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> I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not retire in the oil industry. I'm also in oil & gas right now and I suspect that you're going to

> I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not retire in the oil industry. I'm also in oil & gas right now and I suspect that you're going to lose, though not because the industry is going to grow. It's going to shrink strictly based on out-of-the-ground production. But the oil companies aren't huge, they're gigantic. And they're not going to just roll over and die. If tomorrow someone gets a working LFTR going you can be sure that all the majors are going to spend a LOT of money trying to buy said company and scale it up. And the oil companies already own tremendous amounts of assets re: liquid fuels so they'd just start plopping reactors down in the middle of their plants and start producing DME (for diesel) or whatever the gas equivalent is out of various feedstocks. It'd take a decade or two to finally make the transition, but I really think that's where things are going. The oil companies regularly spend billions getting leases on land, drilling, production assets, etc. To spend $10b (or $100b even) on buying a 'safe nuclear' technology to avoid going out of business I suspect wouldn't generate too many waves. So they'll be sort-of reinvented, but still largely themselves. The majors aren't necessarily oil companies anymore, but energy companies. We're going to see them slowly change or die, but I suspect most will transition successfully just because they have so much money under "management" that it'll be hard to screw up too badly.

falsestprophet 12y ago
Energy in liquid form comes at a large premium to energy in other forms (coal, gas, electricity) because of it's utility for transportation. As batteries become cheaper, the value of liquid fuels will decrease. At some point, some current oil production is going to cease to be economically viable. This is likely even without carbon taxes and regulation -- which are possible and surely won't help petroleum industry. LFTR videos are popular on social media, but there are many technologies that could produce superior fission plants to what we have now [1]. And thorium isn't required for molten salt reactors like LFTR in any case [2]. You may be interested in these designs. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Current_technologies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Current_technol... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
guelo 12y ago
That wouldn't be the oil industry anymore.
- msandford 12y ago
  > That wouldn't be the oil industry anymore. What is the oil industry then? I mean, there are probably a bunch of different definitions. The "oil industry" does a lot of stuff. 1. explores for oil 2. obtains mineral rights to the oil it suspects is in the ground 3. does test drilling to determine if oil is in fact there 4. does production drilling to make it feasible to extract any oil it does find 5. sets up production equipment to extract the oil from the ground 6. establishes a logistics chain to move the crude oil coming out of the ground to a refinery (truck, train, pipeline, etc) 7. builds and maintains many-multi-billion dollar refineries 8. uses said refineries to turn crude oil into a multitude of products like various gasses, butane, naptha, grades of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, greases and lubricants, waxes and various other byproducts 9. establishes supply lines to ship finished products to various markets domestically and internationally 10. trades in the energy markets to ensure that prices across the world properly reflect transport and other costs (arbitrage by virtue of known internal costs) 11. develops new equipment, techniques and strategies to make any of the above mentioned things more efficient, cheaper, easier, etc So while I agree that 1-5 might end up changing, that's far from the entirety of "the oil industry" and thus I think my statement isn't entirely wrong.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    I thought the refineries had been turned into separate corporate entities. Which means they have to be profitable. They're having a hard time doing that, with razor-sharp margins and fluctuating demand.
    - msandford 12y ago
      Yeah, most of the majors are actually about 20 different companies each now. They're technically separate and they pretend to actually be separate, but people from one company "suggest" what people from another should do and of course they do. Because they're really just one big company in reality.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

falsestprophet 12y ago

Energy in liquid form comes at a large premium to energy in other forms (coal, gas, electricity) because of it's utility for transportation. As batteries become cheaper, the value of liquid fuels will decrease. At some point, some current oil production is going to cease to be economically viable. This is likely even without carbon taxes and regulation -- which are possible and surely won't help petroleum industry. LFTR videos are popular on social media, but there are many technologies that could produce superior fission plants to what we have now [1]. And thorium isn't required for molten salt reactors like LFTR in any case [2]. You may be interested in these designs. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Current_technologies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Current_technol... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

guelo 12y ago

That wouldn't be the oil industry anymore.

msandford 12y ago
> That wouldn't be the oil industry anymore. What is the oil industry then? I mean, there are probably a bunch of different definitions. The "oil industry" does a lot of stuff. 1. explores for oil 2. obtains mineral rights to the oil it suspects is in the ground 3. does test drilling to determine if oil is in fact there 4. does production drilling to make it feasible to extract any oil it does find 5. sets up production equipment to extract the oil from the ground 6. establishes a logistics chain to move the crude oil coming out of the ground to a refinery (truck, train, pipeline, etc) 7. builds and maintains many-multi-billion dollar refineries 8. uses said refineries to turn crude oil into a multitude of products like various gasses, butane, naptha, grades of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, greases and lubricants, waxes and various other byproducts 9. establishes supply lines to ship finished products to various markets domestically and internationally 10. trades in the energy markets to ensure that prices across the world properly reflect transport and other costs (arbitrage by virtue of known internal costs) 11. develops new equipment, techniques and strategies to make any of the above mentioned things more efficient, cheaper, easier, etc So while I agree that 1-5 might end up changing, that's far from the entirety of "the oil industry" and thus I think my statement isn't entirely wrong.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  I thought the refineries had been turned into separate corporate entities. Which means they have to be profitable. They're having a hard time doing that, with razor-sharp margins and fluctuating demand.
  - msandford 12y ago
    Yeah, most of the majors are actually about 20 different companies each now. They're technically separate and they pretend to actually be separate, but people from one company "suggest" what people from another should do and of course they do. Because they're really just one big company in reality.

deleted 12y ago

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