Eastern Utah Operations
EDL’s Eastern Utah Operations program plans to increase the United States’ domestic liquid fuel supply. Our office at the Utah State University’s Bingham Research Center (BRC), located in Vernal, Utah, is surrounded by world-class energy assets like oil, natural gas, oil shale and oil sands. The BRC is uniquely positioned to accommodate a wide range of next generation fossil energy research, development and demonstration.
Currently, America is burdened by the excessive cost oil imports place on the U.S. economy. The Eastern Utah Operations program is designed to relieve this burden by using our own resources, such as the rich and concentrated unconventional fuel resources (i.e., unconventional oil, gas and coal) located in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. This will result in an environmentally-sustainable U.S. unconventional fuels industry which uses our coal resources for more environmentally sustainable uses and creates new industries with high-paying jobs.
EDL’s Next Generation Fossil-Energy Program will select projects (most likely unconventional gas, oil, or coal) that emphasize end-to-end solutions of fossil energy production, utilization and environmental stewardship; include integration of advanced computing/simulation, measurement and monitoring; and that demonstrate linkages of the comprehensive needs of the demonstration-scale project.
The selected field laboratory projects might demonstrate technologies such as:
- Oil from low permeability units
- In-situ microbial generation of methane from coal, kerogen or bitumen
- In-situ liquefaction of coal
- In-situ combustion/gasification for heavy oils/oil sands
- Oil shale technologies, in-situ or ex-situ retort
