The Probable Fate of Saudi Arabia

Dec 26, 2007 16:45

The following is in response to firstashore; the quote is from his livejournal. You should read it, he's a cool guy! Anyway, I thought I should share this with my other LJ Friends ...

I would LOVE to see Underground Coal Gasification (UCG) and Coal-to-Liquids (CTL) tech start up and make Saudi's oil redundant. Especially since I have reason to believe they ( Read more... )

energy, diplomacy, oil, saudi, political

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Comments 22

anonymous December 27 2007, 02:02:50 UTC
Nuclear energy is no substitute for oil consumption in a country where a bare fraction of petroleum use goes to electrical generation. IE, the US.

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jordan179 December 27 2007, 02:10:53 UTC
Nuclear energy is no substitute for oil consumption in a country where a bare fraction of petroleum use goes to electrical generation. IE, the US.

In another generation, cars will mostly run off fuel cells anyway. Thus the main issue will be the source of the grid power.

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anonymous December 27 2007, 03:12:59 UTC
And are nuclear reactors and fuel cells going to provide the vast array of plastics and petrochemicals that the majority of oil consumption is used for today?

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operations December 27 2007, 03:29:36 UTC
Plastic can already be synthesized from carbon made of tree ash, I believe, or at least there is progress in the research. I will look around and see if I can find that article again.

Would it be a strong as current plastics? Probably not, but it would be biodegradable, given enough time. Not fast enough to be useless, but not forever either.

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zaimoni December 27 2007, 04:00:56 UTC
Cutting back on uncatalyzed fusion reaction research made sense at the time; you really did need to wait for better materials science to come online before trying again. It doesn't scale worth anything. A small prototype can't be made into a power-generating prototype simply by making it larger; the energy cost of the magnetic bottle grows at exactly the same order as the reaction rate.

What could work quickly is lithium-catalyzed fusion of deuterium:
6Li + 2H -> 8 Be -> 2 4He + 22H -> 2 6Li .

(Beryllium-8 decay is on the order of microseconds.)

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Brilliant people abound here mrmeval December 28 2007, 21:49:49 UTC
:)

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