Begin the invasion of Venezula!

[MKSheppard]

Link

Venezuela oil 'may double Saudi Arabia'

A new US assessment of Venezuela's oil reserves could give the country double the supplies of Saudi Arabia.

Scientists working for the US Geological Survey say Venezuela's Orinoco belt region holds twice as much petroleum as previously thought.

The geologists estimate the area could yield more than 500bn barrels of crude oil.

This assessment is far more optimistic than even the best case scenario put forward by President Hugo Chavez.

The USGS team gave a mean estimate of 513bn barrels of "technically recoverable" oil in the Orinoco belt.

Chris Schenk of the USGS said the estimate was based on oil recovery rates of 40% to 45%.

Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), Venezuela's state oil company, has not commented on the news.

However, Venezuelan oil geologist and former PDVSA board member Gustavo Coronel was sceptical.

"I doubt the recovery factor could go much higher than 25% and much of that oil would not be economic to produce", he told Associated Press news agency.

Venezuela holds the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has proven reserves of 260bn barrels.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'm all for pumping blood right into the ground to force out oil, but I don’t see how they can make any credible claims on the matter at all without being able to do surveys on the ground and sinking test wells to back it up. Seriously, you just can’t do that, and I doubt they have any really new information to work from after all the foreign companies got chased out.

[J]

40-45% recovery rate for tar sands. Not even the high quality reservoirs in Saudi Arabia have that high of a recovery rate. Forget about it. Going by this ridiculous standard, Canada should upgrade its reserves to 760 billion barrels or so.

[Sriad]

40-45% recovery rate for tar sands. Not even the high quality reservoirs in Saudi Arabia have that high of a recovery rate. Forget about it. Going by this ridiculous standard, Canada should upgrade its reserves to 760 billion barrels or so.

IIRC we've got a trillion or two barrels of oil in my backyard (Colorado/Wyoming) if we allow techniques that don't exist yet in our estimates!

Good old oil shale. We'll have it licked 5 years before fusion!

[Beowulf]

Might be licked 6 months after fusion. Fusion would give the power necessary to crack the tar in situ, while also hopefully reducing the energy cost to a point where it's comparable to pumping the normal stuff out.

[Phantasee]

I have a vague idea of how a nuclear power plant could generate enough steam to make it easier to extract oil from the oil sands, but I don't know enough about fusion to explain how that could help increase the recoverable oil in the Alberta oil sands. Would it just be used to generate power for steam plants?

[J]

Might be licked 6 months after fusion. Fusion would give the power necessary to crack the tar in situ, while also hopefully reducing the energy cost to a point where it's comparable to pumping the normal stuff out.

Fission is good enough, a few dozen nuclear stations will generate enough electricity to cook out all the oil the US needs from the oil shales using the in situ process developed by Shell.

I have a vague idea of how a nuclear power plant could generate enough steam to make it easier to extract oil from the oil sands, but I don't know enough about fusion to explain how that could help increase the recoverable oil in the Alberta oil sands. Would it just be used to generate power for steam plants?

Oil shales, not oil sands. To get the oil out of oil shales, Shell has developed a process where they put giant electrical heaters in the rocks to cook the oil shale into oil and then pump out the oil. At the same time they build a large refrigerated wall of ice around the oil shales to keep the oil from leaking out area and contaminating the environment.

For oil sands a nuke plant is used to generate steam for extracting the oil and also to make a bunch of hydrogen for upgrading the heavy tar-like oil into a lighter thinner oil which can flow down a pipeline. Right now they use natural gas for both but there's only so much natural gas around, not nearly enough to fully exploit our oil sands. That's why nukes are being talked about.

[Phantasee]

I know that much, but I was wondering if fission would make it easier/more efficient somehow, maybe improving the percentage of recoverable oil out of the oil sands.

Fun fact: despite all the talk about oil, natural gas is the number one generator of income for the Alberta economy, with oil coming in at third or fourth.

[J]

I know that much, but I was wondering if fission would make it easier/more efficient somehow, maybe improving the percentage of recoverable oil out of the oil sands.

It's not so much a matter of efficiency but scale, with nuclear there's a lot more room for expanding operations. Right now they're limited by the available amount of fresh water and the cost of natural gas which they need to boil the water into steam for extracting the oil. With nuclear they can run a bunch of desalination plants to make as much water as they want and boil it all with the heat from the reactors.

[Phantasee]

Desalinization plants? In Northern Alberta?

I understand what you mean though, cheaper to use nukes to warm up all that water instead of burning our number one income source to dig up our number 4 income source.