A Convenient Solution
How America Can Solve the Energy Crisis in Just Ten Years.
Sample
Introduction
This book is about energy, energy systems, energy use, fuels, and fuel use. It describes some history of energy and fuels, their sources, practicality, and uses. It also describes many new and revolutionary materials and systems that could be solutions to the current energy crisis. The best combination of the solutions described could solve our energy crisis in just a few years, a decade at most. The real problem is in enacting these solutions. Implementation will be dependent on varied systems of interacting disciplines, companies, researchers, investors, and governments.
The many forces that will shape our energy systems
Energy, fuels, and all their associated products and services make for some complex and interacting systems on a huge scale. This rapidly changing, worldwide set of systems are affected by a broad range of factors and circumstances. Some of the major ones include:
1. The state of the world's economy
2. Supply/demand balance
3. World prices of crude oil
4. The politics of nations and organizations that produce and sell crude oil
5. The politics and power of the oil importing nations
6. Supposed global warming and its effects on policy and markets
7. The “global warming” movement and the power it wields
8. Profitability of alternate fuels compared with petroleum products
9. Profitability of various energy use systems
10. Profitability of various energy generating systems
11. Government involvement at many levels
12. Private investment
13. Public and private research efforts
14. The news media and even the world of entertainment
There are certainly many more, but to try to list them all would be foolish and counterproductive. Suffice to say that there are enough interacting variables to tax even the expert operators of the most sophisticated super computers. What this means is that significant changes in any of these factors can affect a number of the others and not always in predictable ways.
There are many ideas and systems, new and old described herein.
I make no apology for favoring some over the others. Favored mostly are those that seem to be practical, economical and especially speedy. Some of these have come to prominence recently and thus are not covered as thoroughly as others. Things are changing rapidly in this field with new ideas and products appearing almost daily. These are being triggered by the rapidly fluctuating price of petroleum. It is my belief that an energy shortage or crunch is coming much sooner than most expect. The long range forecast is for oil prices to spiral upward. The worldwide recession has temporarily halted the rapid rise over the previous few years, but sooner or later the recession will abate and oil prices will continue their long range rise. The systems described in this book or new ones not yet imagined will eventually replace petroleum because of market forces.
The purpose of this book is to provide information and encouragement for doers, movers and shakers. The many energy systems described run from those used for several hundred years to those just discovered and in their infancy. Many of these will fall into disuse or be kept for historical or sentimental usage.
Here's a bit of old news: For all practical purposes, the horse and buggy have left the American scene. Except for the Amish and some nostalgic sight seeing uses, they have disappeared. The Stanley Steamer and the Baker Electric, once quite popular are now found only in museums or in the hands of collectors. The “iron horse” of the plains is but a memory with a rare few still in collections or on sightseeing railroads. A few WWI Sopwith Camels and WWII Japanese Zeros are still flying. Last fall I witnessed a WWII B17E Flying Fortress fly by while I was walking on a popular Florida beach. It was quite a thrill watching that half a century old legend still flying. How vastly different it is from the modern B2 bomber. This illustrates the increasing speed with which technology advances. Most of what we have today would be as unrecognizable during the era of the B17 as the B17 would have been at the time of the revolutionary war.
As time passes the evolution of technology accelerates. It has been said that the sum of scientific knowledge doubles every fifteen years. This has been going on since the time of Copernicus in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Galileo and Kepler in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and Newton in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Western science seems to ignore the work of Muslim mathematicians and astronomers who knew that the earth was a sphere and revolved around the sun centuries earlier than Europeans. They in turn had learned from Greek and Persian astronomers and mathematicians after translating much knowledge into Arabic from Greek and Persian. These early scientists in turn probably learned much of their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy from the Egyptians.
How about today? With computers to record our work and the Internet to distribute it, new knowledge quickly spans the globe as the sum of knowledge continues its geometric expansion. Not only are we learning new things faster, but new, practical and sometimes serendipitous findings now spread around the world at the speed of light. Information can be distributed instantly, but the actual creation of new items, systems, procedures and processes still requires time and considerable effort to move from raw material to finished products. Most of these fall by the wayside because of unattractive appearance, lack of understanding of their actual value, lack of economic appeal, or even erroneous perceptions. If another item or system is cheaper with the same value or even more expensive but with superior value, that system will prevail. Except within government bureaucracies, profitability is the clue to the economic success of any item or system. The life of even a well-accepted technology can soon be eclipsed by a newer, better or cheaper technology. Witness the evolution in recorded music from the wax cylinder to the brittle 78, the flexible LP and 45, to reel tape, to 8-track tape, to cassette tape, to CD, to DVD, and now micro chip and Ipod. The effective life of each system lasted for a shorter period of time than its predecessor. This is the nature of accelerating technology in the music business as in many other industries.
