DOE unconventional fossil energy report

The U.S. Department of Energy is seeking comments from industry and academia on a draft report titled “Unconventional Fossil Energy: Domestic Resource Opportunities and Technology Applications.” The report, requested under federal legislation appropriating funds for DOE fossil energy research, is intended to act as a basis for a future DOE research strategy by overviewing the status of the various unconventional fossil energy resources that exist in the United States. The legislation requires industry and academia input to the report.

Unconventional resources considered include tar sands, heavy oil, gas from coal seams, shale gas, methane hydrate and unmineable coal.

The report suggests a research strategy that especially focuses on the development of residual oil in existing oil fields while also storing waste carbon dioxide in these fields; new research into the use of coal gasification as a method of developing unmineable coal; continued research into the production of natural gas from methane hydrate and the potential to use methane hydrate production as a means of sequestering carbon dioxide; continued research into the environmental and technical challenges associated with the development of shale gas and tight gas sands; and the use of “advanced computational methods” in the evaluation of the cumulative environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the concurrent regional development of conventional and unconventional resources.

“Any strategy is subject to the limitations of our current understanding of the recoverable volumes of the unconventional resources and the publicly available information related to current research activities in the private sector,” the report says. “However, we believe that these five elements should remain central parts of the Department of Energy’s approach to R&D that supports development of U.S. domestic energy resources.”

The report is available on the DOE website at www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/oil-gas/index.html.

—Alan Bailey