Trying to Help the Environment - More on the West Ukraine Case

Marchetti, C. (1991). Trying to Help the Environment - More on the West Ukraine Case. IIASA Research Report (Reprint). IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: RR-92-002. Reprinted from International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 16(8):563-575 [1991].

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Abstract

The Hydrogen Economy can be seen as a train ready to move. We should start building the track. In this paper we examine a combination of technologies and circumstances that make large scale water splitting using nuclear heat from HTR reactors an attractive proposition. The idea is to tap a large natural gas pipeline system near an area where oil tertiary recovery pays for the consumption of large amounts of CO2. The high value that CO2 can command is shown by the construction by Shell of long pipelines to carry CO2 from a natural field to an oil province. Natural gas is steam reformed to H2O and CO2 using heat from HTR nuclear reactors with a process developed at KFA Juelich in Germany. The oil province to receive the CO2 is in West Ukraine where three gas pipelines converge to transport Soviet gas into Western Europe. One of the critics to the original suggestion made at the Moscow Hydrogen Conference in 1988 was that the massive use of reactors (up to 30 GWth) was made improbable by public opinion rejecting nuclear energy wholesale. A study made by the author for the European Community in the meantime, and whose pertinent results are reported here, shows that the doldrums of nuclear energy are not related to public opinion as such but to stop-go mechanisms of the economy related to the Kondratiev long cycle. The author tries to show that the broad scale evolution of a system will open a "window of opportunity" for this project during the next 10 years.

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