An oil shale recovery system powered by solar thermal energy

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 (D-w) is studied. The result shows that, when the SM is 2.5, TES capacity is 16 h, and D-w 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. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd.