In Situ Pyrolysis of Oil Shale with the Copper-Amine Complex as an Efficient Catalyst
Lianhua Hou, Chen Wang, Jing Chen, Bo Sun, Ziyi Xu, Baojian Shen, Chunming Xu, Xiaochun Zhu · 2026
Read In Situ Pyrolysis of Oil Shale with the Copper-Amine Complex as an Efficient Catalyst by Lianhua Hou, Chen Wang, Jing Chen, Bo Sun, Ziyi Xu, Baojian Shen, Chunming Xu, Xiaochun Zhu (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13647371.txt.
Description
Lianhua Hou and seven colleagues test a copper-based catalyst for cooking oil out of shale rock inside a sealed reactor, a step toward producing shale oil in place. The target rock is the Chang 7 shale of China's Ordos Basin, rich but stubborn with ordinary methods. Their catalyst joins copper to an amine partner and was dosed at a tiny fraction of the rock's weight. The sealed run held at a fixed high temperature for three hours.
With the catalyst, shale oil yield jumped by about a third over plain heating. The oil also came out cleaner: roughly a third of its sulfur and over half of its nitrogen were stripped away. Quality gains of that size matter for refining costs. The authors say the cheap, low-dose catalyst shows potential for cost-effective in-ground shale production, a route that could unlock reserves that surface mining cannot touch.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Lianhua Hou, Chen Wang, Jing Chen, Bo Sun, Ziyi Xu, Baojian Shen, Chunming Xu, Xiaochun Zhu |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 26 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |