“What’s up with Qatar and Venezuela? I don’t see the connection unless it’s ‘Iran’.”
They are both OPEC nation’s. Venezuela has the largest recoverable hydrocarbon resources on earth it’s heavy oil basin has a trillion barrels in it of which 15% ish percent is recoverable at anything close to economic rates. Technically you could get at 60-80% depending on how hard you went at it with solvents, steam gravity drainage or huff and puff, super critical CO2, electromagnetic waves to heat it, joule heating it’s EROI is already close to one, you could easily go negative and expend more energy extracting it vs what product comes out of the ground then it’s not an energy source it’s a sink. You could trade energy types say nuclear heated steam for semi liquid petroleum really bitumen and asphalt not petroleum. The net loss of primary exergy is still there but you do get a desired product worth more than the BTUs of steam to get at it in dollars. Nuclear heat is cheap oil is expensive. Same could be said of say solar electrons at 3/10s of a cent per kWh that’s 3412BTU a MMBTU would then cost 87 cents.
[Using the 2021 average SOR for SAGD of 2.7 and a conservative estimate of 3.9 million BTU per barrel of steam:
This means approximately 10.53 million BTU of thermal energy would be used per barrel of oil production for a SAGD operation with an SOR of 2.7.]
That’s $9.35 cents worth of solar joule heating.
CANDU nukes produce $18 per megawatt hour at the plant gate. That’s 1.8c per kWh so $55.55 per bbl in nuclear electrons. The steam off a CANDU directly could be used but you can only move it 25 ish km before it’s too cold to use for SAGD oil recovery so any further you must move electrons.
Gas turbines are $50 and coal is $35 at minimums for break even prices per megawatt hours. So those sources are out you would be better off burning gas on site for the 10.53 MMBTU to steam directly. $4 MMBTU wholesale gas is then $42.12 per bbl produced in NatGas costs.
There there is this inconvenient fact....
One barrel of oil contains approximately 5.6 to 5.8 million British Thermal Units (MMBtu).
So it takes 10.53 MMBTU of steam to get out 5.6 MMBTU of bitumen. Simple fact is you cannot run a civilization long term on negative EROI energy it is impossible by the very physics of it. Yes you can make lots of profit in the short term by burning one energy source for another of the first one is worth less on the market than the product of the combustion of the first. This is the greed that is driving the world currently it’s profit motive not solid physics.
Note how the math does work for fusion energy...the sun is a fusion reactor in the sky, we have the means to make energy harvesting machines that return well over 100 times their energy cost to create in electrons produced. A panel in a 4 kWh PVOUT pays back it’s EROI in under 6 month’s and has a 30 year minimum life to 80% original capacity there are panels over 40 years old with old tech still working at 80% capacity it’s expected that current thin film will last 50 years or more till under 75% they are warranted to 30(80%) but real world decline curves show an asymptotic drop off trend.
Remember a single hour of sunshine falling on Texas is more energy than the entire human race uses in a day all 8+ billion of us. It’s never a primary energy source supply problem it is a capture, distribution, and storage problem.
So, while we may have ‘carbon based resources’ the energy in is going to soon exceed energy produced on the difficult ones. Thus, we need fusion. Hopefully soon.