Oil Shale, my Father and My First Inklings of Suspicion About Innovation

While I was quite young, about 14 years, my father, who was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, told us (his family) about new research he was starting.  The world was faced with the possible oil shortages.  We had long lines at gas pumps and price increased a lot.  He thought about the problems involved with retorting oil shale.  There were pilot projects that involved strip mining the shale and then cooking the rock in large vessels, which transformed the kerogen into something that could be refined into commercial grade oil.  Nobody doubted that it worked, but the cost and environmental impact were prohibitive.  He wondered if perhaps using microwave instead of conducted heat would be superior.

This idea drew derision for the obvious reasons.  Electricity is produced in processes that waste most of the available energy, whether by combusting fuel, absorbing sunlight or capturing wind energy.  Even as a young teenager, it dawned on me that there was an energy balance:  so much was produced and so much was consumed.  In an typical electricity generation process, about 2/3 of the heat energy is lost.  So, the microwave retorting process would need to return enough hydrocarbon fuel to make three times as much energy in electricity, just to break even.  To make it worthwhile, the hydrocarbon energy produced would need to be many times the electrical energy consumed.   How did those compare in the lab?  I asked my father about this and he was convinced that the product contained much more energy than was consumed electrically.

Working in a lab where my main goal was to measure energy out verses energy consumed taught me a lot.  With that perspective, I look at what my father had to measure and conclude that it was not a very difficult thing to determine in his experiments.  Electrical power input is measured very simply.  Output power is just the quantity of gas and oil produced in terms of their heat content, and there is not much dispute about that.  A possibly more relevant measure is the cost of the electric power versus the commercial value of the product.  Until his death, he often talked about the process and he was absolutely certain of its economic viability.

The microwave energy is primarily absorbed by molecular structures that can resonate, so water absorbs it. Dr. Phillips, et al., demonstrated interesting anomalies with water vapor in a chamber stimulated by microwave energy.

Within the striated shale, there is moisture.  When it is heated, the rock puffs up, resembling a paperback book that was dropped in the bathtub and left to dry.  This is caused by the steam pressure expanding the layers apart.  These conditions resemble those within the apparatus used in the experiments cited in that paper.  There would be expected to be in abundance monatomic hydrogen and isolated water molecules, and that is a recipe for hydrino formation.

If the experiments run in my father's lab were generating hydrino, that might explain the energy gain that my father was certain they were seeing.

Another surprise was the quality of the oil produced.  It looked just like refined motor oil, about 30W, as clear as unused oil.  I remember looking at the Mason jar of oil that he brought home one night.  I usually stayed up to talk to him about my school and his work.  He was as excited as could be.  He knew that the oil from conventional retorts resembled tar that required much refining. 

The refining process called "cracking" is the breaking of long hydrocarbon molecules into shorter chains, to adjust the ratio of the yield from a unit of crude.  Getting a low viscosity oil from oil shale requires a lot of cracking after heating it into a thick liquid.  Thermal cracking uses heat (about 450–750 °C) and sometimes high pressure to break bonds through free-radical reactions.  Microwave energy is not absorbed by the hydrocarbons to an appreciable extent, so it seems clear that the pressure cooker of kerogen sealed water molecules was creating ideal conditions to reduce viscosity. 

He filed for a patent, which was eventually assigned to him.  He started a company, Interactive Microwave, Inc.  I asked him, what does this have to do with interactivity, a term that I'd only seen applied to computer systems?  He explained that investors generally do not understand what they are buying and a buzzword was enough to gain credibility.  I thought that was nuts, and it is, but so is the stock market.

Soon after the stock issued, the price of oil dropped and the value of the stock went to zero.  There had been interest from some companies willing to build a pilot plant, and eventually, a portable extraction system.  A borehole through shale would be drilled and fitted to a waveguide, fitted with vacuum for liquid and gas.  The VSWR would be adjusted with a tuning stub to minimize reflected energy.  The bore hole impedance would change as the operation proceeded, so the tuning stub adjustments would be automated.  As oil drains and water is evaporated from the expanded shale, the microwaves would penetrate further into the surrounding rock.  The oil extracted rock becomes transparent to microwave.  In principle, it seemed simple, but he never got past the modified commercial microwave oven.

I was flummoxed by what I saw happen.  I was thrilled at the prospect of oil money, technology saving us from skyrocketing gasoline prices, and preserving the environment.  So, this was a hard lesson about research and development in fluctuating economic circumstances.  Still, I reasoned, there were vast reserves of oil in shale, and this process did not require extensive drilling.  It seemed like a portable device removing oil from shale could economically harvest a good yield and sooner or later, it would be cost effective.  But, fracking was developed.  However, fracking would not utilize hydrino generation.  There are seemingly credible claims that fracking destroys ground water.

This is part of what got me past the common assumption that if a better way is discovered, the forces of capitalism will drive innovation to maximize exploitation of the discovery for profit.  If that was true, at the very least, there would have been an effort to determine how worthwhile this process may be.