Saudi Arabia Says It is No Longer An Oil Producing Country

Oilprice ^ | Jun 06, 2021 | Julianne Geiger

[Ozark Tom]

Be serious—put a microwave receiver there and beam the power down from orbit. Blasting sand and deposits wreak havoc upon panels—keep them clean for continued operation.

[Ozark Tom]

Venezuelan heavy-oil sands require only modest temperatures relative to Canadian bitumen, to release the hydrocarbons.

[JD_UTDallas]

With Elon’s 100 ton starship rocket geosynchronous or at least sun synchronous orbital solar becomes a reality. Solar panels in high particulate areas are given a quartz top coating that is as hard as quartzite rock blowing sand which is also quartz cannot scratch a surface that has a hardness equal to or greater. It’s not that expensive to CVD deposit polycarbon diamond coatings on a silica base that are optically transparent. Depending on the latitude determines the pitch of the panels at anything more than 20 degrees the pitch is too high for microdrifts to form or piles for that matter. In windy areas the wind itself will blow the surface dust off or you could send a drone robot down the lines with a air blower like a large version of a leaf blower and just blowem once a week or so these robots would run up and down the lines 24/7 being charged via the same panels they service at the ends of the runs having been to the empty quarter it’s flat as a pits a$$ for miles and miles in every direction a 4 or 6 wheeled robot would have zero issue rolling down the lines of panels like mowing a yard.

[JD_UTDallas]

The issue is not the insitu recovery temps it’s the amounts of steam needed to thin the API down enough to get it to flow to the recovery well. Then once you get it to the surface you have to either keep it hot to make it flow or dilute it with a dilutant such as hexane or some other light napthalene. This yields a heavy crude that is 4 to 6 percent sulfur. No where on earth can you sell products with a sulfur content above 1% the USA is 15 parts per million for on road use and under 500 for off road dropping to 15 ppm soon and it’s already 15ppm in California for all fuels. The EU also has a 15 or 50 ppm limit. To reach these levels with a heavy crude you must hydrocrack it with pure hydrogen. Your refinery must be set up to have not only the catalysts which are specific too heavy sour crudes you also need a source of millions of kgs per year of pure hydrogen.

Realistically there is nothing in common to heavy crude, bitumen and heavy oil sands relative to light sweat crudes from the North Sea, West Texas or parts of the Kingdom the three largest sources of crude oils and by that virtue light crudes. Heavy crudes also yield low yields of petrol, jet fuels and gasoils without again heavy hydrocracking the long chain hydrocarbons into C8 to C20s from the 40+ that is the majority of heavy crudes. All that hydrogen plus fluidic crackers add costs and more importantly environmental impacts. The world is never going to run on tar sands or bitumen on a scale that it does with light oils. The EROI is simply too low, the pollution generated by it’s extraction, cracking, and refining are simply above the levels that people would tolerate on a huge scale. They will always be niche high cost products.