Rock Spring

T. Junghans, Technical Resources Inc., 6500 Rock Spring Drive, Suite 650, Bethesda, MD 20817, United States... 

The crude shale oil used in this study was obtained from an in situ combustion retorting experiment at Rock Springs, Wyo. (I, 2), during the last week of the experiment and is considered a representative steady state oil. Properties of the in situ crude shale oil are shown in Table I. 

Purpose. The first research program designed to recover shale oil by in situ combustion was planned for Rock Springs site 4. Little information has been published about in situ retorting methods for production... 

Figure 2. Location of wells, Rock Springs site 4...

Figure 5. Position of explosive charge in sequence of wellbore shots in five-spot pattern, Rock Springs site 5...

Procedure. Green River site 1 was located 5 mi west of the Rock Springs sites 4 and 5. The oil shale zone of interest, at approximately 346-385 ft, was selected after studying the analysis of cores cut from an earlier well. As determined by Fischer assay, oil yield of the cored section averaged about 21.0 gal/ton. 

Retorting of Oil Snale at Rock Springs, Wyo., U.S. Bur. Mines Tech. Prog. Rep. (June 1969) 16. 

Funding for this project was provided by the SF Phosphates, Ltd., Rock Springs, Wyoming. We thank Darin Howe and Bill Lew of SF Phosphates for their assistance and help in the project. We also thank Amber Jackson, Maqi Patz, Rachel Shorma, Junran Li, Mary Knight, Kari Fink, and Mary Fortier for their help in plant and soil sampling and laboratory analyses. 

The conduit that feeds Rock Spring is entirely in the phreatic zone. It has been explored by SCUBA diving for roughly 400 meters. The conduit carries a flux of clastic sediments. The diver reports a lift tube where the flow rises about 4 meters up a slope. Channel facies sediments collected from bottom and top of the lift tube were dried and sieved. The resulting grain size distribution (Fig. 9) reveals little difference between the bottom and the top of the tube. These sediments are being swept down the conduit by pipe flow and quite clearly follow undulations in the pipe. 

Figure 9. Grain size disbibution in feeder conduit of Rock Spring. Diamonds bottom of lift tube squm-es top of lift tube.

The chemical compositions of a shallow water-table and a deeper and semiconfined ground-water in carbonate rocks near State College, PA, are contrasted in Fig. 8.4 and Table 8.3. The figure shows the variation of specific conductance of Rock Spring, which is the shallow groundwater (r =... 

Figure 8.4 Specific conductance of Rock Spring near State College, Pennsylvania, from December 1971 to August 1972. The spring responded rapidly to snow melt (January 1972) and storm runoff (April, May, and June 1972) as evidenced by specific conductance minima during those months. From Jacobson and Langmuir (1974).

Figure 9. Chromatogram of shale oil from Rock Springs No. 9, a true in situ experiment. The alkene/alkane ratios are very low (coking) and the naphthalene content are very high (combustion and associated cracking). The naphthalene/methylnaphthalene ratios are high compared with the...

Figure 4.6. Correlation between TG mass-loss at 500°C with oil yield. Samples are . Anvil Points, Rifle, CO O, Logan Wash, CO , Rock Springs. WY A, Vernol. UT. The error bar denotes maximum mean deviation in TG values (121).

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