This book is about the same kind of thing happening in the energy industry, a much broader field than music with many more variations and possibilities. A problem or need arises. Creative minds search for answers, primarily to find ways to make money, a living, even wealth. The many answers are presented to the public in ways from simple word-of-mouth contacts to mass media advertising. All things being equal, the highly advertised will always prevail over the word-of-mouth simply because it reaches far more people in a short period of time. By the time widget A gets started by word of mouth, widget B has thousands of orders from its massive advertising.
So on with the new systems described in this book. These have been proposed or developed and are being pursued by companies of many different sizes, some with patents, some without. I have some distinct opinions of the systems we can and should end up using. The same can be said for those interim products needed to move us from total dependence on petroleum to multiple energy systems in the next decade or so. I also have some definite opinions about those I think will not be successful. These opinions are shared with readers in the section on conclusions and predictions.
It makes no difference who or what is blamed for rapidly rising fuel prices, or where they go in the future. It makes no difference what your position on environmentalism is. It makes no difference what the reality is about global warming. It makes no difference how much oil companies are hated or loved. None of these things change the fact that we still need alternative fuels and energy sources. They have become an absolute necessity because of diminishing supplies of petroleum.
Use of any fossil fuel will add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. There are only two known ways to use energy without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The same two reasons apply if we are forced to survive without petroleum fuels for any reason.
The first and most obvious is energy from fuels derived from plant materials — non fossil sources. Carbon dioxide created by the burning of these fuels came originally from the atmosphere. Thus, use of fuel produced from plant sources only returns carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that was originally taken from it. These no-net-CO 2 fuels include: wood, ethanol from corn, methane recovered from landfills, methanol, butanol, DMF and ethanol from plant material fermentation, oils from plant sources including soy beans, palms, and algae, pelletized agricultural waste, and any other form of fuel from recent biological activity.
The second way is and promises to be far larger than no-net-CO 2 fuels both today and in the future. It includes all non combustion processes for generating energy. Those energy systems currently in use include: nuclear, river water, solar, wind, tidal water, ocean wave action, and geothermal. Each of these has its own set of challenges, including practical limits, funding, new technologies, environmental impacts, site locations, weather problems, real or imagined dangers, and concerns of the public.
Any or all of these processes could be used to generate electric power for grid distribution in the Optimal Energy Economy of the future as described in these pages. It remains for some nation or organization to take the high road to the cheap, safe, portable, no-net-CO 2-producing energy that these processes promise. Once in use, the benefits to the economy of any nation that uses it will be unlimited.
Nuclear power, is it passé? In the past, nuclear power has been touted as the best way to produce safe, clean, non CO 2 producing energy. Unfortunately, a very slanted and scary movie, The China Syndrome, so frightened the American public that the entire nuclear industry was scuttled there and then at tremendous expense and waste. Once more, perception of the American people trumped reality. This false perception was generated by a fictional story. It baffles me that the public believes a completely fictional story over the obvious reality. Hollywood must still be gloating over the destructive power wielded by their movie. It is interesting to note that it was based on an actual nuclear accident, the one at Three Mile Island. The interesting thing about that accident is that the safety features of the plant worked. The danger was contained just as the plant was designed to do. Radioactive leakage was far less than the maximum considered safe and the resulting dispersed radiation was barely detectable above normal background radiation. There was never any detectable radiation danger. Fortunately for France and China, they didn't believe or ignored the intended message of the movie, understood the reality, and are now rapidly developing and building nuclear power plants. By the way, nuclear power has been proven the safest of all types of power plants in real terms of human lives lost and bodies injured. I wonder why Hollywood and the media never acknowledge that fact.
Two far different methods could turn out to be the best in all ways including economic. Geothermal power could be the real winner in an all-out competition given that useable geothermal energy is available in about 60 percent of the area of North America. This is covered in sections II C and III A 5 on geothermal power. I wonder if Hollywood will mount a new attack on progress with The China Syndrome II about a cataclysmic geothermal volcanic explosion. Don't put it past them. Right now in California, several geothermal plants have been supplying power for some time. Though still a tiny part of the overall mix, geothermal power has the greatest long term potential of any system, including wave energy power.
Following are some recently released estimates showing the present distribution of the various worldwide energy sources. Also shown are two potential energy sources and how they could stack up for the future
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