[billnotgatez]

When discussing the energy situation there is information given out in which there are conflicting views. This thread is designed to be an adjunct to other threads in the Energy Challenge discussion.

[billnotgatez]

Many think that just having electric cars that you plug in will solve the carbon dioxide problem. They fail to see that the production of electricity produces effects on the environment. Not only that but the changing of chemical energy into mechanical and then into electrical is less efficient than going directly from chemical to electrical. Also there are losses due to transmission. Some suggest that solar panels would be used instead, but there seems to be a steep starting cost relative to the savings. I wonder how many square feet of space are required to create enough electricity for a 50-mile commute.

[billnotgatez]

Could someone do the mathematics?

How many nuclear power plants does it take to create the same energy as 80 million barrels of crude oil per day?

[Donaldson Tan]

A 420MW Nuclear Plant is capable of producing 17000 bpd of Crude Oil.

Ref: http://www.chemicalforums.com/index.php?topic=14060

This means you would need 4700 such plants to produce 80M bpd.

It is a hard to secure public approval to build 1 nuclear plant, talk alone 4700 such plants.

[Donaldson Tan]

Is anyone familiar with pyroelectronics?

Apparently, a pyroelectric crystal can directly convert heat energy directly into electricity, but to date, no man-made material can replicate this material.

[billnotgatez]

I assume you mean something better than thermocouples. We are familiar with them on the deep space probes.

[billnotgatez]

How many of these would be located in the USA

edit
these nuclear power plants = these

[Donaldson Tan]

The location of such plants would be a political decision.

[billnotgatez]

Let me rephrase the question.
How many plants needed to accommodate the oil usage in USA?

[Donaldson Tan]

What is the USA demand for crude?

It is not the most efficient or best process anyway.

Direct conversion of nuclear energy to gasoline or diesel is ideal.

[billnotgatez]

I was hoping that someone had the USA energy usage percentage of world energy usage at hand.

I was thinking that if we went all electric cars there would have to be a source for the electric. That would mean a lot of nuclear power plants. Therefore electric cars while potentially not causing carbon dioxide emissions would cause other hazards and heat emissions.

It would be nifty if you could get a nuclear power plant to provide the energy to convert carbon dioxide and water to gasoline and diesel.

By the way 80 million barrels may be old news based on this link.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/oil.html

Also so far when talking nuclear we are referring to fission not fusion.

[mekrob]

The US used about 21 mpd in 2006.  However, if you account for the fact that it takes a few years to build a nuclear power plant and if you assume we build them all at once, then by the time they are done we'll be using about 22 to 22.5 mpd.  So about an extra 1300 plants in the US. 

By the way 80 million barrels may be old news based on this link.

And in a few years, we'll be back down to 80 mpd.

[Donaldson Tan]

I recently hear of a potential oil boom in the USA base on oil shales in the green river formation. Shell is trying to incorporate deep underground heat exchangers to convert the oil shales (kerogen) into crude oil and also reduce the viscosity of the synthetic crude oil formed.

[mekrob]

I recently hear of a potential oil boom in the USA base on oil shales in the green river formation. Shell is trying to incorporate deep underground heat exchangers to convert the oil shales (kerogen) into crude oil and also reduce the viscosity of the synthetic crude oil formed.

Go back throughout history and there have been half a dozen other "potential oil shale booms".  It was always "if the price of oil goes up just a few more dollars, then oil shale will flood the markets, etc".  However, oil shale has a horrendous energy return on investment.  Even the best areas of the Green River formation yield maybe a 2:1 ratio, while some of the worst conventional oil sources aren't that bad.  Back in the '80's, Exxon spent a massive amount of money (billions?), but it proved to be too expensive.  It was somewhere around a couple thousand dollars per barrel.  If oil cost that much, then gas would be between $50 and $100 per gallon. 

Besides, even if Shell (who's currently working on a new technique) do get it to work, the amount of oil will still be very small.  I believe the numbers are something like a 1 GW nuclear plant to produce 100,000 bpd. 

[Donaldson Tan]

To further qualify mekron's statement on energy consumption for the production of synthetic crude from shale oil, RAND Corporation estimates that Shell's approach of using ice to keep out water from the oil shales on the perimeter and using heat exchanger to convert the kerogen to crude would require a 1.2GW Nuclear Power Plant to produce 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

Terry O'Connor, a Vice president for Shell Unconventional Resources commented "Shell estimates that its process would produce 3.5 units of energy for every one it uses. That balance isn't great compared with that of conventional oil reclamation efforts (estimated at 20 to 1 today and perhaps 100 to 1 in the 1930s). But the new ratio makes sense because the easiest fuels to recover on the planet have already been tapped. We're all looking at technologies that are going to be more expensive and resources that are going to be more difficult to access and recover." on US News in 2006.