Currently, enterprises of oil and gas industry use oil, gas condensate and natural gas as main source of raw material. At the same time, there is need to consider alternative resources of mineral raw materials like coal, shale oil and heavy oil, he said.

“International experience of processing oil shale (Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, China and other) confirms their suitability as an alternative source of hydrocarbons. The perspective reserves of oil shales in Uzbekistan have been estimated at the volume of 47 billion tonnes,” Zakirjan Salimov underlined.

“The Institute managed to produce fractional distillation of two tar samples taken from two oil shale deposits Baysun and Sangruntau. We developed mass balance of the diesel fraction extracted from the tar, which show that the yield of diesel fraction of the oil shale tar is 30% for Sangruntau and 22% for Baysun”.

“Given that the yield from pyrolysis reaction of oil shale is 10-12%, the 100 kg of oil shale deposit Baysun can make 2.2% of the diesel fraction, and Sangruntau - 3.3%. We also identified presence of small quantities of rare-earth, rare, non-ferrous and precious metals in solutions of sulfuric and leaching after shale processing”, he said.

Zakirjan Salimov said that it is planned to organize production of complex processing of oil share on the base of Sangruntau deposit in Navoi region with the cost of US$150 million.

According to preliminary date, the processing complex will produce 300,000 tonnes of oil products and 500,000 tonnes of aromatic hydrocarbons a year.