That's good news. Now for the bad news....
It takes two barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil shale liquid (source: Argonne National Laboratory and RAND). And without cutting-edge water treatment technology, the water discharge from oil shale refining will increase salinity in surrounding water, to unacceptable levels poisoning the local area.
So then, to extract 9 billion barrels of shale oil, you would need 18 billion barrels of water!! And that is the hitch! But there's more bad news.....In addition to the environmental impacts of oil shale, and the huge requirement of clean water, vast amounts of energy are required to support production. NRDC cites Rand Corporation estimates that generating 100,000 barrels of shale oil would require 1,200 megawatts of power—or the equivalent of a new power plant capable of serving a city of 500,000 people!!
And then, shale oil production faces huge technical and environmental obstacles and is many times more expensive to extract compared to crude oil. Shale oil, has not yet been commercially developed even in the United States, only shale gas, because of the huge investments involved and technical aspects that have not been mastered so far.
Considering this, it would be a decade or more for Pakistan to exploit its reserves, though extracting shale gas would be comparatively easier and the way forward. Shale oil extraction would be financially unaffordable for Pakistan as the infrastructure required would be gargantuan.
