by drilling holes into the resource, inserting electric resistance heaters into those heater holes and heating the subsurface to around 650-700F, over a 3 to 4 year period.
“During this time, very dense oil and gas is expelled from the kerogen and undergoes a series of changes. These changes include the shearing of lighter components from the dense carbon compounds, concentration of available hydrogen into these lighter compounds, and changing of phase of those lighter, more hydrogen rich compounds from liquid to gas. In gaseous phase, these lighter fractions are now far more mobile and can move in the subsurface through existing or induced fractures to conventional producing wells from which they are brought to the surface. The process results in the production of about 65 to 70% of the original “carbon” in place in the subsurface.
“The ICP process is clearly energy-intensive, as its driving force is the injection of heat into the subsurface.
However, for each unit of energy used to generate power to provide heat for the ICP process, when calculated on a life cycle basis, about 3.5 units of energy are produced and treated for sales to the consumer market. This energy efficiency compares favorably with many conventional heavy oil fields that for decades have used steam injection to help coax more oil out of the reservoir. The produced hydrocarbon mix is very different from traditional crude oils. It is much lighter and contains almost no heavy ends.
“However, because the ICP process occurs below ground, special care must be taken to keep the products of the process from escaping into groundwater flows. Shell has adapted a long recognized and established mining and construction ice wall technology to isolate the active ICP area and thus accomplish these objectives and to safe guard the environment. For years, freezing of groundwater to form a subsurface ice barrier has been used to isolate areas being tunneled and to reduce natural water flows into mines. Shell has successfully tested the freezing technology and determined that the development of a freeze wall prevents the loss of contaminants from the heated zone.”
It may seem, as O’Conner said, counter-intuitive to freeze the water around a shale deposit, and then heat up the contents within the deposit. It’s energy-intensive. And it’s a lot of work. What’s more, there’s no proof yet it can work on a commercial scale.
Yet both technologies, the freeze wall and the heating of shale, have been proven in the field to work. The freeze wall was used most recently in Boston’s Big Dig project. It was also used to prevent ground water from seeping into the salt caverns at the Strategic Petroleum reserve in Weeks Island, LA.
But still, you may be wondering, does it really make sense to heat the ground up a thousand feet down for three or four years and wait? Of course it does. In case you missed O’Conner’s math, Shell could harvest up to a million barrels per acre, or a billion barrels per square mile, on an area covering over a thousand square miles.
It’s still early days in the oil shale fields of Colorado and Wyoming, but it looks to me like someone’s gonna make a lot of money out there. I’m working hard to discover how we outside investors can play along.
Shell’s Mahogany Ridge
Last week, I paid a visit to Royal Dutch Shell’s oil shale project in Colorado. The visit left me with more questions than answers, but I came away from the place with the sense that this opportunity is very real…or, at least, it soon will be.
After driving across a vast expanse of “Nowhere,” Colorado, my brother and I met up with a few geologists from Shell. Of course it’s just those large, unpopulated tracts of high desert that make the area so appealing from a geopolitical point of view. Tapping into the oil shale 2,000 feet underground isn’t going to bother too many people. And there are no spotted owls around either. If the technology to turn shale into oil works, the entire area will become a new American boom patch.
Soon after we arrived, the geologists escorted us around the facility, chatting all the while about the successes and challenges of their venture.
The two trickiest aspects of oil shale development, as the geologists and engineers explained, are heating the shale to extreme temperatures, while simultaneously surrounding the heated area with a subterranean ice wall. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, which part of the project will be the most challenging. If you were about to change the world by making it economic to tap into as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil under the Colorado plateau, you’d be pretty careful about showing your competitors how you were going to do it.
First, anything that heats up rock around it to around 600 or 700 degrees Fahrenheit has to conduct electrically generated heat well. The most conductive metals on the Periodic Table of Elements are, in order, silver, copper, and gold. Naturally, the number of heaters you put in a place affects the amount of time it takes to turn the shale goo into API 34 crude. The more heaters, the more cost, though.
