الفهرس 
Chapter 1- IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Egypt is facing an energy crisis that is expected to aggravate in the near future because of the expected rapidly increasing gap between hydrocarbons consumption and production. During the “grace transition” period – during which conventional oil and gas are available - a number of solutions should be addressed to alleviate this imminent crisis. One of such solutions is the exploitation of Egypt’s tremendous potential of the unconventionals, oil shale being one of them. This research presents a solution to such a crisis in Egypt by developing the tremendous oil shale resources that exist in the Quseir - Safaga district in the Eastern Desert which is expected to contain around 12 billion barrels of oil and 24 trillion standard cubic feet of gas. Samples are collected from different areas in the Quseir - Safaga district. Geochemical characterization and retorting experiments of such samples confirm the potentiality of oil shale deposit. The study has also arrived at simple correlations that can be easily applied to evaluate the potential of such oil shale resource without the need to conduct time consuming costly experiments. Retorting experiments are continued on the most prolific sample (Nekheil) in order to determine the optimum retorting conditions which are found to be 25.4 mm particle size, 450 oC maximum temperature and around 20 minutes residence time. A comprehensive utilization system aiming at achieving high utilization factor in an environmentally friendly manner is discussed as well. A simple economic study is conducted to evaluate the importance of value added byproducts whose value is estimated to be up to 6 times that of oil. In addition, in-situ production technologies are studied and screened in order to select the most suitable to apply in the oil shale deposit of the Eastern Desert. However, for a primary pilot project, this is very expensive to apply. To help solve this, the study has theoretically developed two techniques, namely Radio-Frequency (RF) and Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC) In-Capsule technologies, that might help gather data about the problems that face in-situ production with less economic burden than that associated with deep exploration testing wells.