Conference Papers

The quantity of heavy hydrocarbons - heavy crude oil and natural bitumens - known or surmised to be present in the earth is large. The total is estimated to fall in the range of 5,879,712-5,942,139 million barrels. The portion of this that may ultimately prove recoverable is small, perhaps on the order of 500,000 million barrels of heavy crude oil and 200,000 million barrels of bitumen.

An oil-shale mine and experimental retort were operated near Rulison, Colorado by the U. S. Bureau of Mines from 1926 to 1929. Samples from seven drill cores from a retorted oil-shale waste pile were analyzed to determine 1) the chemical and mineral composition of the retorted oil shale and 2) variations in the composition that could be attributed to weathering. Unweathered, freshly...

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) has been doing research on coal quality for almost a century. Most of the work of the USGS regarding coal went into efforts to assess the quantity of coal in the United States, not the quality. On April 9-11, 1985, the U. S. Geological Survey, along with cosponsors - the Association of American State Geologists, the U. S. Department of Energy, the...

No abstract available at this time

No abstract available at this time

Oil shale from the lower part of the Eocene Green River Formation in the Piceance Creek Basin, Colorado, averages 0. 13 weight percent fluorine, which is about twice that found in common shales, but is the same as the average amount found in some oil shales from other parts of the world. Some fluorine may reside in fluorapatite; however, limited data suggest that cryolite may be...

In a legal dispute in the State of Washington (Colville Confederated Tribes vs. Boyd Walton, Jr. , Farmer), it became necessary to determine the proportion of transmission losses sustained by developed water that was commingled with native water in a natural stream channel. Ground-water pumping and irrigation adjacent to the stream resulted in both gains and losses to flow along the...

Sediment containing gas hydrates from two distant Deep Sea Drilling Project sites (565 and 568), located about 670 km apart on the landward flank of the Middle America Trench, was studied to determine the geochemical conditions that characterize the occurrence of gas hydrates. Site 565 was located in the Pacific Ocean offshore the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica in 3,111 m of water. The...

Coalified wood was examined by SEM and CPMAS**1**3C NMR to delineate chemical and physical alterations responsible for gelification. Early coalification selectively degrades cellulosic components, preserving lignin-like components that are eventually transformed to coal. Cellular morphology persists until the chemical composition becomes uniform, at which point the cells coalesce under...

EROS Data Center is evaluating the geodetic accuracy of Landsat-4 data from both the Multispectral Scanner (MSS) and Thematic Mapper (TM) processing systems. Geodetic accuracy is a measure of the precision of Landsat data registration to the Earth's figure. This paper describes a geodetic accuracy assessment of several MSS and TM scenes, based on the geodetic referencing information...

The number or types of origins of the components of a coal bed cannot be determined from its bulk composition. Minerals such as quartz, calcite, and pyrite as well as macerals such as vitrinite can originate from a variety of processes that result from different depositional conditions. The Upper Freeport coal bed was studied and characterized by sampling and analyzing its mappable...

Changes in seepage flux and hydraulic head (ground-water level) resulting from ground-water drainage into the first and subsequent cuts of a surface coal mine can be estimated by a technique that considers drainage from the unsaturated zone and drainage effects of the advancing mine. A 'single-layer' technique is used, in which each layer of a stratified aquifer system is considered...