Bitumen beyond combustion: how to triple oil sands value, reduce emissions, and create an advanced material industry for 2% of a battery plant’s subsidies
December 13, 20237:00 AM Terry Etam0 Comments
What if some phenomenally large energy/materials breakthroughs were right here in front of us, vastly more accessible than experimental aspirations, but held back by an image problem?
To help ponder that question, it is necessary to share with you one of the best (meaning funniest), most explosive miscalculations in modern science; the reason for bringing it up is that it’s simply too good not to. But before that, some context.
It seems there are a number of energy paths ahead of us. One, there will be some sort of breakthrough in energy technology that ushers in a whole new way of powering things. But we can’t bank on that, for the same reason people can’t bank on lottery tickets for retirement. We don’t know if the breakthrough will actually happen, and even if one does, we don’t know what it would take to build it out – materials-wise, cost-wise, planning-wise, etc. (Please don’t send me a picture of what some team has working in the lab. Been far too dazzled by those things for decades now, call me when it’s on the market.)
We might get more comfortable societally with nuclear energy; the world seems hellbent on ‘carbon free energy’ and the only way that’s going to happen in a way that meets the needs of 8 billion people is nuclear power. But I get that some people get pretty rattled by nuclear energy, figuratively speaking, which I understand; nuclear fallout is probably not what you want to wake up and see dusting the patio furniture.
Far be it from me to add any negativity to the discussion however; I think nuclear is key to a low-emission future. Which brings me to the story mentioned at the outset.
https://boereport.com/2023/12/13/bitumen-beyond-combustion-how-to-triple-oil-sands-value-reduce-emissions-and-create-an-advanced-material-industry-for-2-of-a-battery-plants-subsidies/
