North American Unconventional Oil Resources: Electronic Access to Technical, Legal, Environmental and Economic Issues

Levey, Raymond A.¹, Phillip Smith², Milind D. Deo³, Robert Keiter⁴, Mike Lemmon⁵ (1) Energy & Geoscience Institute; University of Utah, Salt Lake, UT (2) Department of Chemical Engineering; University of Utah, Salt Lake, UT (3) University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (4) Wallace Stegner Center; University of Utah, Salt Lake, UT (5) David Eccles School of Business; University of Utah, Salt Lake, UT

The University of Utah, Heavy Oil Center (UHOC) has built a comprehensive electronic repository in three important resource areas for North America (heavy oil/bitumen, oil shale, and oil sands). With support from U.S. DOE a map server interface using ArcIMS server technology allows internet access to users to explore in a geospatial setting via the internet. The purpose of the repository is to assist all stakeholders (corporations, government, financial and the public sector), in evaluating the resources and making informed public impact decisions. The UHOC map server provides a series of frames in HTML pages linked to other frames for the user to explore multiple sources of information in layers. A major component in the unconventional oil resources for the 21st century is the viability of oil shale production in the U.S.A. With upwards of 2.0 trillion barrels of oil shale resources in the U.S.A. a tremendous volume of 500 billion barrels is estimated to be recoverable. Examples using a GIS interface demonstrate the utility.