And given the fact that Shell does not know yet if the heaters will be recoverable, you can see that sticking
silver, copper, or gold heaters 2000 meters underground and then leaving them there once the kerogen has been pumped has a serious effect on the economics of your operation.
At the moment, Shell is not sure what the optimal size of production zones ought to be. The big issue here is how big can a freeze-wall be to be effective and freezing the groundwater surrounding a shale deposit? The test projects, as you can see, were quite small. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, what the optimum size is for a each “pod” or “cell”. That’s what they’ll have to figure out at the next stage…and the picture with the dirt is a football field sized project….where rather than creating the freeze-wall at 50 meters down…they will do it at 1,000 ft. down…. with 2,000 being the desired and necessary depth for commercial viability. I’m not sure anyone has ever created a freeze-wall at that depth….neither is shell. But we’ll find out. The oil itself that comes from the process looks like…oil. No heavy refining needed.
Shell thinks the whole thing is economic at a crude price of $30. So barring a major reversal of geopolitical trends, they’re forging ahead.
Since the Bureau of Land Management owns about 80% of the oil shale acreage in Colorado, there is no investment play on private companies that might own land with rich shale deposits. Although, if Shell and the DOE are right that you can recover a million barrels of oil per acre…it wouldn’t take much land to make a man rich out here.
Oil Shale: Testing Public Lands
The Bureau of Land Management recently received ten applications (by eight companies) for a pilot program to develop Colorado’s shale reserves. The program allows the companies access to public lands for the purpose of testing shale-extraction technologies. You see below an interesting mix of large, publicly traded oil giants and small, privately held innovators.
How will it all unfold? Well, for starters, it could all utterly fail. To me, Shell’s in-situ process looks the most
promising. It also makes the most sense economically. There may be a better, less energy-intensive way to heat up the ground than what Shell has come up with. But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil clearly have the resources to scoop up any private or small firm that makes a breakthrough.
And there are a host of smaller firms involved with the refining and drilling process that figure to play a key
role in the development of the industry, should that development pick up pace.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005, otherwise known as a listless piece of legislation without any strategic vision, does, at least, make provision for encouraging research into the development of shale. But government works slow, when it works at all. It’s going to take an external shock to the economy to really ratchet up interest and development of the nation’s energy reserves…say…something like a nuclear Iran.
Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning
Read more: Oil Shale Reserves http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/#ixzz1crOcGTDT
Oil Shale Reserves
Oil Shale Reserves: Stinky Water, Sweet Oil
A Daily Reckoning White Paper Report By Dan Denning
"America’s oil shale reserves are enormous, totaling at least 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. That’s five times the
reserves of Saudi Arabia! And yet, no one is producing commercial quantities of oil from these vast deposits. All that oil is still sitting right where God left it, buried under the vast landscapes of Colorado and Wyoming.
"But what if we could safely and economically get our hands on all that oil? Imagine how the world might change. The U.S. would instantly have the world’s largest oil reserves. Imagine…having so much oil we’d never have to worry about Saudi Arabia again, or Hugo Chavez, or the mullahs in Tehran. And instead of ships lined up in L.A.’s port to unload cheap Chinese goods, we might see oil tankers lined up waiting to export America’s tremendous oil bounty to the rest of the world. The entire geopolitical and economic map of the world would change…and the companies in the vanguard of oil shale development might make hundreds of billions of dollars as they convert America’s untapped shale reserves into a brand new energy revolution."....Dan Denning.
You won’t think much of Rio Blanco County if you ever drive through it. In fact, unless you take a right turn off Interstate-70 West at Rifle, head north on Railroad Avenue and then west on Government road to Colorado state highway number thirteen, odds are you’ll never even step foot in Rio Blanco County.
But even if you keep heading west toward Grand Junction, through the town of Parachute and the shuttered oil shale refineries from the 1970s, you’ll see the Book Cliffs geologic formation on your right. For miles and miles. It’s a bleak landscape. Almost lunar. At first glance, it’s the kind of land you’d never want to explore, much less settle down in.
Oil Shale Reserves : America’s Strategic Future
In the small world of geologists, though, the region is well-known. In fact, you might even say it’s the single
most important patch of undeveloped, unloved, and desolate looking land in America. But you’d never guess this particular corner of the Great American Desert may play an integral role in America’s strategic future just by looking at it. You’d never guess that the whole stretch of brown, red, and orange land contains enough recoverable oil and gas to make you forget about the Middle East for the rest of time.
There are places in Rio Blanco County like Stinking Water Creek, named after the smelly mix of oil and water the first white settlers found there, that tell you oil’s always been around the Rocky Mountains. It’s just not always been easy to find. It’s one thing to find oil that bubbles out of the ground in liquid form. It’s quite another to drill a thousand feet down, and encounter oil locked up tight inside a greasy rock.
The first seeping pools of oil were discovered in Western Colorado as far back as 1876, the year the state entered the Union. But exploration didn’t get serious until drillers settled in the town of Rangely in Rio Blanco County.
By 1903, thirteen different drillers had come and gone in Rangely. According to the local museum, the only six wells that actually struck oil were producing just two to ten barrels of oil a day. Hardly a Spindeltop, the gusher that launched the Texas oil-boom on January 10th, 1901, and immediately began producing 100,000 barrels per day.
The energy reserves of the Piceance Basin, upon which Rio Blanco County sits, contain massive petroleum reserves of a very unusual nature: Oil shale.
Oil Shale Reserves : A Congressional Legacy
Most of the nation’s oil shale reserves rest under the control of the U.S. government – a legacy of a 95-year old Congressional Act. In 1910, Congress passed the Pickett Act, which authorized President Taft to set aside oil- bearing land in California and Wyoming as potential sources of fuel for the U.S. Navy. Taft did so right away. The Navy was in the process of switching from coal burning ships to oil burning ships. And the U.S. military, conscious of the expanding role of America in the world, needed a dependable supply of fuel in case of a national emergency.
From 1910 to 1925 the Navy developed the Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves Program. The program became official in 1927 and President Roosevelt even expanded the scope of the program in 1942 as the U.S. geared up for war with Japan and Germany.
Several of the oil fields set aside for the nation’s first strategic reserve, particularly Elk Hills in California,
would go on to produce oil for the U.S. government. Elk Hills was eventually sold off to Occidental Petroleum for $3.65 billion in 1998 in the largest privatization in U.S. history. The shale reserves, however, still remain, locked 1,000 feet underground in the Colorado desert.
Unlocking The Future
The destruction of Hurricane Katrina shows the importance of a strategic petroleum reserve, or, more accurately, a strategic energy reserve. But the SPR in Louisiana only holds about 800 million barrels of emergency, enough to get the country through about 90 days of regular oil usage. That’s barely a band-aid for a country that faces a potential energy heart attack.
In other words, the future of oil shale may have finally arrived. Extracting oil from shale is no simple task, which is why the reserves remain almost completely undeveloped. But an emerging new technology promises to unlock the awesome potential of the oil shale.
“The technical groundwork may be in place for a fundamental shift in oil shale economics,” the Rand Corporation recently declared. “Advances in thermally conductive in-situ conversion may enable shale-derived oil to be competitive with crude oil at prices below $40 per barrel. If this becomes the case, oil shale development may soon occupy a very prominent position in the national energy agenda.”
Estimated U.S. oil shale reserves total an astonishing 1.5 trillion barrels of oil – or more than five times the
stated reserves of Saudi Arabia. This energy bounty is simply too large to ignore any longer, assuming that the reserves are economically viable. And yet, oil shale lies far from the radar screen of most investors.
But we here at The Daily Reckoning are on the case. Just yesterday, I caught a first-hand glimpse of a cutting-edge oil shale project spearheaded by Shell. I trekked out to a barren moonscape in Colorado to tour the facility with Shell geologists. To summarize my findings, oil shale holds tremendous promise, but the technologies that promise to unlock this promise remain somewhat experimental. But sooner or later, the oil trapped in the shale of Colorado will flow to the surface. And when it does, it will enrich investors who arrive early to the scene.
Can Oil Shale Change The World?
America’s oil shale reserves are enormous, totaling at least 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. That’s five times the
reserves of Saudi Arabia! And yet, no one is producing commercial quantities of oil from these vast deposits. All that oil is still sitting right where God left it, buried under the vast landscapes of Colorado and Wyoming.
Obviously, there are some very real obstacles to oil production from shale. After all, if it was such a good
thing, we’d be doing it already, right? “Oil shale is the fuel of the future, and always will be,” goes a popular
saying in Western Colorado.
But what if we could safely and economically get our hands on all that oil? Imagine how the world might change. The U.S. would instantly have the world’s largest oil reserves. Imagine…having so much oil we’d never have to worry about Saudi Arabia again, or Hugo Chavez, or the mullahs in Tehran. And instead of ships lined up in L.A.’s port to unload cheap Chinese goods, we might see oil tankers lined up waiting to export America’s tremendous oil bounty to the rest of the world. The entire geopolitical and economic map of the world would change…and the companies in the vanguard of oil shale development might make hundreds of billions of dollars as they convert America’s untapped shale reserves into a brand new energy revolution.
Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter may have been entertaining similar ambitions in the late 1970s when they encouraged and funded the development of the West’s shale deposits. A shale-boom ensued, although not much oil flowed. The government spent billions and so did Exxon Mobil. New boomtowns sprung up in Rifle, Parachute, Rangely, and Meeker here in Colorado.
And then came Black Monday. May 2, 1982. The day Exxon shut down its $5 billion Colony Oil Shale project. The refineries closed. The jobs left (the American oil industry has lost nearly as many jobs in the last ten years as the automobile and steel industries.) And the energy locked in Colorado’s vast shale deposits sat untouched and unrefined.
Oil Shale Technology – Old & New
Extracting oil from the shale is no simple task. The earliest attempts to extract the oil utilized an environmentally unfriendly process known as “retorting.” Stated simply, retorting required mining the shale, hauling it to a processing facility that crushed the rock into small chunks, then extracted a petroleum substance called kerogen, then upgraded the kerogen through a process of hydrogenation (which requires lots of water) and refined it into gasoline or jet fuel.
But the difficulties of retorting do not end there, as my colleague, Byron King explains:
“After you retort the rock to derive the kerogen (not oil), the heating process has desiccated the shale (OK, that means that it is dried out). Sad to say, the volume of desiccated shale that you have to dispose of is now greater than that of the hole from which you dug and mined it in the first place. Any takers for trainloads of dried, dusty, gunky shale residue, rife with low levels of heavy metal residue and other toxic, but now chemically-activated crap? (Well, it makes for enough crap that when it rains, the toxic stuff will leach out and contaminate all of the water supplies to which gravity can reach, which is essentially all of ‘em. Yeah, right. I sure want that stuff blowin’ in my wind.) Add up all of the capital investment to build the retorting mechanisms, cost of energy required, cost of water, costs of transport, costs of environmental compliance, costs of refining, and you have some relatively costly end-product.”
But a new technology has emerged that may begin to tap the oil shale’s potential. Royal Dutch Shell, in fact, has recently completed a demonstration project (The Mahogany Ridge project) in which it produced 1,400 barrels of oil from shale in the ground, without mining the shale at all.
