Does Nuclear Energy Have a Role in the Development of Canada's Oil Sands?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) recently completed a study for Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) that compares the economics of a modified ACR-700TM Advanced CANDU Reactor with the economics of a natural gas-fired facility to supply steam to a hypothetical Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) project located in north-eastern Alberta. This paper presents the results of CERI's evaluation. The comparison was made by using discounted cashflow methodology to estimate the levelized unit cost of steam that could be supplied to the SAGD project from either a nuclear or a gas-fired facility. The unit cost of steam was determined by treating the steam supply facility as a standalone business; it would ensure that all costs are recovered including capital costs, operating costs, fuel costs, and a return on investment. The study indicated that steam supply from an ACR- 700 nuclear facility is economically competitive with steam supply from a gas-fired facility. An examination of key variables indicated that the cost of steam from the nuclear facility is very sensitive to capital cost of the facility, while the cost of steam from the gas-fired facility is very sensitive to natural gas price and possible Kyoto compliance costs. Introduction The Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) estimated that Alberta's oil sands deposits contain 259.2 109m3 of initial crude bitumen in-place and that over 10% of the initial crude bitumen in-place (28.33 109m3) is recoverable using either surface mining (5.59 109m3) or in situ recovery (22.74 109m3) techniques. 1 At year-end 2001, only 2.0% (0.56 109m3) of the initial established reserves had been produced. The EUB reported that, in 2001, Alberta produced 116.6 103m3/d of crude bitumen, with surface mining accounting for 58% and in situ recovery 42%. In the same year, non-upgraded bitumen and synthetic crude oil accounted for 43% of Alberta's total crude oil and equivalent production. The EUB reported that it expected total mined bitumen production to increase from 67.4 103m3/d in 2001 to 223 103m3/d in 2011 and in situ crude bitumen production to increase from 49.2 103m3/d in 2001 to 126 103m3/d in 2011. Total bitumen production in 2011, 349 103m3/d, would represent a three-fold increase from 2001. Based on the configuration of currently operating projects, it is estimated that achieving this production level could require approximately 60 106m3/d of natural gas in 2011, a significant quantity relative to Alberta's remaining established reserves of 1,184 109m3 at year-end 2001 and total production of 143 109m3 that year (Reserve Production Ratio of 8.3 years). Using nuclear energy to generate steam would reduce the oil sands industry's reliance on limited natural gas resources, reduce its exposure to volatile natural gas prices, and reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This study updates work carried out over the last two decades regarding the possible application of nuclear technology for oil sands development.2,3 The study focuses on the relative economics of the nuclear and gasfired steam generation options. It does not address noneconomic issues that might be associated with either option.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".