Harold Vinegar

The role of chief scientist was created to reinforce the Shell commitment to science, technology and innovation. Each chief scientist has internationally recognised expertise in individual fields. They deliver innovative technology that has a strong impact on wider business development.

Video transcript

The world uses a very large amount of hydrocarbons every day. Because of that, it's getting more and more difficult to find conventional hydrocarbons that can meet that need. So increasingly, we're starting to look at unconventional resources. Here in the basin, in this part of Colorado, we're looking at about one trillion barrels of oil shale. It's the largest, richest, thickest deposit, anywhere in the world.

You wouldn't think we'd be able to make a light hydrocarbon liquid out of rocks such as this, but this rock, when heated to high temperatures, actually generates a very light hydrocarbon. You're only looking here, for a sense of scale, at the upper hundred feet of the mahogany ledge, but below this, there's over a thousand feet of oil shale.

There have been multiple attempts, going back to the 1850's, to produce the oil shale. But Shell has, over the last twenty years, developed this in-situ conversion process, so we don't mine it as previous attempts were made. What we do in this process is basically drill wells and install heaters into the wells, and gradually heat the oil shale up to temperatures of about 300 degrees centigrade. This has been a revolution in the production of oil shale.

This is one of our electric heater wells. We're heating about 700 feet of oil shale at this location. The power building generates the power that goes through the black cables into the well head here, and down into the heater. The heat moves out from the heater wells, gradually heating up the oil shale, and the oil moves towards the production well, where it's pumped over to the separation and collection facilities over there.

Effectively, what we do is what would naturally happen here over a hundred million years, but what we're going to do is over a period of three to five years, we're going to slowly heat the oil shale and do the same thing. This process is unique to Shell. We've been working on this since 1980 and gradually improving the technology. What this shows to me is Shell's continuity of effort. It's belief that research and continued work in an area of importance will ultimately lead to being able to solve the problems. We now have over 190 patents. We're starting to apply it in pilots and demonstrations around the world.

The in-situ conversion process just has absolutely unbelievably large potential, because there is so much unconventional resources in the world: between seven and nine trillion barrels. This is just incredibly exciting, something that makes you want to get up in the morning and go to work.