Recently there has been renewed interest in the possibility of obtaining liquid hydrocarbon fuel from shale oil deposits. The Green River formation of oil shale has been extensively studied due to the potential of this resource, but many of these studies were conducted over 20 years ago and the studies mainly dealt with atmospheric retorting conditions. A recent approach to shale oil production is through in-situ processes. These processes will obviously operate with overburden pressures that are greater than atmospheric retorting conditions. The present research explores the kinetic parameters for the extracted kerogen using TGA methods. These methods allow the fitting of data using non-linear regression techniques to determine the activation energies and pre-exponential factors for the pyrolysis of the kerogen in an inert atmosphere.
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