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.