"Usual suspect" wrote in message
...

If the Saudi's have a problem that can be solved by heat
http://www.newser.com/story/119282/i...avy-crude.html
and the USA has a problem with storing hot nuclear fuel rods
http://www.stltoday.com/business/loc...9c8c0878c.html
then could the hot nuclear rods be "stored" in the oil sands under
Saudi Arabia? I don't think there is any potable water mixed with the
heavy oil and I don't have the foggiest notion of how radioactive the
pumped oil would be.

Interesting developements indeed

I was raised in Saskatchewan and worked in the oil industry there in the
late sixties and early seventies while geting my engineering degree. The
area has a lot of shallow ( about 3000 feet) heavy oil sands which were
starting to peter out about that time as most of the lighter crude had been
pumped, so they started two different methods of tertiary recovery methods.

The first one tried,was to install a hight pressure (700 psi) boiler and
inject superheated steam down on of the holes. After a few weeks of this
they started pumping the surrounding holes. By this time summer was over and
I had to go back to university so all I heard after that were hearsay
reports that it hadn't been terribly successful. The high tempertures caused
a lot of problems in the injection well and I believe that the casing
collapsed as no provision was made for the expansion due to temperature.

The other method was much simpler. They assembled a number of air
compressorsand piped them up to another injection well. A low ignition point
fuel ( probably naptha, it was cheap)was pumped down first, followed by the
compressed air. Spontanious combution got the fuel burning and this started
the heavy crude burning. The process was simple enough to control by adding
or shutting of air compressors The heaviest crude burned and heated the
formation as well as raising the down hole pressure so they no longer had to
pump it . Direction drilling then was invented so the production was from
long casings that ran horizontally through the formations. This increased
the production rates enourmously.
About 40 years ago I moved to Australia so I had no more to do with it. A
long time friend, who was also an engineer in the area, tells me that these
wells ar still producing today.

When I was still in uni there was talk of putting a nuclear power plant in
Fort McMurrey to supply heat to soften the tar sand crude. Of course the
green uninformed screamed the house down and the testicullarly challenged
politicians all rolled over and played dead so nothing happened