An oil shale recovery system powered by solar thermal energy

Abstract

The oil shale in-situ recovery requires huge thermal energy, which has become one of the important factors restricting its further development. Using solar thermal energy for oil shale in-situ recovery is thought to be an environmental friendly way to solve the problem. In this paper, an in-situ solar thermal shale oil recovery system with rated output power of 100 MW is analyzed as a study case to understand its cost-effectiveness. The correlation between oil shale production cost (PC) and the solar multiple (SM), the thermal energy storage (TES) capacity and the distance between injection well and production well (Dw) is studied. The result shows that, when the SM is 2.5, TES capacity is 16 h, and Dw is 20 m, the PC of oil shale in-situ recovery with solar intermittent heating mode is the lowest, which is 306 $/t and is even lower than that with continuous heating mode by natural gas and natural gas-assisted solar energy. Besides, the sensitivity analysis shows that the cost of O&M has the biggest effect on the PC. However, due to the high initial cost of the solar field, when the discount rate is above 8.23%, oil shale in-situ recovery by solar energy intermittent heating is uneconomical.