BC: PAVING THE WAY FOR A THORIUM FUTURE
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1. Buy coal reserves. As the oil price rises, the NPV of a barrel of oil in the ground and the NPV of a tonne of coal in the ground converge. AT$200/bbl, coal in the ground is worth $66 per tonne as feedstock for a CTL plant. At the moment you can buy some coal reserves for cents per tonne. This is a very cheap option to future-proof yourself. It is a very scaleable from buying a few thousand dollars of a coal stock to whole coalfields. Coal is the thing most hated by the Sierra Club, the EPA etc. and that is a good indicator that it is a very good thing to do.
2. Some stupid states, e.g. Colorado, are closing coal fired plants so they can build gas-fired plants. Buy those coal fired plants on closure for their scrap price, with the coal reserves, and then sell them back to the former owners in five years time. Right at the moment Deutsche Bank is leading a push to promote AGW, so my guess is that they will start a fund to buy closed coal fired power plants and do exactly this.
3. Buy depleted oil fields that would respond to enhanced oil recovery (EOR) using CO2. There is at least one US-listed oil company already doing this and they are constrained by a lack of CO2. As CTL plants are built, there will plenty of CO2 becoming available. Right at the moment, these sorts of depleted oil fields can be bought for cents per barrel. Or as a CTL plant builder, you could marry the two for enhanced profitability.
4. Become the Boeing of the thorium-fueled molten salt breeder reactor industry. Apart from the research to commercialise the reactor, you would need a big long shed adjacent to navigable water. The reactors will not be physically large and neither the individual components. So the individual parts can be made by subcontractors and you will assemble the reactors on a production line, put them on a barge and out they go.
5. CTL plants require a big cryogenic oxygen plant. There is potentially a constraint in the supply of those.
6. The basic chemical industry left the US when it was undercut by cheap supply by SABIC etc from the Middle East. Now that the price of internationally traded natural gas has risen to the oil price, and natural gas is directly substitutable as a transport fuel, natural gas is no longer a cheap chemical feedstock. So the UAE is installing South Korean nuclear reactors so they can stop burning natural gas for power generation. This all means that the chemical industry for basic things like urea will return to the US. So buy distressed urea plants etc. now and then put a coal-fired synthesis gas plant on the front end to provide the feedstock.
7. This idea is for Basin Electric Power Corporation, which owns the Great Plains Synfuels Plant in North Dakota. That plant was set up to convert lignite to synthetic natural gas instead of diesel etc. because, at the time, it was thought that the US had a shortage of natural gas. In fact the perceived shortage was only due to Federal legislation on pricing of interstate sales of natural gas. Now there is a big price differential between natural gas and the liquid fuels that the plant could be producing. So, pipe the synthesis gas off to new reactors that will make liquids, and then also sell access to the plant for training for the rest of the US CTL industry. |