Instead, Shell utilized a process called “in situ” mining, which heats the shale while it’s still in the ground, to
the point where the oil leaches from the rock. Shell’s Terry O’Connor described the breakthrough in testimony before Congress earlier this summer (And Congress may have an acute interest in the topic, since the U.S. government controls 72% of all U.S. oil shale acreage):
“Some 23 years ago, Shell commenced laboratory and field research on a promising in ground conversion and recovery process. This technology is called the In-situ Conversion Process, or ICP. In 1996, Shell successfully carried out its first small field test on its privately owned Mahogany property in Rio Blanco County, Colorado some 200 miles west of Denver. Since then, Shell has carried out four additional related field tests at nearby sites. The most recent test was carried out over the past several months and produced in excess of 1,400 barrels of light oil plus associated gas from a very small test plot using the ICP technology…
“Most of the petroleum products we consume today are derived from conventional oil fields that produce oil and gas that have been naturally matured in the subsurface by being subjected to heat and pressure over very long periods of time. In general terms, the In-situ Conversion Process (ICP) accelerates this natural process of oil and gas maturation by literally tens of millions of years. This is accomplished by slow sub-surface heating of petroleum source rock containing kerogen, the precursor to oil and gas. This acceleration of natural processes is achieved by drilling holes into the resource, inserting electric resistance heaters into those heater holes and heating the subsurface to around 650-700F, over a 3 to 4 year period.
“During this time, very dense oil and gas is expelled from the kerogen and undergoes a series of changes. These changes include the shearing of lighter components from the dense carbon compounds, concentration of available hydrogen into these lighter compounds, and changing of phase of those lighter, more hydrogen rich compounds from liquid to gas. In gaseous phase, these lighter fractions are now far more mobile and can move in the subsurface through existing or induced fractures to conventional producing wells from which they are brought to the surface. The process results in the production of about 65 to 70% of the original “carbon” in place in the subsurface.
“The ICP process is clearly energy-intensive, as its driving force is the injection of heat into the subsurface.
However, for each unit of energy used to generate power to provide heat for the ICP process, when calculated on a life cycle basis, about 3.5 units of energy are produced and treated for sales to the consumer market. This energy efficiency compares favorably with many conventional heavy oil fields that for decades have used steam injection to help coax more oil out of the reservoir. The produced hydrocarbon mix is very different from traditional crude oils. It is much lighter and contains almost no heavy ends.
“However, because the ICP process occurs below ground, special care must be taken to keep the products of the process from escaping into groundwater flows. Shell has adapted a long recognized and established mining and construction ice wall technology to isolate the active ICP area and thus accomplish these objectives and to safe guard the environment. For years, freezing of groundwater to form a subsurface ice barrier has been used to isolate areas being tunneled and to reduce natural water flows into mines. Shell has successfully tested the freezing technology and determined that the development of a freeze wall prevents the loss of contaminants from the heated zone.”
It may seem, as O’Conner said, counter-intuitive to freeze the water around a shale deposit, and then heat up the contents within the deposit. It’s energy-intensive. And it’s a lot of work. What’s more, there’s no proof yet it can work on a commercial scale.
Yet both technologies, the freeze wall and the heating of shale, have been proven in the field to work. The freeze wall was used most recently in Boston’s Big Dig project. It was also used to prevent ground water from seeping into the salt caverns at the Strategic Petroleum reserve in Weeks Island, LA.
But still, you may be wondering, does it really make sense to heat the ground up a thousand feet down for three or four years and wait? Of course it does. In case you missed O’Conner’s math, Shell could harvest up to a million barrels per acre, or a billion barrels per square mile, on an area covering over a thousand square miles.
It’s still early days in the oil shale fields of Colorado and Wyoming, but it looks to me like someone’s gonna make a lot of money out there. I’m working hard to discover how we outside investors can play along.
Shell’s Mahogany Ridge
Last week, I paid a visit to Royal Dutch Shell’s oil shale project in Colorado. The visit left me with more questions than answers, but I came away from the place with the sense that this opportunity is very real…or, at least, it soon will be.
