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| Re: Oil at $61/bbl - Top THREE Reasons Saudis are keeping price down (1246458) | |||
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Re: Oil at $61/bbl - Top THREE Reasons Saudis are keeping price down |
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Posted by WillD on Thu Dec 11 09:35:03 2014, in response to Oil at $61/bbl - Top THREE Reasons Saudis are keeping price down, posted by SLRT on Wed Dec 10 12:19:33 2014. Saudi's dropping oils prices nipped alternative oil extraction in the bud.Entertainingly this may yet come back to bite them in the ass. The Canadians *really* like all the revenue they've gotten out of the tar sands. But it's barely cost competitive at the current commodity price, because they consume so much of the crude they produce (as well as natural gas) in refining the tar sands. But if the energy source is non-fossil fuel then the inefficiency disappears and they can distribute more of their production outside the plant. A few years ago a number of nuclear power plant installations were being considered to provide process heat for tar sand refining. These could be CANDU or LWR designs, but Terrestrial Energy's Denatured Molten Salt Reactor combines small size, high output temperatures, and passive safety in a way existing designs do not. From the way Mr. LeBlanc of Terrestrial talks it sounds like they've been priming the tar sands extractors for something like this for years, and have a truck transportable 500MW thermal design ready to go. Whether they'll get something built and installed before the Tar Sands extraction dries up remains to be seen. They're helped by the fact that the reactors will be used for process heat and thus do not need accompanying turbines and generators. But if they do get it built and if MSRs pan out, then we'll face another nuclear genie being let out of the bottle, but this one should be a lot more benevolent. They may start operation on tar sands, but it's more than likely they'll quickly supplant the mines. If the Canadians can get the DMSR (or any other small modular, high temperature reactor design, be it LFTR, WAMSR, or some form of SmAHTR) into operation to keep the tar sands competitive then the Saudis' gamble is likely to backfire. There is no way they'll be able to compete with the efficiency of a low pressure, high temperature reactor producing electricity at a lower cost than coal and giving useful process heat and beneficial radioisotopes as byproducts. |
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