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| Re: Oil at $61/bbl - Top THREE Reasons Saudis are keeping price down (1246663) | |||
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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 Fri Dec 12 09:55:09 2014, in response to Re: Oil at $61/bbl - Top THREE Reasons Saudis are keeping price down, posted by SLRT on Thu Dec 11 20:35:29 2014. Yeah, sorry, graveyard shifts will do that to you.Suffice it to say oil, or at least petroleum transportation fuels, can be synthesized from carbon feedstocks, including coal, natural gas, and even carbon dioxide, so long as you have enough energy. One way to get that energy is to use a nuclear reactor. But light water reactors used now are expensive, dangerous, inefficient, and their waste heat is worthless once its done producing electricity. Green Freedom (from the link above) assumes gasoline price of around $4.60, because they limited themselves to utilizing existing reactor designs and the reactor ends up being most of the cost. Various Gen 4 reactors achieve greater safety, efficiency, and temperatures, but IMHO the molten salt reactors combine low pressure and high temperature and that makes them especially worth looking into because they can be used to both produce electrical energy and supply heat to synthfuel plants. There's a fairly wide variety of reactors possible, using Thorium, Uranium, or both for fuel. There are also differences in salt composition, moderators, and so on. A number of companies including Transpower, Terrestrial Energy, and FLiBe energy are all looking at different designs. Some of these can be designed efficiently as Small Modular Reactors which can be trucked into place, loaded with fuel, and operating in a relatively short time. SMRs lend themselves to mass production, particularly if they're a low pressure design and do not require a large containment dome. Of particular interest is Terrapower's DMSR reactor, partly because Dr. LeBlanc, who runs the company has indicated there was interest from the companies doing tar sands extraction prior to the Saudis cutting into their profits. With the decline in oil prices those oil companies should be looking for ways to get more oil to the market, and diverting oil from plant gas to the cracking tower by using nuclear energy to produce process heat for extraction and refining is a good way to go about it. But it's a bit of a double edged sword for the oil companies. If we can produce reactors on production lines for little more than the cost of an airliner then economics of Green Freedom above change drastically. With the nuke accounting for more than 50% of the cost, halving that cost could lead to it producing gasoline substitutes for less than $2.00 at the pump. It wouldn't be a gimmick or a monopolist push to drive out competition, it'd produce at below the world commodity price for 30 some odd years. And because it'd use atmospheric carbon dioxide that fuel would never have a carbon tax slapped on it. It'd be cheaper than sucking oil out of the ground and refining it and as green as you can get. And all that while it produces a gigawatt or two of electricity for around a tonne of Uranium. Finally, if we should manage to make something with the Thorium fuel cycle work (DMSR uses Uranium), such as FLiBe's liquid fluoride thorium reactor, then there are a lot of interesting byproducts. Technetium 99m and Bismuth 213 are potential medical applications. Plutonium 238 is another potential byproduct that NASA would like to use for deep space missions. These things are worth their weight in gold right now. |
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