Abu Dhabi is building “gold-standard” safety procedures into its plan to develop four nuclear reactors, a foreign adviser to the government said.
This country could even teach the Japanese a thing or two, experts say, after drawing lessons from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The UAE is investing in facilities for nuclear power, renewable energy and liquefied natural gas to cut its reliance on oil and will be the first Arab state in the GCC region to have a nuclear plant when the facility starts as scheduled in 2017.
Elsewhere in the Arabian Gulf, Iran generates atomic energy.
“Safety culture has got to be first, and here they are doing that,” says Barbara Judge, a member of an international nuclear advisory council formed by the Abu Dhabi Government.
Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the Fukushima plant’s operator, “had moved to an efficiency culture” focused on profit over safety, Ms Judge said, speaking in Abu Dhabi last week on the third anniversary of the Japanese nuclear accident.
The Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant leaked radioactive material after a tsunami triggered by an earthquake struck the facility on March 11, 2011.
Ms Judge, a former chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, is the vice chairman of a committee advising Tepco on the decommissioning of the damaged Fukushima units.
She also serves on Abu Dhabi’s nuclear International Advisory Board, headed by Hans Blix, a former UN chief weapons inspector.
“We respond sincerely” to Ms Judge’s assessment and “will steadily work to improve the safety culture in the company,” Mayumi Yoshida, a Tepco spokeswoman, says.
Emirates Nuclear Energy, the government-owned company building the Abu Dhabi plants, will be a benchmark for safety when the units are built, Ms Judge says.
Officials seeking her views into what went wrong at Fukushima have created strong regulatory oversight for the Abu Dhabi project, something Japan lacked, she adds.
Authorities here are still working on a permanent plan for storing or disposing of nuclear waste, and the Government did not brief advisory board members last week on any new developments, Ms Judge says.
The UAE plans to generate 25 per cent of its power from four nuclear plants by 2020, Suhail Mohammed Al Mazrouei, the energy minister, said in October.
The reactors will produce 5,400 megawatts when they are completed, Matar Hamed Al Neyadi, an energy ministry undersecretary, said at the time.
While the UAE’s neighbour Saudi Arabia plans to develop a nuclear power sector in the future, for now it is focused on its gas industry for electricity production.
But foreign companies that formed joint ventures with the state oil firm Saudi Aramco to look for conventional gas in the kingdom’s Empty Quarter, including Russia’s Lukoil, Royal Dutch Shell and Sinopec, have failed to find commercially viable deposits.
So Saudi authorities are now seeking to concentrate the search on unconventional deposits — very deep, high-temperature reservoirs that would require more complex and expensive technologies to commercially exploit.
“The assumptions of the initial gas exploration agreements do not exist anymore because in spite of a decade of exploration, no commercial gas discoveries have been made,” says Sadad Al Husseini, a former senior executive at Saudi Aramco.
“Therefore the exploration programme could be redefined as a change to unconventional gas exploration with higher costs and new buy-back terms,” says Mr Al Husseini, who now owns an energy consultancy firm said.
Lukoil is negotiating a deal with the world’s top oil exporter to tap unconventional gas deposits in the Empty Quarter, the company’s overseas unit said this week.
Saudi Arabia has kept its vast oil reserves off-limits to foreigners, but needs natural gas to help cover domestic power demand and conserve oil for export. It invited investors a decade ago to find and produce gas in the Empty Quarter, also known as Rub Al Khali.
Lukoil is still on the hunt for desert gas and is now evaluating the possibility of production from an unconventional deposit.
“This is tight gas. The negotiations are under way. No details on deal and future production plans yet,” says a spokesman for Lukoil Overseas, which operates the group’s foreign upstream projects.
“Yes, we are hopeful and will continue evaluating drilling after signing a deal.”
Because such production would be more expensive than conventional output, the firm is trying to negotiate a higher price with Saudi authorities in its joint venture, industry sources say.
The sources say no deal has yet been reached as further studies need to be carried out by Lukoil and Saudi Aramco to estimate how much unconventional gas was available.
Saudi Aramco and the Saudi oil ministry were not immediately available to comment.
“At this time there isn’t enough data to determine how much gas may be recoverable, what levels of production can be achieved, and what levels of expenditures are likely to be required,” says Mr Al Husseini.
“It appears that the decision-makers may now be thinking that since there are source rocks in the region, there may be some formations where fracking can be successful in generating unconventional gas production,” he adds.
The higher cost of extracting unconventional gas was not the only obstacle to production — scaling up and sustaining unconventional gas operations at a meaningful level of supply would also present major technical challenges, Mr Husseini says.
Shell says it is not currently drilling in its Rub Al Khali venture but says it is in regular dialogue with Saudi officials, without elaborating further.
An industry source familiar with the matter says China’s Sinopec has suspended drilling operations in the Empty Quarter. A Sinopec spokesman could not be reached for comment.
The Saudi oil minister Ali Al Naimi has estimated the kingdom has more than 600 trillion cubic feet of unconventional gas reserves, more than double its proven conventional reserves.
* Agencies
