OP-ED: Fusion energy- the good and bad for Guyana

Dec 14, 2022 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

---

By GHK Lall
Kaieteur News – Fusion energy is here.  Well, yes and no, as it is still a few decades away from transforming into the revolutionary development that it is held out to be.  That is, clean, free replacement for fossil fuels.  But the wait could be as far into the future as 2050, almost 30 years from now.

Hailed as a “an enormous game changer” and “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21^st century”, nuclear fusion energy has all the elements that an endangered world has been searching for in its quest to cease the century-long dependence on oil.  Thirty years in the trial-and-error process beginning at Princeton, nuclear fusion energy as experimented, pursued, and now refined to where it is at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, with the carbon free emission and less long-lived hazardous waste trail in its wake, is proof positive that American science is still very much alive.  In this instance, I am forced to admit there is a free lunch, considering its carbon breath, its innocuous sounding radioactive excretions.

Interest on my part in tabling this issue has to do with this country’s pool of fossil fuels lying under the seabed, both the known discovered amount to date, and those still to be found.  It is most likely more billions of oil equivalents.  Currently, Guyana has 11 billion barrels in its ledger.  I make the not unreasonable assumption that there is, at a minimum, an additional 9 billion barrels, for a grand approximation of 20 billion barrels in total in the Stabroek Block alone.  It is an abundance of billions for a society with less than a million citizens.  To clear the air, the focus today is not on the economics of the national oil bonanza, or how well or poorly it is distributed, but on the production of it.

Before advancing, I restate my standing position with the nation’s oil.  It is an endowment that must be exploited to the fullest, but under one condition.  The proper safety limits must be fully and honestly observed.  Again, I withhold comment on the money part (terms and conditions) for this writing.  So, now it is back to the numbers, and aligning them with this groundbreaking (‘moonshot’) nuclear energy fusion development.

I will fast forward a few years to the point where Guyana hits that magic number and club of producing 1,000,000 barrels per day (1M BPD).  For each billion barrels of oil available that would be good for production of 1000 days, or about 3 years, give or take, using a 300-day production cycle.  A nonstop 24/7 production scheme lowers the pumping days to some extent.  For the 20-billion-barrel estimate that is my baseline total discovery figure for the oil-saturated Stabroek Block, we are talking about 60 years of production of 1M BPD.  It could be that the infrastructure for double that amount may be erected, especially since Guyana is not what, I shall call, ‘cost constrained.’  This should be subject to the most liberal of interpretations.  If we find more billions of barrels of oil, the number of production years of this vast national treasure simply continues to march relentlessly head.

By now, I think that most would be able to appreciate where I am heading, based on the focus I give to nuclear energy fusion today.  All other things being equal (though they never are, including hydrogen developments, renewables, and so forth) this new wonder energy source is expected to be in hand in 30 years.  We would have produced a huge quantity of oil for consumption, but still have a considerable fraction of our oil still locked inside their homes underwater.  Holding still to the constant of 20 billion barrels, this means that likely up to 50% of our oil could be behind the 8-ball.  That is, existing in a world where oil as an energy source is noncompetitive, if not subject to fading demand to a precipitous degree.  Guyana’s oil could be half-depleted, at best; or fully defeated (by fusion energy), at worst.

It should be noted that I have religiously abstained from going beyond 20 billion barrels for the purpose of this discussion; and one million barrels in daily production.  What if it is another 10 billion?  Or double the 20 billion that I employ so freely?  Or I put this another way: without a speck of proof and corroborating science in hand, it is almost guaranteed that we have not maxed out at the 11 billions that are on the books. We are going to have to increase production at multiples of the 1M BPD rate to leave as little oil as possible in the ground in our race with the nuclear energy fusion clock.

It is an exhilarating and daunting prospect at the same time.  Considering our severe limitations of population, skills, supporting infrastructure, and overall knowhow, we are in the best of places, and the worst one simultaneously.  Something is going to have to give here, and this one I am sure of: I am not going to be around to say or do anything about it.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

---

---