After driving across a vast expanse of “Nowhere,” Colorado, my brother and I met up with a few geologists from Shell. Of course it’s just those large, unpopulated tracts of high desert that make the area so appealing from a geopolitical point of view. Tapping into the oil shale 2,000 feet underground isn’t going to bother too many people. And there are no spotted owls around either. If the technology to turn shale into oil works, the entire area will become a new American boom patch.
Soon after we arrived, the geologists escorted us around the facility, chatting all the while about the successes and challenges of their venture.
The two trickiest aspects of oil shale development, as the geologists and engineers explained, are heating the shale to extreme temperatures, while simultaneously surrounding the heated area with a subterranean ice wall. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, which part of the project will be the most challenging. If you were about to change the world by making it economic to tap into as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil under the Colorado plateau, you’d be pretty careful about showing your competitors how you were going to do it.
First, anything that heats up rock around it to around 600 or 700 degrees Fahrenheit has to conduct electrically generated heat well. The most conductive metals on the Periodic Table of Elements are, in order, silver, copper, and gold. Naturally, the number of heaters you put in a place affects the amount of time it takes to turn the shale goo into API 34 crude. The more heaters, the more cost, though.
And given the fact that Shell does not know yet if the heaters will be recoverable, you can see that sticking
silver, copper, or gold heaters 2000 meters underground and then leaving them there once the kerogen has been pumped has a serious effect on the economics of your operation.
At the moment, Shell is not sure what the optimal size of production zones ought to be. The big issue here is how big can a freeze-wall be to be effective and freezing the groundwater surrounding a shale deposit? The test projects, as you can see, were quite small. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, what the optimum size is for a each “pod” or “cell”. That’s what they’ll have to figure out at the next stage…and the picture with the dirt is a football field sized project….where rather than creating the freeze-wall at 50 meters down…they will do it at 1,000 ft. down…. with 2,000 being the desired and necessary depth for commercial viability. I’m not sure anyone has ever created a freeze-wall at that depth….neither is shell. But we’ll find out. The oil itself that comes from the process looks like…oil. No heavy refining needed.
Shell thinks the whole thing is economic at a crude price of $30. So barring a major reversal of geopolitical trends, they’re forging ahead.
Since the Bureau of Land Management owns about 80% of the oil shale acreage in Colorado, there is no investment play on private companies that might own land with rich shale deposits. Although, if Shell and the DOE are right that you can recover a million barrels of oil per acre…it wouldn’t take much land to make a man rich out here.
Oil Shale: Testing Public Lands
The Bureau of Land Management recently received ten applications (by eight companies) for a pilot program to develop Colorado’s shale reserves. The program allows the companies access to public lands for the purpose of testing shale-extraction technologies. You see below an interesting mix of large, publicly traded oil giants and small, privately held innovators.
- Natural Soda, Inc. of Rifle, Colorado.
- EGL Resources Inc. of Midland, Texas.
- Salt Lake City-based Kennecott Exploration Company.
- Independent Energy Partners of Denver, Colorado
- Denver-based Phoenix Wyoming, Inc.
- Chevron Shale Oil Company.
- Exxon Mobil Corporation.
- Shell Frontier Oil and Gas Inc
How will it all unfold? Well, for starters, it could all utterly fail. To me, Shell’s in-situ process looks the most
promising. It also makes the most sense economically. There may be a better, less energy-intensive way to heat up the ground than what Shell has come up with. But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil clearly have the resources to scoop up any private or small firm that makes a breakthrough.
And there are a host of smaller firms involved with the refining and drilling process that figure to play a key
role in the development of the industry, should that development pick up pace.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005, otherwise known as a listless piece of legislation without any strategic vision, does, at least, make provision for encouraging research into the development of shale. But government works slow, when it works at all. It’s going to take an external shock to the economy to really ratchet up interest and development of the nation’s energy reserves…say…something like a nuclear Iran.
Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning
Read more: Oil Shale Reserves http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/#ixzz1crOcGTDT
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